It seems to me lately the number of people pushing anti-EV or anti-battery narratives is increasing.
I keep stumbling upon more and more social media posts where people seem to reach the conclusion that EVs are either a scam or not viable. Mostly they use one or more of the following opinions to justify that:
- the energy used to recharge batteries comes from fossil fuels
- the metals used to make the batteries are mined by kids in the congo
- the total carbon footprint of an EV is higher than an ICE
And other similar stuff that i dont rlly wanna get into.
The thing that I dont understand is how can narratives like these keep gaining traction when the only, ONLY thing we know 100% for certain about all this is that oil is going to eventually run out (and not so late according to current estimates). How can anybody believe it would not be beneficial for us to start working in alternatives to oil NOW instead of… Idk waiting until it almost runs out and then we start killing each other for the last drops of it or smth.
I tried to talk some people into this point of view but somehow I cant convince anybody who already thinks the other way this shit makes me so frustrated sometimes.
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I like to use this anti-ev all the time. Ev car buyers are mind children, Mind children are easily led — and easily misled.
Congratulations. You have realized that a lot of people are dumber than rocks.
You are right, because there are very active misinformation campaigns against EVs, funded by some of the richest corporations and governments in the world.
https://climate-reporting.org/undercover-saudi-arabia-keep-burning-oil/
tldr: Saudi Arabia has an active strategy to attempt to keep increasing oil demand through putting more ICE cars and buses on the roads, and burning heavy fuel oil for electricity, especially in lower income countries in Africa and South Asia.
You forgot “Not everyone is able to install L2 charging at home, or can afford to do so, so we should avoid electric vehicles altogether.”
For some reason, that argument makes people feel quite proud of themselves, and very original and eloquent.
And it is extremely annoying. Installing an L2 charger is apprentice level electrician work. There’s sometimes difficulty but it is generally not that hard and just an issue of people being too cheap or lazy to do it.
For the love of all that is holy, use the search function! The sub has had this conversation at least twice in the past two weeks!
It’s worse than that. Cars wreck cities by encouraging anti-walkable sprawl development that cannot ever be served by transit (by design), and taking up disproportionate amounts of space for traffic and parking. Wide boulevards with few intersections (for flow) are poison to pedestrians. Having nowhere to walk has calamitous effects on health due to people being sedentary. The wealth people pour into cars robs them of wealth in other areas.
Throw that in their face. If they want to say EVs are unsustainable, it’s all unsustainable bro.
While Alex is admittedly biased, this video shows how the fallacy of EVs polluting more than ICE cars just is not true.
I tell them that I will believe they are sincere as soon as they give up their phones, laptops and tools that are all powered by lithium ion batteries.
“If you’re so scared of lithium-ion batteries, why do you have one in your pocket next to your genitals?”
Climate emergency became a divisive political issue many years ago, and you know how stupidly ends when this happens.
Also, we’re becoming an society of old peoples, and people tend to be from skeptical to averse to everything born after their 40th.
Furthermore, cars and its dirty ICE mechanics is still deeply felt as something epically manly, which again triggers many middle aged man feeling the EV a blasphemous attack to their inner self.
In brief: it’s just the fucking reactionary boomers fighting back as hard as they realize their way of life is dying.
Just saying this as someone who works in marketing:
Your social media feed is fueled by algorithm. What you open, click on, read, and otherwise engage like stopping your scrolling—all those feed into the algorithm to constantly show you more of the same thing. That’s why you’re constantly seeing those same sentiments.
Stop engaging on those types of posts and watch only cat videos for 2 weeks and you will stop seeing those and only see cat videos.
Social media is such a cancer.
You know what they say—if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.
You are witnessing the fossil fuel industry shaking in their boots.
Their schmuck-o-meters are pegged to the right of the dial and that is how they communicate - anything but the truth will do just fine.
people who post this shit arent interested in any facts that are not inline with their worldview. just ignore them.
Because people are stupid and cant think for themselves and so they feel better parroting what they hear elsewhere and social media has made fake news a believable thing for people who are either dumb or want to believe that news despite a clear mental capacity to see past it. These are all obviously propaganda posts and convincing people otherwise can often be an exercise in futility.
Usually my line is to deflect ask what kind of phone they have and then tell them when they replace that battery with a fossil fuel burning engine so they dont have to charge off of coal power or exploit 3rd world labor or have a higher carbon footprint then we can resume this conversation. My other line is to ask how much they pay to fill their gas tank (I live in big truck country, the answer is almost never under $100) then I tell them what I pay to charge (at home not DCFC rates!) and that usually ends the conversation with them scratching their heads.
Just dont get frustrated bc thats probably what they want. If you told someone with a diesel truck their vehicle was bad for the environment what would they do? Dont argue their points even if they are wrong, cant convince stupid of its stupidity. There are several ways to playfully disarm even the most aggressive argument. Good luck!!!
Oil is not going to run out anytime soon. We are not switching to EVs because oil might run out, it’s because we can’t keep burning oil at this rate and expect the Earth to be liveable for us in 50 years, it’s as easy as that, it doesn’t require a further explanation.
The estimates I read keep saying we’ll run out around 2060. Plus the chaos will not start once it runs out but a while before that once the prices start getting crazy. I might be very well mistaken but if you look at the insane amounts of oil we are currently using on the daily it kinda makes sense. Take ukraine for example can you imagine the amount of gasoline it takes to keep a war like that running, its pretty massive.
Well, of course there’s a limited amount of oil in the world so we’ll run out of it at some point, but the estimates are always based on reserves, and reserves change based on the price. If we start “running out” the price will go up and more oil will be available to extract at those prices, so we’ll have more reserves and more years of it. The amount of oil we are burning has been quite stable for the last few years in about 100 million barrels per day, not a lot changed because of the war (you need a massive amount of gasoline to keep the billions of cars in the world running).
In any case, if we keep burning oil up to the point where we start running out of it, the world would already be in a much terrible situation, that’s why we need to start now and with the right justification (we need to stop burning fossil fuels, no matter how much of them there is).
It’s not a “lately” thing - those talking points have been around in some fashion since the days of the Prius. What’s happening is that hybrids and EVs have been swept up in the culture wars - progressives see carbon footprint as a problem that needs to be mitigated, which leads reactionaries to oppose such measures at any cost, up to and including citing reasons that aren’t even true.