Lifecycle of a Swasticar

Elon’s Swasticars did not become fascist overnight. They were all along part of a system which breeds fascism and green fairy tales so it can boost its profits and keep fattening the oligarchs. Replacing fossil fuel-powered cars with electric vehicles addresses neither traffic congestion nor carbon emissions. Brand new electric vehicles enter the market already burdened by the immense carbon footprint of their manufacture. Given that they run on electricity, the production of which comes with its own huge carbon and/or environmental footprint, it is doubtful how much, if any, of their accumulated emissions they manage to “offset” during their brief lifetime on the road. Once they’re dead, their batteries become an environmental disaster. There is still no effective, ecologically viable and sustainable way of recycling these batteries - a tiny detail which "green" car manufacturers forgot to tell us when they were prompting us to save the planet by buying an electric vehicle.

Let me just be clear: these so-called "green" vehicles are a threat to the planet before they come on to the market, during their operation, as well as thousands of years after their death. But even if they had the potential to offset significant emissions, in practice they never do and never will. Consumatrons get quickly bored with them and ditch them in favour of the next most fashionable car model, before they’ve accumulated enough road time to do any “good” for the climate. In this throw-away necrocapitalist society every product must be wasted and replaced way before its natural death. Of course, the planet itself doesn’t work that way. Once you waste this planet, you don’t get another one. Sorry.

The Unhappiness Machine will always push new products to consumatrons just as it forcibly removes from circulation the ones already sold. The sooner products, people and resources are terminated ahead of their natural expiration, the steeper the profits will be, and the weaker our democracy will become.

As for the "clean industries" which Green New Deal investors have fabricated, they simply do not exist. All technologies, however clean and sustainable they claim to be, have a voracious appetite for energy and resources. No industry, however new, innovative, efficient and "clean" can grow without a significant input of raw materials and a destructive output on society and the planet.

It would be foolish to continue to believe that yet another technological revolution could save this civilisation, given that each new technology in our history has left its own ugly, indelible scars on both planet and society. Despite this legacy, our civilisation gives technology a blank cheque, every single time.

The fossil fuel industry needs to end, but not through replacement economics. In the 80s the food industry lied to us, replacing fat with sugar rather than advise us to eat less overall. In the 2020s, the renewables industry replaced fossil fuel with Tesla cars, rather than telling us to drive less overall. We need to end all unsustainable, eco-destructive industries for good. There are barely any sustainable technologies, businesses and human activities left on this planet. It is time to end the current unsustainable ones, rediscover old ones, and create new ones.

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George is an author, scientist and researcher covering the polycrisis

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