Call me when they go full on 1970’s urban guerilla and start kidnapping and executing oil execs, blowing up pipelines, and robbing banks that fund the industry. I honestly would be amazed if anything less worked.

It will not, but it will destroy everything it built and make capitalism impossible.

Then yeah, also congrats on not being American.

Oh, do you happen to have a military? That’s actually a big chunk of the reason Americans have such a high carbon footprint… That and an entire society built around making it almost impossible to live without a car.

Oh, you should stop by Amsterdam.

No, I left because I had the opportunity to get out while there was still a chance. I grew up in the US, and I couldn’t do that to my children knowing I could get out.

https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw

But if you’re not able to leave the US, you can still make it better.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

The simple fact is that you have to live in a world without cars, or where cars are much more rare, because it simply isn’t possible to build a sustainable society around them. This isn’t even a climate thing, it’s simply geometry. Cars take up space. In order to make space for cars, density has to go down. High population places with low density can’t afford infrastructure because there isn’t a concentrated enough tax base. Basically, most US cities are insolvent and are ticking time bombs that will collapse, like Flint and Detroit in time. As Trump increases economic pressures, American cities will become bankrupt faster.

American infrastructure is crumbling all over the place, because no one can afford to fix it. That’s a car problem. Car infrastructure costs too much to maintain. That’s not even taking into account climate change. The US has never built back from several of the climate disasters that have destroyed critical infrastructure, and these will continue to accelerate.

The US was built around trains, horses, streetcars, and bikes. It’s only within the last 100 years that it’s been completely redesigned around cars. That experiment has been a complete failure, and it was only possible to try because of cheap fossil fuels. That’s gone… and I’m only talking about one of the many headwinds.

So you do have to live without cars. That’s not actually a question. The question is if you will do that on your terms or by the force of complete economic collapse.

I left behind all my friends, a high paying job, a big house with a garden we’d been working on for years, and everything else I lost and sold, to get out because I don’t believe people like you will be able to accept these facts. Oh, and before you say something about me never living outside of a city, I spent the majority of my first 20 years living in places like Gates, OR and Cobb, CA. You can google those if you care to.

It’s not ICE or EV, it’s cars or not cars. Cars are not sustainable.

Ok, what do cars travel on? What lithium do you use to make all the batteries? How do you make the all the steel you need for those wind farms and the power lines you need to get the energy from the farms? How do you store it?

I’m not going to go in to all the problems, but I don’t think you’ve every questioned this story.

0. Stop building everything around cars so people can choose not to buy a car.

Not wanting something to be true doesn’t make it false. Oh where have I heard people reject inconvenient truth before?

EVs were always a way to save the auto Industry, not a way to solve the climate crisis. Add them to the list of greenwashing grifts (carbon footprint, plastic recycling, hydrogen fuel cell cars, etc) and move on to the real solution: bike infrastructure and mass transit, with cars as an absolute last resort until they can be eliminated.

EVs solve one of the numerous problems with cars, and make some of the others much worse. People should have seen EVs as a grift the whole time, it just took the biggest grifter to blow his cover to start making it obvious.

Exactly.

The problem with protesting is that it’s begging people to kindly do ask you ask. In the case of oil, you’re the “people” you are asking are a social cancer. The people doing the work are literally destroying their children’s future for money today. They couldn’t possibly care about anything you could do or any argument you could make. Very few relationships are really zero sum games, but this is one.

They exist or we do, there can be no common ground. There can be no negotiation. These are corporations we’re fighting, not people, and corporations don’t care about anything.

I’m glad people are waking up to the fact that there can be no rational dialog. It’s life or death, for humans and oil companies. They must be stopped, and stopping means death for the oil companies. They will not, and cannot, listen. They must be forced to stop or we all die.

“Direct action gets the goods.”

Don’t forget the cost of insurance. That’s the big one. If it stops being possible to insure fossil fuel infrastructure, then investments shift to renewables that can be insured. It’s pretty simple economic math.

Edit: that also works in all levels of the economy. Pipeline constitution vehicle get torched every time there’s a pipeline built? Uninsurable therefore reduce or stop investment. Cas in cities always get flat tires and vandalized? People won’t buy cars they can’t insure.

You’re going to trust the exact same industry that grifted away 10 years and billions of dollars on hydrogen fuel cells only to switch to the promise of EVs when the grift ran out? Good luck with that.

How much power would be needed to switch to EVs everywhere? Where does that power come from? Recognizing that manufacturing and transportation are also extremely carbon intensive, would we actually be better off switching or is this just another opportunity to dump money in to the auto industry?

The US had massive rail infrastructure in the past. We know that’s possible. I don’t have any evidence that electric vehicles would actually improve things even if they can be rolled out. Why would I believe an industry that has lied before and has every incentive to lie again? Why would anyone?

I used to go backpacking a lot, but I haven’t been since I got shot. I’m looking forward to bike camping now that I’m no longer in the US.

Biden shouldn’t give money to the auto industry or anyone who supports them. He should spend money on things that actually solve the problem: huge grants to build bike lanes and super blocks in cities, national high speed rail, and local rail networks.

He could literal give away eBikes to people who can’t afford them. Manufacturing infrastructure for those already exists and there’s actually enough lithium available to make that happen.

The problem isn’t that work takes time and money, it’s that this is a huge subsidy to the auto industry who are the absolute last people who should ever be involved in any kind of climate solution.

Edit: this isn’t even a new thing. The auto industry sold hydrogen fuel cells as the solution last time and it turned out to just be a giant grift to buy more time to sell cars and take a bunch of money from the government. Why are you letting the same people fool you again?

There are trains that go to forests in Europe. That’s not really a far fetched thing at all. There are busses that can take you to national forests in the US of all places.

Yeah, that’s totally a thing and it could be more of a thing if we stopped spending so much money on absolutely the wrong things.

This money is going to the auto industry. The same auto industry that lobbies against mass transit and bike infrastructure, the same auto industry that ripped out all the light rail and destroyed American cities. The auto industry that is selling everyone SUVs and trucks in order to evade environmental regulations. This is a massive subsidy to some of the worst people, instead of funding things that make the auto industry basically obsolete.

Those are the same people who sell electric cars. This is money for them, instead of bike lanes and mass transit. That’s the problem. Work takes time, but what work you choose to do and who benefits from it actually matters.

The work that’s chosen is funneling money away.