Comment by while_true_
8 hours ago
I'd like to know if there was an oil industry financed or sponsored astroturf campaign to turn the American public against electric vehicles.
8 hours ago
I'd like to know if there was an oil industry financed or sponsored astroturf campaign to turn the American public against electric vehicles.
It felt like that in the UK a couple of years ago. All of a sudden there was a mass of negative publicity about EV’s. Most of it was false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car
There was a spate of memes here and there back in March, but to me they read as:
"Please don't turn away from oil now that its geopolitical risks are so plain to see."
Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
Frankly, I hope that both of those things happened, so that people could make their own minds up after an adversarial process. (We have one pure-EV and one ICE car (non-plug-in hybrid, but that's just ICE with extra equipment for marginal efficiency gains), because the cars have different use cases that they're good at. I'm very happy for the EV companies to tell me how much better EVs are than ICE cars; I'm also happy for ICE car companies to tell me how much better their cars are than EVs.)
It’s not like you can squash only PR campaigns that you happen to be misaligned with, so If you want your own biases to be able to communicated, you have to let others do the same.
> Would you also like to know if there was an EV company or environmental group financed or sponsored astroturf campaign against ICE vehicles?
I wouldn't care, because environmental groups aren't destroying the planet and covering it up (see also the article you're commenting on: "New Documents Add to Evidence in Climate Deception Case Against ExxonMobil").
> If you want your own biases to be able to communicated
Wanting to know if you're being lied to isn't a "bias".
I suspect that 38 years from now, future versions of us will look negatively upon Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club's opposition to fission reactors for electrical power generation, whether as a transitional approach to reducing fossil fuel combustion or longer-term base load generation, and there exists today at least one internal memo/email suggesting that their anti-nuclear policies are harmful to the environment. (Some current versions of us are looking negatively at that, but not all.)