In a pair of Truth Social posts Monday evening, Trump took aim at the electric vehicle industry and President Biden’s push for more electric vehicles. With this opposition to electric vehicles, Trump is likely trying to persuade Michigan voters to support him over Biden, who carried the swing state in 2020.
The Biden administration has pushed to boost electric car sales, with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) predicting that two-thirds of new car sales could be electric by 2032 under a new proposal released by the administration earlier this year. Last week, the Energy Department announced plans to invest $12 billion into converting auto manufacturing facilities into plants for hybrid and electric vehicles.
Trump also took aim at Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, for supporting the Biden administration’s latest investment into electric vehicles.
The anti-electric / pro-oil propaganda that “conservatives” pass around is really baffling. They have integrated this stuff into their core belief platform. It’s nonsense because EVs seem to be a really great option to solve a lot of problems, and you’d think people that complain about gas prices all the time would want to not have to buy gas at all.
All the sense that I can make of it is that Russia is an oil-export economy, and they have been pushing the pro-oil propaganda into the “conservative” thought pipeline for so long that it just became part of their religion.
It’s more than that. A lot of conservatives think of texas and Dakota when they think of oil. They think of Michigan and Ohio when they think of gas powered cars. They think of Appalachia when they think of coal. And they think of all of this as what energy independence is. Meanwhile they think of California and foreign countries when they think of batteries and renewables. To them a windmill is ugly chinese made crap that will leave them with rolling blackouts when they need electricity the most
More than all that though they think climate change is a lie to convince them to stop living the way they want and to take their jobs and make them subservient to the government. Because even if the democrats are right the new jobs aren’t going to someone who dropped out of high school to mine coal in a rural town in West Virginia. Sure Columbus might get more jobs, but zanesville wont.
It’s performative opposition. No one really thinks there’s some kind of actually intellectually coherent views regarding incandescent bulbs, fuel efficiency, or solar power. It’s a conditioned reaction at this point. Sure, the oil lobby will oppose it, but it’s not like Big Bulb is trying to get rid of smart bulbs.
They’ve been conditioned to respond to the talking point of “the government is trying to tel you what to do” to such an extent that Biden could win the next election if he announced a government initiative to stop people from chaining themselves to rocks and jumping into the nearest lake.