Not before time, some drivers are beginning to realize that the war against cars is neither an abstraction nor some distant conflict that they can safely avoid — nor something they can avoid by switching to electric vehicles (EVs). As conventional cars are forced off the roads, EVs will be next.
In a recent article on “degrowth” for NR, I noted that in Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Jason Hickel explained that while “we need to switch to electric cars,” ultimately their numbers would have to be “radically” reduced, too.
And, as I mentioned in that article, Hickel is no wild outlier. He is a successful economic anthropologist and writer. Among his other positions, he’s a member of the Roundtable on Macroeconomics and Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities of the National Academy of Sciences.
Joseph Sternberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal:
[T]he car is a focus for the war on carbon because it’s so visible. An electric vehicle is the most conspicuous, although perhaps not the most effective, thing a household can do in service of reducing global emissions.
If buying an EV even does that. Spoiler: Not really.
But that’s only part of the story. Some of those directing climate policy genuinely believe that climate change poses an existential threat to our species, but many others see it as a way to force the construction of the kind of society that certain strains of the Left have long wanted to see. Their policy prescriptions are about control, not the climate. And the car, with its promise of freedom and autonomy, is, both symbolically and in reality, the opposite of that. Nowhere is that more true than in the U.S. Car ownership and the freedom to just get up and drive plays a central role in many Americans’ sense of themselves, and when enough of them discover what climate fundamentalists have in mind, the political consequences are likely to be . . . interesting.
Sternberg adds this:
The car is becoming a cultural flashpoint because it is where climate-apocalypse proselytizing meets antielitist pragmatism. Both sides increasingly understand their fundamental values are at stake . . .
An oddity is that up to now the right hasn’t treated the car as a culture issue, more often debating electric vehicles in economic or scientific terms. That may be starting to change.
Let’s hope so. But this is not a fightback that should be confined to the Right. It’s too important for that.