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.

How does this refute the message you replied to?

That money could be building infrastructure to make cars less relevant instead of wasting time on a fake solution.

Well that’s great, but we solved the problem of efficiently moving people around 100 years ago and the auto industry destroyed it. EVs do not exist to save the climate, they exist to save the auto industry. That’s always been the game.

Even if we do manage to actually get the electricity, where will the lithium come from? How will the charging infrastructure actually get built? None of these were ever meant to be solved, because the point of EVs has always been to push off the real changes just a little bit more.

EVs also make a lot of things worse. They’re deadlier, they produce more tire microplastics, they do more damage to car infrastructure (which, uh, is HUGELY carbon intensive), and they’re also hugely carbon intensive to build and ship. In terms of carbon today you’re better off getting a small older ICE than a new EV.

They just make rich liberals feel better about themselves without actually needing to change their behaviour.

Hope isn’t lost at all. A future that’s still full of cars isn’t hopeful. The hopeful thing is that we can solve all this today without any new technology simply by abolishing free parking, ending parking minimums, creating super blocks, and investing in mass transit, bike, and pedestrian Infrastructure instead of car infrastructure.

The thing that makes it hard to keep that hope going is that there are people who subscribe to /c/climate who think there will be a magic solution to climate change that lets everything go on exactly as it is without changing anything at all.

It was always completely impossible. Transportation was the biggest impediment, but it was just full of unsolvable problems. At the end of the day, the easiest way to crack hydrogen was from oil anyway. It was never intended to work. It was intended to buy time for the auto and oil industry by selling the people a fake solution.

The infrastructure investment needed to support EVs, when the electricity would come from natural gas anyway, is pretty transparently the exact same grift.

Isn’t that what they said with hydrogen fuel cells as they grifted away a decade continuing to invest in car infrastructure instead of pedestrian, bike, and rail?

EVs are the new hydrogen fuel cells. They’re not about saving the environment, they’re about saving the auto industry.

I wonder how many of them just got badges.

Oh yeah, I was agreeing, just didn’t really communicate it super well.

Basically…

“This serial killer should feel remorse.” Ok… But he doesn’t because he’s a hedonistic nihilist who lives off the suffering of others. You can’t reason with that because you don’t actually have any bargaining power except violence.

Stop trying to pretend that these people care about the survival of humanity. They knew about this, they built their oil rigs taller to account for it. The oil industry and humanity are now locked in a zero sum game: one survives or the other, it cannot be both.

Murdering people has been a normal part of corporations for a long time, but they generally do it to union organizers in the developing world.

I can’t save you from looking like an arrogant idiot if that’s what you want to do. Have fun with your life.

Exactly. His relationship with the US is just as cynical as it is with Russia, and as it is with any country or people (including his own). He will do or say anything that gets him more power. That means he’ll be a solid US ally as long as the US is completely stable and functional, and he will take advantage of any weakness (like he did with Trump letting him murder Kurds in Syria).

I think we’re in violent agreement about the overall with perhaps subtle difference in the details.

Ok, so you, who have absolutely no context on the situation, keep being told that you’re wrong by people who have context on the situation, and your responses is to record all the ways you’re told you’re wrong so you can gloat about how you keep getting told you’re wrong by the ignorant people who actually have lived their entire lives in the place you know nothing about? Cool.

It’s kind of like you’re listening to the 5 blind people describe an elephant over the phone and you’re like, “I have a cat, therefore you also have a cat. You need cat litter and everything you’re saying is dumb.”

America for Europeans is either Hollywood, major cities, or Europe with rednecks. You fundamentally do not understand the context. You keep comparing to Europe and Austrian, but those models don’t work. Europe enclosed the commons generations earlier. It’s not possible for Europeans to comprehend America.

I’ve driven for 6 hours straight with the radio on scan and not even found a signal in more than one part of the US. There are vast areas of nothing with no law and no possibility of control. The vast majority of the US is unpopulated. The closest analog would be Australia or Canada.

Except that Austria and Canada never had an economy that relied on chattel slavery enforced by “organized milita.” That’s what the “well regulated milita” is in the second amendment, it’s slavers. Slavery and genocide are essential to the US in a way they aren’t in any developed country. If you want to compare the US to something, you need to look at Brazil.

The US is more like a developing nation or a dictatorship than a democracy the way you think about it.

Americans have all heard the same things over and over again. Your arguments are old and bring nothing new. So what is it exactly you’re trying to do here? What is the point if first hand information will change your articles of faith? Are you just trying to feel superior? Because coming in to a place, knowing nothing about it, and telling people they’re doing everything wrong is a pretty old school European thing to do and it really isn’t convincing anyone.

Erdogan has been close to Putin for a long time. He’s one of the most extreme authoritarians in the NATO alliance. The US has armed it’s enemies in the past, and I don’t think it’s short sightedness has changed.

I don’t believe that Erdogan will help Palestinians, but he very well may materially support Hamas as long as he doesn’t do it openly enough to cause problems. I mean, Netanyahu propped up Hamas for years in order to forward his interests. No one would care if Erdogan helped justify continuing the genocide by making Hamas more dangerous to Israelis, as long as he didn’t send any American weapons to them.

But perhaps I’m just extremely cynical.

Fixing US gun violence is trivial from a policy perspective. You tax bullets at an extremely high rate while also creating a social welfare system like Europe. This restricts the ability to execute violence while also addressing some of the biggest causes. But it’s impossible to implement that because right wing terrorism is the point.

Right wing terrorism isn’t a problem with America. It is America. It’s how the system is supposed to work. It is the point.

Right wing terrorism keeps people traumatized. It ensures that anyone proposing a social safety net would be murdered. It is the extrajudicial extension of the oligarchy that controls America. What the government can’t do, right wing death squads do instead.

If you stop mass shootings, you will destroy America. It isn’t being stopped because it is intentional. It isn’t being stopped because both parties, and, more importantly, the oligarchs who control them, benefit from it.

If you think you can stop gun violence in the US, you fundamentally do not understand what the US is. The KKK has been deeply involved at all layers of government across the US for generations. Today Aryan Brotherhood infiltrates police departments across the nation. The violence is the reality of America, the thing you think is America is just a facade.

America is colonial white supremacy maintained through terror, where guns are the primary tool of that terror. America is not normal, it’s a two party dictatorship pretending to be a democracy. America is the problem, it cannot fix the problem anymore than Nazi Germany could have fixed their antisemitism problem.