Back in February, we called out Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) for citing a misleading, industry-funded report from the Manhattan Institute in his argument against policies supporting electric vehicles. The report, titled “Short Circuit: the high cost of electric vehicle subsidies,” is a year old at this point and relies on data even older, making it fatally outdated for a present-day discussion.
Somehow, though, that hasn’t stopped folks from coming back to the Manhattan Institute’s work attacking EVs. As Maxine Joselow at E&E recently reported, the group’s “research has found a prominent place in the public discourse.”
That place, of course, is the bottom of the barrel, where deniers scrape up all their oil-funded arguments. Because, as Joselow reports, the Manhattan Institute is funded by plenty of industry actors with a stake in the electric vehicle fight, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2017 from the Kochs and Exxon Mobil (who promised to stop funding denial in 2007.)
With that kind of industrial backing, it’s no surprise that the report keeps getting mentioned. In addition to the Barrasso piece in February, there was a more recent column that made reference to the report by George Will in the Washington Post. Steve Forbes also mentioned it in Fox News this week.
Ben Jervey at DeSmog took on the Forbes piece, writing a thorough debunking that explains how Forbes “repeats a number of well-rehearsed by thoroughly debunked claims” to attack electric vehicles.
DeSmog didn’t stop there, though. It also has a new page on the Manhattan Institute report itself, providing links to a half-dozen existing debunkings and info on how the Manhattan Institute is funded by Big Oil. As DeSmog explains, the report’s author, Jonathan Lesser, cherry-picks data, ignores carbon pollution as a cost, employs discredited assumptions and otherwise “makes a number of demonstrably false claims about electric vehicles.” So pretty much exactly what one would expect from an energy industry consultant who provides expert testimony for energy companies and an anti-wind group.
Facts aside (where Lesser leaves them), it’s the rhetorical approach that Forbes and Will took that deserves the most scorn, as they shroud their opposition in a faux concern for low-income taxpayers.
By presenting electric vehicle subsidies as something that benefit the rich at the poor’s expense, these exhausting arguments use the very people who are hurt most by fossil fuels as a human shield to defend carbon pollution.
Let’s not forget, as Lesser so strongly wishes we would, that the working class and communities of color are disproportionately impacted by both climate change and tailpipe emissions from automobiles. Highways get built through poor communities, not rich ones, and for decades African Americans were red-lined into traffic-packed corridors that white families didn’t want.
So while it is true that you don’t see a ton of Teslas in working class neighborhoods, these communities absolutely reap the rewards of electric vehicles, both in terms of direct tailpipe emissions reductions as well as overall gains in fighting climate change.
Which is worse: propaganda that makes false claims in the service of ideology, or propaganda that uses faux concern for the poor to fight for sustained profits for the mega-rich fossil fuel industry? Two real evils there, hard to say which is Lesser.
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