 The fossil-industrial complex is showing interesting cracks along a fault line. "Motordom", as Peter Norton named it in his book "Autonorama", is one half of this complex. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Peter-Norton/dp/1642832405 It represents the car manufacturers, the people who reshaped our cities and our laws to induce car dependency. The people who bought public transport companies in the US to shut them down in order to force people to use cars. 4 comments
When we are looking at messaging about "the german car industry killing itself by insisting on keeping the internal combustion engine alive past 2030" or similar initiatives, we are looking right at this fault line. German car makers have – maybe with the exception of BMW – understood that there is no choice of technology and that the battery electric car already won. But there are financial interests outside of the car industry that used to be aligned with it and no longer are. These interests are who is orchestrating the various campaigns to keep cars with internal combustion engines "alive", seed fear, uncertainty and doubt over heat pumps and generally try to sabotage the electrification of industry and household. Public discussion and media commentar in Germany fail to make this distinction and hence almost all analysis we can read falls short of providing proper insight. We need to distinguish clearly between car sellers and fuel sellers in order to understand some of the disorientingly stupid discourse around all of this better. Both are trying to kill us, mind you, but they are still not the same forces, and they are no longer friends. |
Gregory's Server
The other half of the fossil-industrial complex are people selling fuel.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/21/revealed-oil-sectors-staggering-profits-last-50-years
There is a staggering amount of money in fuel, in selling hydrocarbons to drive machinery.
And of course the people profiting from this money want to keep the spice flowing.