Fossil Fuel Companies Want To Suck Our Minds Into The Mirror Universe

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A recent article at Forbes reports on an awful situation: renewed attempts to sabotage the EV market. Just like the original Who Killed The Electric Car? moment, we’re seeing attempts to derail and gut EVs so that entrenched interests can keep making money.

While some of the writing about the problem is sensational (blaming Mr. Bean for everything), there is still a lot of bad information circulating about EVs. Not only have we seen problems with outright misinformation and disinformation, we’re also seeing governments act on that disinformation as if it were verifiable fact. Like any public policy, when the public becomes misinformed and elects people who agree with that bad information, the end result is piss poor policy.

And note that I didn’t say bad. I said piss poor, like in the movie Armageddon. We can call a policy bad if it causes some short-term suffering or requires a few billion dollars to clean up after it. But, when the fate of humanity hangs in the balance and people are intentionally doing stuff wrong to make a quick buck or gather some meaningless political power for one human lifetime, piss poor might not even cover it.

It’s said that hydrogen is the fuel of the future, and always will be. If you get what I did there, you get it. If not, I have to explain that it’s kind of like “mañana” in New Mexico. Tomorrow never comes because tomorrow is always the next day. It’s like when a man’s wife asks when he’s going to take the trash out or fix that leaky faucet: “Soon.”

While the world struggles with charging infrastructure (this is a real problem!), hydrogen is doing anything but riding in for the rescue. Not only is building out hydrogen infrastructure more challenging (electricity is already almost everywhere while hydrogen needs a duplication of gasoline and diesel infrastructure), but the challenges are proving to be too much. Companies everywhere are closing down hydrogen fueling stations and leaving drivers stranded.

So, when people say that the automotive world is pulling back from EVs, they’re telling you a tale from the mirror universe where Spock and Kirk and everybody has a goatee and the Enterprise is a ship that goes around committing unspeakable acts of genocide and terror. The good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys are the good guys. Oil companies are winning, and clean energy is losing.

But, this is about more than just pulling the wool over our eyes or plugging our brains into The Matrix of Evil. The consequences are very real. If they can get us to assume that the bad guys are winning, the future of humanity might not be very cheery and bright. Instead of going on to be a force for good in the cosmos, we’ll be lucky to leave the planet and would become a galactic disease if we pull that off somehow.

The fact is that renewables and EVs put the people in charge. It gives a chance for people to make individual decisions that add up to a better future. It’s a form of democracy. But, if we let them fool us into thinking that hydrogen is winning and then go make it win, then the fossil fuel companies get to greenwash their operations and keep the energy markets looking more like a centralized oligarchy.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is a choice between the world people like Putin and Xi want and the world that the rest of us would be happy with. So, it’s no surprise that the kind of people who support the Putins of the world are so busy trying to suck our minds into that mirror universe.

Featured image: the logo for Star Trek’s Terran Empire, an evil vision for the future of humanity that exists in a parallel universe. Fair Use, Commentary.