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.

You know what would be better than trying to convince people to vote for the lesser of two evils? Fucking striking and rioting until you don’t have to.

Fuck this election, don’t pay taxes until you have a democracy worth paying for.

These are the people who think that the punisher is pro-cop and the bible is pro-rich and anti-abortion.

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.

There are folks preparing for armed insurrection. I would say there are probably enough of those folks already, I’m not saying they’re wrong, just that it’s easy to think of that as a default solution and miss the much more important foundation building work.

Collective disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from preparing the logistical side of a revolution. The art of was says that for every person on the field of battle, 7 are in support.

The idea of the revolutionary with a gun is attractive, especially for those of us socialized male. But there are a lot of critical roles that are revolutionary and are not that. In a lot of ways the glorification of the militant serves the state by making the resiatence easier to kill. Focus on the things that are harder to justify killing people over and harder for feds to figure out how to disrupt. The armed part of the Panthers were used to justify the attacks, but the breakfast program is why they were a real threat.

My favorite example from the past of a revolutionary project I worked on was our local GDC’s food security committee. We started with a shared pantry for members. This allowed some members to engage in riskier things like striking because they knew they’d have food covered. Other times it just supported people through hard times. We did some guerilla gardening on some abandoned plots. I learned to forage. Eventually it grew in to a few folks regularly bringing canned food to houseless camps and providing them material support.

Houseless camps are a threat to the stability of the state. They are necessarily a lawless space which threaten the legitimacy of the state.

The biggest lesson we need to take away from the Syrian civil war is that whoever can fulfil the needs of the people becomes the regional power. The state will control resource (like food) to control people. If you can disrupt their ability to control those resources or provide alternatives, then the state has less power to leverage. Simultaneously, fascist terrorists will attack the infrastructure in order to inflict suffering and control people. In both cases, providing things like food to comrade makes resistence possible and undermines the legitimacy of an authoritarian state.

A state that cannot fulfil the needs of its people loses legitimacy. But the other pillar, aside from fulfilling needs, is the legitimacy of the infrastructure of violence. My other favorite project was an independent journalism and public records activism collective. Lucy Parsons Labs OpenOversight is a plarform for police accountability. Since police ultimately will never be held accountable, pointing this out weakens the state’s ability to leverage them without losing legitimacy with the people.

So erode the narrative of the state and build it’s replacement. If you read Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare or any book like that, you’ll realize that the literal fighting part is probably the smallest and least import part of a revolution. The fate of the revolution is decided long before anyone picks up a gun.

So go talk to your neighbors, find out what they need. Organize with comrades. Join food not bombs. Push local disaster prep groups to support houseless camps, since it’s also indistinguishable from supporting people after a major natural disaster. If you do all the legal and easily justifiable things then if a fed infiltrates your group they just end up doing a lot of work without being able to disrupt anything.

Finally, go read as much as you can about the Rojava. Learn about Libertarian Communalism and think about how that translates to the US context.

To do any of this you need to organize. Start a book club or join one. Join FNB. Find other people. Talk to your neighbors. You would be amazed how many normal people actually want radical change. I’ve talked to liberals who are really radicals who haven’t figured out how to make it actually work. Don’t discount normal folks, because revolution is impossible without their involvement.

Edit: a note on foraging, one of the critical things for a revolutionary guerilla force is soap. Most US cities have abundant horse chestnuts (buckeyes or conkers). These are natural soap and can be used for laundry detergent, hand soap, or body soap. To anyone in an urban area, you’re welcome.

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Liberals would rather blame leftists than actually fight fascism.

White people finally figuring out what names are for… https://youtube.com/watch?v=63ldknEhOMM

People in functional countries don’t love their country. Only dictatorships do that, like Russia, China, and the US. People in normal countries acknowledge the problems and work to solve them, because there are actually solutions. If it is impossible to solve things in your country, why would you not hate your government?

Saying that anyone who points out flaws is an enemy agent is something cults and dictatorships do. It’s how Xi and Putin maintain control, it’s how Trump maintains control of his people, and it’s how America has worked for generations. You are responding like someone who is in a cult.

The US is not a democracy, it’s an oligarchy. This is a fact. We talk about it constantly. The fact that oligarchs basically choose who can and can’t run for the two major parties, and that the two major parties control the debates, mirrors the way the Chinese Communist Party controls who can run in elections. In both cases they let the people choose between the options that are acceptable to those who are actually in charge. This is just an observation of reality.

The US was built by slave owning oligarchs who didn’t want to pay taxes for the genocide they’d been doing. They built a system od government around controlling the population. Only landed white men could vote. The facade of the system has changed over time but the system itself remains largely the same: a small group of landed white men get to control basically everything. This is just an observation of history.

The idea that any colonizer state can possibly be democratic is just absurd. Any system bult on genocide and oppression won’t magically stop being built on genocide and oppression. The system must be completely replaced.

So the question to ask is if you advocate direct action to make sure this isn’t something that can ever happened again, or if you just advocate direct action so you can go back to brunch until next time?

The bus is heading for a cliff. Someone stands up and says, “this is stupid! We should change the way we make decisions so this can’t happen!” You hold that person down so they can’t stop the driver because you want to tell the driver to get ice cream after the bus drives off the cliff.