We've covered a lot of ways the fossil fuel industry's disinformation-spreaders try and mislead people about electric vehicles over the years, from their performance in a snow storm (better than gas cars!) to their being charged by a coal-powered grid (still better than gas cars!) to woke-washing and made-up phrases like "energy transition materials" to describe minerals needed for everything from, yes, EV batteries, to any computer or cell phone electronics.
Now Climate Nexus has a new roadmap to responding to electric vehicle disinformation with the facts that are so often challenged. There are resources for responses to false claims about those minerals, charging and grid anxieties, emissions, equity issues, taxes and, yes, the cold weather concerns! Those are of course unfounded given that "Electric vehicles are popular in cold climates, including in Norway, where electric vehicles make up more than 90 percent of sales. Studies in Norway, Alaska, and Iowa show that electric vehicles perform comparably or better than conventional gas cars in cold weather conditions."
The report does a great job of providing neutral and fact-based responses to disinformation most often found in mainstream and conservative media.
But in the fringe world, of tin-foil-hat-type conspiracy theories, there's another narrative that, given the social media mainstreaming of once-radically hateful and harmful content, is increasingly getting picked up by the Koch'd up professional disinformation agents once hesitant to look quite so kook-y.
The most succinct example is a tweet from holocaust denier turned climate denier fave Peter Sweden, imagining "the year is 2031. Your electric vehicle has been remotely shut off because you exceeded your monthly driving limit" or that "the year is 2035" and "the Ministry of Truth has deemed a social media post as containing 'misinformation'" and therefore "electricity to charge your electric vehicle has been cut off for 7 days in order to get your social credit score back."
But CFACT can't afford anyone quite as eloquent as the holocaust denier who tweeted, "Remember how they keep telling you to stop driving cars because of climate change? The same elite just flew to Davos on private jets to mingle at the World Economic Forum…"
Instead they had to settle for a thousand-word version of it by Duggan Flanakin, who in addition to the World Economic Forum point and "electricity rationing" point that Peter makes all the time, also considers EVs "a death machine" because sometimes they catch fire (something gasoline never does, apparently) and "the era of mandatory electric vehicle[s] marks the end of human freedom on the American highway, truly the end of human freedom – PERIOD."
Oh and it's "not just the EV, but the EV culture" which is apparently "part of the 'virtual' revolution in which people can act out roles online that do not translate easily to the physical world."
Yes, apparently video games are to blame for people preferring a car that's less harmful to the climate, and won't kill their family if they accidentally leave it running in the garage.
And the worst part of it is that Flanakin isn't even up to date on his video game scaremongering, invoking the very mid-aughts Grand Theft Auto era by writing that "most 'driving' done by pre-teens through twenty-somethings is done via video gaming. These virtual unreality games often focus on killing, almost never on, say, gardening, ranching, farming, forest management, electrical line work, water and sewer system construction, or other physical world jobs."
Apparently the next round of rebuttals to EV disinfo need to include an update on how popular farming and simulator games are- or at least were, in that there were write-ups about the Truck Simulate and Train Simulator craze in 2016. And of course Animal Crossing is all about gardening, Farmville was a huge craze on Facebook, and The Sims (in which users construct cities) is one of the most popular video game franchises in history with nearly 200 million copies sold!
Facts, though, even about things like video games, are not something you'll generally see at CFACT.
