Renewable Revolution

Agelbert NOTE: Though I normally would have posted this in "Fossil Fuel Propaganda Modus Operandi", I placed this here because it relates to ⚡ EVs. Please pass this on to anyone who thinks 🦕 Bruce Yandle, 🦕😈 Diana Furchtgott-Roth, 🐍 Katie Tubb, et al aren't lying, double talking mouthpieces for the 🦖 hydrocarbon hellspawn.

August 12, 2021






Last week, President Biden signed an Executive Order encouraging U.S. leadership in the clean car sector with a goal of half of all new car sales in the U.S. being zero-emission by 2030 . It took them a few days, but deniers seem to have assembled their response by cobbling together a mix of old lies, new misrepresentations, and bizarre logical fallacies. 

For example, a response that in any sane outlet might be praise for Biden’s plan was published in the Koch-funded RealClearEnergy as an attack: President Biden’s Electric Car Future is Union Made. 🦕 Bruce Yandle, a fellow at the 🦕😈 Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is upset that Biden invited three major U.S. car companies to attend the announcement because they were the largest employers of workers in the United Auto Workers union, and didn’t invite non-American companies with non-union workers to his event promoting good American jobs. 

Obviously, it’s no surprise that a 🦕 Koch crony is anti-union and anti-EV, unless you confuse organized labor with organized denial. 

Speaking of organized denial, while the once-Koch-funded Daily Caller has since basically given up on regular climate denial reporting, and its IPCC story was a straightforward rip-off of the AP’s “code red” coverage (sans any Koch-network denial quote, because no-pay, no-play, we assume). The Caller still occasionally publishes guest opinion pieces and ran one from 🐍 Charlotte Whelan of the (pro-Covid) Independent Women’s Forum and Steamboat Institute (which is hosting 🐍 Marc Morano and a slate of other rightwing pseudostars at an upcoming festival).

🐍 Whelan is also upset the White House invited union workers to its pro-union-jobs event, and adds (with a deliberately misleading citation) the claim that “it could take more than 15 years to recoup the upfront extra costs in fuel savings. The average American certainly can’t wait that long to ‘make back’ the additional upfront cost” But the work cited (an NRDC post based on a peer-reviewed study) doesn’t even measure how long it would take to recoup the upfront cost of an EV with cheaper charging and a more efficient propulsion system. The study did, however, use 15 years as the unit of measurement for a car’s life. So the calculations show that over an average 15-year lifespan of ownership, it can be almost $15,000 cheaper to go with an electric car. 

Over at the Koch-funded 🦖 Heritage foundation’s media arm, their policy analyst 🐍 Katie Tubb makes a similar claim about EVs being for rich people, which we’ve addressed before as part of their propaganda campaigns, as well as the old racist dog whistle about China.   

Finally, we get to a new name to us, 😈🦕 Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who wrote that Biden’s move was “costly and counterproductive” in the industry-funded Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. After a column defending the auto industry from 5G in January, and another in March with the phrase “nothing beats personal vehicles for social distancing.” Furchtgott-Roth makes similar points to the other professional disinformers in her most recent City Journal piece, but she also adds a particularly baffling claim that because “the United States has achieved energy security by becoming a net exporter of oil and natural gas,” then “mandating sales of electric vehicles would weaken that security.” 

But if exporting oil makes us stronger (by her logic) then wouldn’t having more of it to export because our own cars are using less of it be a good thing, that would make us stronger? 

Why would someone write something so inane and illogical, despite a byline that includes “former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation” and “adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University?” Those are both legitimate organizations, not industry-funded disinformation operations!

Well it turns out that the DOT appointment was made by notoriously-bad-hiring-manager Donald 🦖 Trump , and prior to that, Furchtgott-Roth was an 😉 economist for the 🦖😈 American Petroleum Institute, proving once again that when someone says something stupid about EVs, it’s probably on purpose.