The Great Driving Right Show

This piece appears in print in Salvage 14: Shrouded in Darkness. Issue 14 is available to buy individually here. Our poetry, fiction and art remains exclusive to the print edition, and our subscribers have exclusive access to some online content, including all audio content. New subscriptions can be taken out here, and start with the next issue. Or you can support our work with a digital subscription, and get instant access to all published issues, including the latest issue.

 

 

Apocalypse is in the air. Over the summer, a group of ‘Blade Runners’ began sabotaging the infrastructure of ultra-low emissions zones (ULEZ’s) around London. Clad in black, face to toe, they target the cameras that scan number plates on cars determining whether they comply with the minimum environmental standards or must pay the daily charge of £12.50. Some Blade Runners dismantle the structures entirely, removing the cameras from their perch and stashing them away in lock-ups. Others hack the posts down, allowing gravity to smash the contraption onto the pavement. The most deft, however, arrive on the scene with long-handled secateurs and snip the cables before making a ghoulish exit. One Blade Runner recorded himself in the act, addressing the powers he was resisting: ‘It might take your blokes half a day to put one up. It takes me less than a minute to take one down. So fuck your fucking ULEZ, shit cunts. This is our country and we’re taking it back’.

What exactly is motivating the Blade Runners’ sabotage? Browse the online spaces where the most committed congregate and you’ll see it has nothing to do with air quality and little if anything to do with the charges involved. These are spaces where all manner of contemporary cultural and political anxieties collapse into one another. Railing against vaccines, ‘climate lockdowns’, cashless societies, ‘gender ideology’, 5G networks and digital IDs, the Blade Runners see themselves as freedom fighters, resisting a totalitarian state with a global agenda. Yet it would be a mistake to discard these actors as cranks on the margins of society. While they partly target developments of traditional concern for the left – such as the expansion of state and corporate surveillance technologies – their diagnosis and prescriptions drive politics into the most conspiratorial terrain of the far right. Their contestation of decarbonisation policies is quickly becoming one of the most important frontiers for the organised denial of climate science, one that mainstreams far-right discourses and synthesises fossil nationalism with a radical form of libertarianism.

Though right-leaning street mobilizations were on the rise before 2020, the pandemic has mutated and accelerated the pre-existing conditions. Its swirl of anxiety, misinformation, and polarisation drew in new and unexpected sections of the population, especially from the petite bourgeoisie, many of whom found themselves participating in a social movement – on and offline – for the first time. Here they encountered more seasoned activists, alternative media, and conspiracy theorists who came equipped with the organisational experience and ideological frames necessary to diagnose and offer ‘solutions’ to a crisis of apocalyptic proportions. Simultaneously, the pandemic choked off the steady mobilisation of the climate justice movement around the world: demonstrations turned into webinars, blockades into strategy discussions, and the lost momentum has yet to be regained. 

If anti-immigrant xenophobia and Islamophobia were the sine qua non of the pre-pandemic far right, the mounting opposition to public health policies altered and added to their forms of articulation. The border remained a site of contention, of course. But with immigration and refugee intake halted by pandemic restrictions, the focus temporarily pivoted from restricting the freedom of movement of nefarious Others to liberating ‘the people’ from their own internal constraints. ‘Freedom’ groups proliferated in this suffocating environment. Entrepreneurs became political entrepreneurs. Restaurant owners, preachers, rogue healthcare professionals, paralegals, the self-employed, small business owners and managers of all stripes made common cause. Some of them emerged as social media influencers, podcast hosts, hucksters of alternative medicine and wellness products, anti-lockdown protest speakers, or leaders of new political organisations. In some cases, this meant sidelining or supplementing their real business for the ‘business’ of the movement, blurring an already fine line between politics and grift on the far right.

As the ranks of the far right have grown, so has its presence in the mainstream. Concepts and conspiracy theories previously confined to the fascist fringe – from Malthusian population control to the ‘Great Replacement’ – have become the language of everyday life. In and through these discourses, the pandemic and the climate crisis have conjoined. Critiques of pandemic lockdowns, to take one example, have turned into warnings about a dystopian future of ‘climate lockdowns’. The denialist apparatus of fossil capital-funded think tanks and advocacy organisations has played its part in ensuring the energies of the ‘freedom’ movement are transferred to the terrain of climate.

In the framing of fossil capitalists, but also their often unwitting allies, the world appears divided around a set of binaries: truth and lies, nationalists and globalists, freedom fighters and totalitarians, the suburbs and the city, workaday motorists and climate protesters. Fuelling the far right’s conspiracy engine, such binary images present what could be called an ‘inverted crisis’. This inverted crisis at once mirrors and obscures the material crisis of planetary warming, promulgating narratives that are neatly aligned with the interests of fossil capital. The crisis is not climate change, but what ‘they’ (the ‘globalist’ elite and ‘woke’ mobs) are going to do about it. In this way, solutions to the ecological crisis are framed as the crisis itself. At the centre of it all is the so-called ‘war on cars’.

As the crystallisation of fossil capital, particularly its twentieth-century form, the car has become the lynchpin of a way of life and a capitalist world system that cannot be altered by an aggregation of individual consumer choices. And as the energy transition becomes existentially urgent, the defence of individual automobility is fast becoming a cipher for a broader set of struggles. Symbolically, affectively, and materially, the car is a ‘vehicle’ for the far right, channelling apolitical investments in the status quo into reactionary forms of anti-ecological politics. In this conjuncture, the car is a symbol of individual liberty, the nuclear family, and the ‘energy-secure’ nation. In a populist key, the car is ‘the people’.

 

 

Lockdown City 

The concept of the ‘fifteen-minute city’ was coined in 2015 by Carlos Moreno, a Colombian-French business professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. The idea is to design cities so that citizens have all of their basic needs, including their workplaces, within a fifteen-minute walk or bike ride from their home. Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris and member of the Socialist Party, campaigned (and won) in 2020 using the fifteen-minute city concept as a slogan, vowing to create ‘a bike lane in every street’ by 2024, and to do so in large part by removing 60,000 of the city’s on-street parking spots. This was largely a continuation of what Hidalgo had already been doing since she was first elected in 2014. As a result of Hidalgo’s policies, the number of cyclists in Paris doubled in one year (2019 to 2020), and emissions in the city went down 20 per cent between 2004 to 2018. Going forward, she plans to ban diesel cars from the city by 2024 and non-EVs by 2030. 

Hidalgo has not been without opposition in implementing these plans. A hashtag translating roughly to #VandalizedParis has gained some traction on Twitter, where users post photos and videos of urban ‘decay’ – syringes, overflowing bins, homeless encampments – and blame Hidalgo for it all. And, as reported by Politico, a protest in October 2021 attracted hundreds who critiqued the city’s dirtiness and the ‘haphazard promotion of e-scooters and bicycles at the expense of pedestrians’. Hidalgo felt sufficiently pressured by the e-scooter complaints to hold a referendum in April 2023 on their use, in which Parisians voted to ban them from the city. Still, despite the boldness of Hidalgo’s policies, there have been relatively few protests targeting her efforts to curb automobiles and expand cycling and walking. 

It is a different story in the UK. In Oxford, efforts to create Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), which primarily entail the use of bollards and planters to restrict car access and pedestrianise certain areas, have been met with a wave of vandalism. In 2022, a single bollard in the city’s east-end – ‘the most hated bollard in Britain’ – was vandalised twenty times, with some driving over it, some managing to remove it, and others even setting it on fire. This led the city to replace it with a more durable wooden construction, and to replace others with steel versions. Similar acts of bollard-bashing have been seen up and down the country. 

At the discursive level, fifteen-minute cities, ULEZ’s and LTN’s all end up blended together with the pre-existing elements of what Naomi Klein calls ‘the great reset conspiracy smoothie’. Jordan Peterson, among the foremost salesmen of this noxious cocktail, sent the fifteen-minute city concept viral with a 31 December 2022 retweet lambasting the ‘idiot tyrannical bureaucrats’ behind the idea and advising his followers to ‘make no mistake, it’s part of a well-documented plan’. Leaving no doubt as to who and what is really behind this ominous-sounding ‘plan’, Peterson’s post included a retweet of Don Keiller, who writes, ‘it’s already happening…  #GreatReset #JailSchwab’, and includes photos of Canterbury and Oxford’s new driving zones, alongside an infographic explaining that ‘the fifteen-minute city is a UN and WEF plan because they care about you want you to drive less’. The tweet has been seen over 7 million times. 

Two months later, again in Oxford, a protest against fifteen-minute cities attracted 2,000 people. A twelve-year-old girl was handed the microphone to address the crowd. Doing her best inverse Greta, she yelled: ‘How dare you steal my childhood and my future, and the future of our children, by enslaving us in your crazy digital surveillance prison’. Leaflets explained that the scheme was in fact a plot to trick people into living in open air prisons. Barbed wire fences, every movement watched by cameras, surviving on a diet of insects: this was the new normal being smuggled in under the guise of green virtue. More understated, one placard neatly summed up the paranoid mood: fifteen-minute cities were ‘the thin edge of a global wedge that will curb our freedom of movement’. Such concerns echoed in the House of Commons, where Tory MP Lee Anderson described the plans in Oxford as ‘an international socialist conspiracy’. Also playing up the tyrannical and restrictive nature of the scheme was Nigel Farage, ominously announcing that ‘the climate lockdowns are coming’. 

Travelling on the international market of misinformation, the fifteen-minute conspiracy theories spread to Canada. In February, 2023, in Edmonton, Alberta – the capital of the petro province – an anti-fifteen-minute city rally opened with the Lord’s prayer. At one point, a co-organiser grabbed a large book from her backpack and presented it to a city planner in attendance: ‘Would you swear on the Bible that we’re not gonna be fined, that we’re not gonna have to show our IDs at stop points, or have our license plates scanned?’ The planner smiled in amusement and sidestepped the question. An hour later, though, when asked again, this time on the speaker’s platform in front of the crowd, he agreed. He placed his left hand on the Bible, only to be corrected by the anti-lockdown activist, Chris ‘Sky’ Saccoccia, who instructed him to use his right. ‘Hey man, I don’t swear on Bibles every day’, the planner remarked, before beginning his oath: ‘I, Sean Bohle, Senior Planner at the City of Edmonton, do solemnly swear’ – looking to Saccoccia for approval, he asked, ‘is that good?’ and continued – ‘that if the city of Edmonton ever tries to institute controls on the people’s movement through the city, I will vehemently oppose it in my capacity as planner at the City of Edmonton’. The crowd erupted in cheers. 

Prior to 2020, Saccoccia, the thirty-nine-year-old son of a wealthy housing developer outside Toronto, had seemingly no political experience other than a penchant for far-right shitposting. As documented by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, he wrote that ‘Blacks lack the sophistication to make an advanced civilization’; that ‘Muslims and child rape go together like burgers and fries’; and that Mein Kampf was ‘100 per cent bang on’ about Jewish efforts to control the world, ‘like [Hitler] had a crystal ball into the future’. When the pandemic hit, Saccoccia channelled this worldview into anti-vax and anti-lockdown activism, growing a large online following, racking up several criminal charges and thousands in fines, while becoming one of the country’s most recognisable ‘freedom’ activists. He also has international notoriety as an occasional guest on InfoWars, and, at the time of writing, is scheduled to travel to Oxford to shoot a documentary on fifteen-minute cities. 

In his speech at the Edmonton rally, Saccoccia re-tooled his pandemic-era messaging for the new climate front: ‘

They used Covid to get you used to the idea of being no more than five kilometres from your home … Now, they know a pandemic can’t last forever, but what can? A climate crisis can! A climate crisis lasts for generations. So Covid was a vehicle to retrain you, to set you up to accept the new climate change-enforced agenda of total control [which will entail] the removal of private car ownership. 

Sky’s messaging, influence, and following are thus re-purposed for the war on the motorist. The fact that ‘a pandemic can’t last forever but a climate crisis lasts for generations’ is perhaps less of a warning here, for Sky, and more of a hope; the previous crisis, after all, made him famous. Why wouldn’t he want the next one to be longer? 

The Edmonton rally can be seen as a pre-emptive strike against urbanist mitigation efforts, drumming up paranoid controversy despite little in the way of the concrete policy planning and implementation seen in Europe. Looking to Oxford for inspiration, Saccoccia worked the crowd into a frenzy: ‘You know what they’re doing right now? They’re smashing through the bollards with their cars. They’re pouring concrete down there. They’re ripping out the cameras … And that’s what we’re gonna do here’. All this despite there being no actual plan to introduce ULEZs into Edmonton. Nonetheless, the crowd is kept in a state of vigilance, on guard against even the slightest sign of efforts to curtail private automobility. 

Such far-out theories are not only to be found amongst street-level activists like Sky. Rather, there is a dance between the ‘bottom-up’ street movement and the ‘top-down’ culture war, in which far-right influencers team up with long-standing denialist groups to spread the paranoia. As reported by DeSmog, Not Our Future – one of the leading anti-fifteen-minute city groups in Oxford – has many linkages to organised climate denialists, including individuals connected to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the leading denialist group in the UK. Meanwhile, such groups enjoy increased attention and traffic courtesy of the likes of Jordan Peterson, who has become, in the words of climate scientist Michael Mann, a ‘central cog in the denial machine’, mainly through platforming and sharing such sources on X/Twitter and YouTube. And in Canada, the long-standing denialist organisation, Friends of Science, has been spreading the same conspiracies. Spokesperson for the group, Michelle Stirling, has appeared on Rebel News and other far-right platforms to explain how the pandemic ‘conditioned the public for fifteen-minute living’, warning that vaccine passports will soon be converted into a technology to administer population-wide carbon rations. In the discourse of these coalitions, the coming tyranny operates on multiple scales: from the heights of ‘globalist’ summits in Davos down to the bedroom. 

 

 

Sex in the fifteen-minute city

‘#JustSayNo to WEF. #JustSayNo to the fake climate crisis. #JustSayNo to Climate Change Lockdowns. #JustSayNo to fifteen-minute cities/Smart cities. #JustSayNo to the Alphabet Gang’. While Saccoccia’s bizarre Telegram litany – the final element being a reference to the LGBTQ community – would be easy to dismiss as yet more demagogic crankery, it nonetheless raises an important question: Why do queerphobes hate fifteen-minute cities? Is this just a random list of far-right grievances du jour? Or is there an underlying ‘logic’ connecting them?

To mark Pride month, Benita Pederson – another prominent ‘freedom’ activist and opponent of fifteen-minute cities – launched a campaign to prevent the painting of a rainbow crosswalk in her small town north of Edmonton. Just to the south, in Leduc, the site of Alberta’s first major oil well discovery, someone had skidded their tires over the newly painted rainbow crosswalk there, leaving it covered in black tread-marks – a fitting symbol of fossilised queerphobia. Cara Daggett has described such events as a ‘catastrophic convergence’ between climate change, a threatened fossil fuel system, and an increasingly fragile Western hypermasculinity. ‘Challenges to fossil-fuelled systems, and more broadly to fossil-soaked lifestyles’, Daggett explains, ‘become interpreted as challenges to white patriarchal rule’.

In this convergence, unlikely alliances are forged. To take one example, conservative Muslims have teamed up with evangelicals and far-right cranks who, just a few years earlier, were warning the migrant crisis was a front for a Muslim ‘invasion’ of the West. In these cynical and short-lived coalitions (the far right cannot leave Islamophobia behind for too long), attention temporarily swivels from the border to the school boards, which become a front-line site of struggle as far-right groups look to ‘take back’ those, too. ‘If your freedom allows you to interfere with my privacy, with how I raise my kid, then it’s not freedom’, says Mahmoud Mourra, the main organiser of an anti-LGBTQ rally in Calgary. Speaking to the Toronto Star, he had no scruples admitting that ‘if my son decides to be gay tomorrow, I’m going to be hurt for the rest of my life’.

Freedom, we can surmise, is the ability to do whatever one wants with one’s ‘property’, whether automobiles or children. There is a non-coincidental parallel between ‘leave our kids alone’ – one of the main slogans of the growing anti-LGBTQ backlash – and a Jordan Peterson tweet demanding elites ‘leave our cars alone’. It is the generalisation of a libertarian ‘don’t tread on me’ ethos, where the state becomes synonymous with tyranny, and where the right to unlimited pollution is akin to the right to psychologically abuse gender-non-conforming children. ‘Change gears, not genders,’ reads one meme-turned bumper sticker. Here, the anti-trans backlash is generalised to the social totality: from gender transitions to energy transitions, the point – to invert Marx – is to stop it.  

 

 

The Fossilised Family

If, following M E O’Brien, the family is ‘one site in the broader reproduction of capitalism’, then what of the family car? To announce a review of ‘anti-car schemes across the country’, Rishi Sunak thought it expedient to pose in the front seat of Margaret Thatcher’s old Rover. ‘Talking about freedom’, Sunak captioned the photo, before outlining his concerns to the Telegraph. The Prime Minister was ‘particularly worried’ about how planters and bollards, such as those seen in Oxford, would allow ‘no vehicle wider than a bicycle to travel through’, thereby obstructing cars for families going about their lives. He knew, of course, just ‘how important cars are for families’.

In the previous issue of Salvage, Alva Gotby draws on the Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians (WDL) campaigns of the ’70s to construct a materialist critique of heterosexuality, which she views as an ‘institutionalised lifestyle that requires … the social desire for a particular life, and all the material underpinnings of that life’. This can be seen in the WDL’s analysis of the sexual division of labour: ‘the woman supports the man to work harder, to buy a bigger house, a car, etc., and to subjugate her needs to these needs, which are capital’s’.

As sure as the capitalist system needs to produce cars, it also needs to produce ‘women’ and ‘wives’ disciplined into supporting the male breadwinner, to produce ‘families’ capable of absorbing through excessive consumption the over-production of materially intensive, ecologically destructive commodities and the attendant ways of life. The combined effect of blending pro-car, pro-family and anti-LGBTQ discourse – an amalgam we could call the ‘fifteen-minute sex panic’ – is to demonise and ostracise heteropatriarchy’s escapees, those who dare construct alternative social desires along with an alternative material underpinning. To refuse a private automobile, then, is tantamount to refusing the family. 

Such links between far-right natalism and climate denial feature prominently in the tweets of Jordan Peterson, who has recently turned his talents to poetry. In one poem, he ventriloquises the ‘global fear-mongering elites’ who speak from on high: 

Starve in the dark 

Peasants 

You and your swarming hordes 

of carbon-emitting children 

Cluttering up the planet. 

The WEF and UN, whom he tags, are thus framed as genocidal maniacs, so consumed by a drive to reduce emissions that they are willing to commit mass murder. The coinage ‘carbon-emitting children’ serves to construct a sense of crisis for the fossilised family: ‘they’ do not want us to have children; ‘they’ are killing us by taking away our fossil fuels. A similar discursive construction is spread by David Parker. 

The founder of Take Back Alberta, one of the most influential far-right organisations in Canada today, Parker is fond of telling his nearly all-white and largely rural crowds of supporters that they are up against an ‘anti-human’ agenda. ‘Most women my age’, he says, 

think the worst thing that could happen to them is to get pregnant. Okay, their careers are more important. More important than the continuation of the human race … Whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, we’re slaughtering our children in the womb. We are living in an anti-human society that literally teaches our children that they are a disease on this planet. That the best thing we can do is depopulate. You are the carbon they are trying to reduce.

 The continuation of the human race is facing an existential threat – not from climate change, but from feminists and environmentalists whose perverse ideologies drive down birth rates. This view is also central to the longtermist ideology, popular among the wealthiest Silicon Valley stars like Elon Musk, who Parker, like so many on the far right, routinely fawns over. ‘A species that will not even reproduce will not survive’, Parker tells the crowd, adding that ‘the birth rate of North America is not replacement’. Between Peterson and Parker (who shared a stage in May 2023), what we are seeing is the development of a fossil fascist natalism, where the old fascist emphasis on birth rates and women’s role in reproducing the white nation is increasingly coupled with climate denial.

It is through this chain of equivalence – a total identification of ‘the people’ with carbon – that anti-environmentalism becomes ultra-nationalism, and vice versa. Through this logic, burning fossil fuels, opposing policies and technologies of the energy transition, and reinforcing the nuclear family all become ultra-nationalist acts in and of themselves. ‘You will not replace us’ becomes ‘you will not replace fossil fuels’. This discursive construction is not random but rooted in historical and material transformations driven by fossil capital and centred on one of its signal commodities, the car. 

 

 

The Motor of History

It is sometimes said that a history of twentieth century capitalism can be told through the car. In the aftermath of the second world war, excessive military capacity had to be repurposed for commercial ends. National reconstruction programmes to revive battered domestic economies were centred around state-owned car industries or ‘national champions’. Manufacturers were wedded to the nation: German Volkswagen, British Leyland, French Renault, Italian Fiat. In truth, these programmes were only bound to the nation in appearance. The US provided the machinery for the factories and primed the pistons with finance. Colonial assets ensured rubber, metals and oil were imported to the shop floors, and manufactured vehicles, sometimes put together by migrant labour, were primarily destined for export. Driving the ‘economic miracle’ of the post-war era, it was these dynamics that the fetishised car served to obscure. 

But through the seventies and eighties, markets for cars became increasingly saturated. This overcapacity drove down profits and forced producers to abandon standardised models, offering modifications to cater to more refined consumer tastes. Owing to the endless range of lacquers, leathers, fabrics, sunroofs, rims and radios, no two identical cars left the VW assembly line on any given day. As customisations expanded, so did size. Threatened by fuel efficiency regulations passed by Congress in the aftermath of the seventies oil shocks, auto-industry lobbyists successfully carved out exceptions for ‘light trucks’ and ‘utility vehicles’. Now known as the ‘SUV loophole’, this essentially incentivised manufacturers to build heavier, taller and less efficient cars and pass them off as trucks. The bulky vehicles were aggressively advertised to ordinary consumers: images of machines scaling mountains sold to suburbanites for the school run. Beyond the initial incentives created by the loophole, the SUV’s higher price tag promised vastly greater profits for manufacturers than regular passenger cars, partly explaining why what originally started as a US phenomenon grew into a global one. While SUVs and light trucks account for nearly three quarters of new car sales in the US today, that figure has climbed from one-fifth to over half of new car sales globally in just the last decade. 

Over the same period, SUVs were the second-biggest factor in global emissions increases, behind only the power sector, and ahead of shipping, aviation, and heavy industry. Today, if SUVs were a country, they would rank as the sixth-highest emitter in the world. Meanwhile, the sheer size of these vehicles is wreaking havoc not only on the climate, but on fellow road users. Production lines today churn out cars comparable in size to tanks on the battlefields of the Second World War. Unsurprisingly, pedestrian deaths have risen in tandem and are at a forty-year high in the US. Perversely, this heightened risk is used by some to justify the need for even bigger cars to ‘protect’ themselves, the same sort of ‘arms race’ logic deployed by gun enthusiasts. If you build tanks, expect casualties.

It is no coincidence that the twentieth century is commonly periodised into Fordist and post-Fordist stages. The car is the preeminent symbol of modernity, the commodity par excellence. Imbued with fetishistic qualities and reaching all corners of the world, the car illustrates self-expanding value in motion, activating circuits of accumulation before, during, and well after it rolls off the assembly line: everything from supply parts, road construction, roadside retailers, insurance providers to car washes. Countries on the periphery of the world system are not only resource pits for the production of cars driven in the core, but also crucial recipients of the metal cages once they no longer meet the regulatory standards or aesthetic tastes of the global North. Whether they continue to be driven or end up on scrap heaps, the car not only strips these local natures of their resources, but continues to pollute long after its lifespan with wealthier consumers. The car, and its defence, are the ultimate expression of the imperial mode of living.

While workers in automobile factories became subsumed to the dictates of the machine, nature and space have been subsumed by the logic of the car, transforming social relations in the process. Residential streets made way for ring roads and car parks; landscapes were torn up for kilometres of motorway; train and tram networks were routinely decommissioned; and housing developments were pushed to the increasingly motor-dependent margins of towns and cities. While there was a broad social consensus for a general direction of travel – new subjectivities aligned with the above transformations – the total dependence on the car was locked-in without much democratic input. 

This is not to say that the car’s supremacy has never been challenged before. Over the course of the car’s much longer history, waves of resistance have emphasised the congestion of streets, the imperilment to life and the destruction of rurality, all driven by the system of automobility. But with ecological breakdown now firmly on the horizon – and transportation often being the single largest source of emissions in any one country – the car and the fuel which powers it are under their most sustained attack. Capital responds to this challenge with a more straightforward technological fix: to switch out the internal combustion engine for a lithium battery. States incentivise this shift to electrification, imposing bans on internal combustion engines and diesel. But this transition in personal mobility also traverses geopolitical, economic, and subjective minefields. 

For starters, entrenched economic interests have to be manoeuvred. The oil and automotive industries remain interlocked in a symbiotic relationship, with half of all global oil consumption flowing through nozzles to power road vehicles. This means a full electrification of personal mobility would be an existential affront to primitive fossil capital. The landscape of production has also dramatically shifted, from Europe and America, decisively to East Asia, with China dominating the new car market. Even the production of the holiest of German products, the car, has shifted to countries where labour power is cheaper and labour regulations weaker; the majority of cars by German brands are now no longer produced in Germany.

The current road map for electrification, however, provides fossil capital with plenty of opportunity to manage the transition to its benefit. In the US and EU, owing to a legal clause concerning the measurement of fuel efficiency rates, the rise of electric vehicles in fact provides a boost for more traditional lines of business. Passed by Congress in the seventies, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards mandate that fuel efficiency compliance is measured not by the performance of a single vehicle but rather across the average of a fleet. So, rather than count fuel consumption by the model (say, the three tonne Chevrolet Suburban), efficiency levels are averaged out across all vehicles produced by brands owned by one firm. In practice, this means the more compact EVs sold, the lower average emissions, the more leeway to sell fossil-fuelled mega machines. The same ‘fleet wide’ accountancy methods apply in the EU, despite slightly more stringent fuel efficiency standards. In such regulatory environments, firms push greener makes and models all the while securing access to the polluting markets where the real money is made. 

In a further bend in the regulatory road, emissions averages aren’t necessarily the sum of a single firm’s emissions alone. Companies who overshoot their cumulative average may cancel out their excesses by purchasing credits from more economical operators. Grifting through these overlapping loopholes, Tesla typically generates more revenue selling such credits to manufacturers of tank-like cars than through the sale of its own electric vehicles. In sum, the more electric cars on the roads, the more 4x4s can be sold.  

But other fractions of capital have stakes in this transition. The lion’s share of surplus value in electric vehicles is contained in their batteries, the overwhelming majority of which are currently produced in East Asia. As software increasingly becomes a prominent component of new cars, alliances between automobile stalwarts and tech titans become commonplace. With this confluence, new revenue streams appear. Drivers emerge as wellsprings of data, while manufacturers like Volkswagen, Toyota and Tesla increasingly charge subscription fees for anything from heated seats to faster acceleration. 

We find discursive traces of these shifting dynamics and tensions in the ‘war on the motorist’. Resisting the ban on internal combustion engines, in Britain and across Europe, politicians reproduce the claim that it is their uniquely special car industry that is to be unfairly decimated by a wayward green agenda. Structured with nostalgia, nationalist imaginaries are mobilised in defence of the car. But there is another battle being waged against the ‘West’. According to the British right-wing press, Chinese car manufacturers have declared ‘war on their Western rivals’, their vehicles are poised for a European ‘invasion’ enabling the Communist Party to spy on populations. This crisis is all but assured should our politicians continue to pursue treacherous net-zero targets. Such suspicions and many more are routinely blended up by the far right, with electric cars portrayed as emasculating machines, their control at the mercy of totalitarian states. One frequently expressed fear is that your car will automatically turn off should you dare leave your fifteen-minute prison. If the war on the motorist is a war on the fossil-fuelled nation, it is being waged by enemies from without and from within. 

 

 

Whose Streets? 

The mid-August cover of Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine with a centre-right tilt, features a Last Generation [Letzte Generation] activist wearing a washed-out bucket hat, a turquoise neckerchief, and the group’s hallmark high-viz orange vest. The activist sits on the street opposite a Porsche. A policeman is at the scene. The headline reads ‘the new enemies of the state: On the inner life of a radical organisation’. 

‘A radical organisation’, to be frank, is the least fitting description for this activist group, which formed in Germany in the summer of 2021. Before the pandemic, Fridays for Future was the most visible part of the climate movement in the country. Today it is Last Generation. At around 900 members strong, the Last Generation uses a tactic of street blockades, normally by glueing themselves to the ground, in order to pressure politicians into addressing the climate crisis. In an apparent appeal to pragmatism, the movement has restricted itself to three official demands: introducing a speed limit on German highways, reintroducing a nationwide nine-Euro-Ticket for train travel, and instituting a ‘council of society’ [Gesellschaftsrat] where a few hundred citizens from diverse and representative parts of society would draw from the expertise of climate scientists, debate different mitigation proposals, and democratically approve a policy program that would be offered up to parliament. Given the visible acceleration of climate collapse this summer alone, to call the three demands timid and insufficient would be an understatement. But this only makes the hostility and repression faced by Last Generation that much more galling. 

Besides a few airfield blockades and the occasional spray-painting of private jets, the group has refused to radicalise its demands, change its strategy, or divert from its pledge of non-violence. Nonetheless, it has become a central object of reactionary media narratives and of obvious left critiques. The latter noter that the group lacks an anti-capitalist framing, underestimates a system of entrenched lobbies, and relies on a tactic that unduly burdens ordinary people travelling to work. The former, as Der Spiegel’s cover page suggests, portrays them as ‘left extremists’ or ‘environmental terrorists’, thus affirming libertarian ideas of freedom and authoritarian justifications for state repression. In this way, the popular publication, the German government, and the far right are increasingly converging on the same frame: climate activists as enemies of the state.

The scapegoating of activist movements plays a major role in the contemporary fossil nationalist political formation. In 2019, as Extinction Rebellion (XR) blockaded their way into the headlines, the credibility of outright climate denial began to wane, but the interests it served did not. The denial machine had instead arrived upon a new framing, with the ‘acceptance’ versus ‘denial’ binary replaced by an opposition between ‘alarmists’ and ‘realists’. To be a climate realist is to accept the science, but also to deduce that nothing drastic has to be done. To be an alarmist, to demand action, is to be hysterical, unreasonable and irrational. This framing fits comfortably with the exclusionary foundations of nationalism. 

Today, as activist groups sit-in or slow march through city centres, they provoke the fury of stalled motorists blasting their horns, revving their engines, and jolting their vehicles into the backs of the seated bodies. Often the anger spills out from the car, with an enraged driver dragging or shoving and sometimes punching the protestors. Passersby film the frenzy and the spectacle of violence circulates online, collecting millions upon millions of views. Comment sections become clogged with outrage and injustice, some reserved for the activists themselves but most for the police seen to be protecting the disrupters. Such resolve is only strengthened after officers are seen to be restraining an aggressive motorist. ‘How can they arrest that guy who is just trying to get on with his life and allow those idiots to ruin everything for the rest of us?’ On one level, then, this ‘eco-tyranny’ which disrupts the lives of ordinary people appears to be state-sanctioned, an association readily exploited by the far right.

Any illusion of an alliance between the state and climate activists is, of course, betrayed by the hardening repressive apparatus across advanced capitalist states. In the UK, a wave of bills have eradicated the right to assembly and extended powers to the police, particularly in their treatment of environmental protesters. Making way for the motorist, the ‘wilful obstruction of the highway’ is now a criminal offence; the same goes for ‘locking on’ to another person or object. At a summer party, Sunak thanked one fossil-affiliated think tank for their part in drafting the legislation. 

In the US, state repression and local legislation both sanction and incite motorised vigilantism against racial justice protesters. In 2017, the car-ramming murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville was prosecuted with life in prison. Automobile homicides are on the rise, however, and such verdicts are increasingly unlikely. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis passed an ‘anti-riot’ law that can be used to charge any public gathering of three or more people with a third-degree felony. A direct response to the ‘defund the police’ and Black Lives Matter street protests, the same law grants immunity to motorists who drive into and potentially injure or kill protesters – that is, if motorists claim protesters made them fear for their life. (The twisted logic parallels Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground Law’, which protects gun owners from prosecution for homicide if they claim an imminent danger of bodily harm or death, as was infamously done following the murder of Trayvon Martin). A similar approach was taken in Oklahoma, where Republican lawmakers passed a bill that criminalises obstructing the street and protects protester-killing drivers from facing criminal charges if they claim they feared for their lives or were attempting to escape. The bill was originally introduced after a pickup truck rammed a group of people in Tulsa, paralysing one from the waist down, during a May 2020 protest against the police killing of George Floyd. The Tulsa County District Attorney’s Office did not press charges, claiming instead that the protesters were the real instigators and the driver was the victim.

The German Verfassungsschutz – the legal body dedicated to horseshoe theory in the name of ‘Protection of the Constitution’ – has considered labelling Last Generation ‘criminal’ and ‘anti-constitutional’. Policing has already escalated from street arrests to anticipatory house searches of the group as well as surveillance of its emails, chats, and phone calls. Already subject to intense police brutality, the French climate organisation Les Soulèvement de la Terre was ordered to dissolve itself until the courts declared the move unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the French state is apprehending Italian climate activists on ‘anti-terror’ laws at the border. Under Spain’s centre-left coalition government, the public prosecutor declared Extinction Rebellion and Futuro Vegetal ‘terrorist’ groups. In the US, sixty-one members of the ‘Stop Cop City’ movement (also known as Defend the Atlanta Forest) have been indicted on RICO charges – a law normally used against criminal mafia organisations – to ensure the bulldozing of the forest so that the 90 million dollar militarised police training facility can proceed as planned.

In reality, by framing climate activists as alarmists and terrorists threatening the social cohesion of the nation, the underlying alliance that is being forged is that between the far- and centre-right. While the ‘inverted crisis’ suggests that a totalitarian state is preparing to clamp down on fossil-fuelled automobility and thus personal freedoms, in reality the state is increasingly crushing civil liberties in defence of fossil capital. The violence of the enraged motorist against the climate activist mirrors that of the state; in a way, the former is deputised by the latter. Climate activists thus face a pincer-like combination of hostility and repression both from above and below. 

If climate activists are confronted with this alliance, so are climate policies and technologies of mitigation, even the most tepid. On the eve of the expansion of the low-emission zone to greater London, a few hundred protestors arrived at Downing Street with ‘NO 2 ULEZ’ on their mock registration plates. The Blade Runners, for their part, marked the occasion by disabling scores of cameras in what some described as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, a reference to their hallmark secateurs that would seem entirely ignorant of the historical connotations. 

They were cheered on by far-right influencers, Tory MPs, and conservative media alike. A Google map of all of London’s ULEZ cameras circulated on far-right Telegram channels, the red icons indicating functional cameras, the black those that have been clipped or otherwise made dysfunctional. ‘South London’ – covered in black – ‘looking good’, wrote Tommy Robinson. ‘I’m happy for them to do it’ approved former Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith in reference to the Blade Runners’ feats. Numerous other Tory MPs were linked to Facebook groups similarly encouraging the Blade Runners’ vigilantism, online spaces where Sadiq Khan was commonly the target of anti-Muslim and racist slurs. Meanwhile, the demonstration outside Downing Street, despite the unremarkable turnout, was amplified on the front cover of the Telegraph and Daily Mail. Undeterred by polls showing that the majority of Londoners support ULEZ (even those living in Greater London), this mediatised feedback loop serves to legitimise, subsidise, and generally encourage the growth of more decidedly far-right grassroots movement. This movement, in turn, creates a window of opportunity for anti-ecological policies. 

At the end of a hot summer of protest and sabotage, the street-level movement was given a nod and a wink by senior Tory politicians at the annual Party conference. Transport Secretary Mark Harper used the stage to call time on fifteen-minute cities in which ‘councils can decide how often you go to the shops, ration who uses the roads and when, and police it all with CCTV’. Having just postponed the 2030 ban on petrol and diesel cars, Rishi Sunak now announced he would be ‘slamming the brakes on anti-car measures across England’. The government released its ‘plan for drivers’ with the objective of curtailing local authorities’ ability to reduce speed limits, penalise driving and parking offences, implement LTNs, or allow bus lanes to be used exclusively by buses. Another policy would restrict councils from using ‘so-called fifteen-minute cities to police people’s lives’. Sunak then used the final day of the conference to announce the cancellation of the northern chunk of the high-speed rail network, set to connect Birmingham to Manchester. But what to do with the freed-up funds? Of the £36 billion, nearly a quarter will be re-allocated for road maintenance and expansion. This is the ‘right decision to make life easier for hardworking families’, said the Prime Minister. ‘We’re on the side of drivers’, assured Harper. In a further mockery of the levelling-up agenda, it was announced that £250 million of the funds would be spent on filling in potholes on London’s roads.

It is hard to take seriously the idea that the Tories believe low-emissions zones or low-traffic schemes (which were readily implemented under their watch) represent early signs of a future dystopia of ‘climate lockdowns’. Using the car as a wedge, this is clearly an electoral strategy designed to polarise the urban/suburban divide. For the Blade Runners and street protestors, however, there is little doubt about an impending WEF and UN-led global surveillance state in which all activity and consumption is monitored and restricted according to emissions criteria. The political trajectory and ‘programme’ that such a worldview implies is clearly more radical than that of most Tories, and it bends towards something like an ultra-nationalist rebirth. Despite any remaining differences in ideology and interest, the alliance is effective for each. 

While fossil capital has typically exercised political power through more mundane tactics like lobbying, regulatory capture, and funding denialist think tanks and media, it is now finding new forms of leverage. Located not in the boardrooms but in the streets,we are witnessing a conscious effort to cultivate a vanguard, one willing and able to serve as the ‘tip of the spear’ – or secateurs, as it were – for the defence of the fossilised nation. 

 

 

Auto Apocalypse

Most accounts of fascism suggest that some kind of ‘crisis’ is required as its condition of possibility. As they deepen, the interlocking ecological and climate crises are ripe for the emergence of fascist politics. In a world of shortages and scarcity, displacement and demagoguery, one can easily imagine how ultra-nationalism might function to safeguard and stockpile, to separate the deserving from the disposable. But the climate crisis is, of course, also a crisis for fossil capital. This crisis is of a different nature. The transition away from fossil fuels towards renewables is existential for dominant lines of business. In light of this, what resources are at their disposal to mobilise in defence of continued accumulation? What narrative forms, prefigurative or imaginary, might make their crisis feel existential for others, too? One answer we have examined in this essay is the ‘inverted crisis’.

The strategy of inversion can be spotted just about everywhere. In Germany, for instance, Naomi Seibt, sponsored by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Heartland Institute, styled herself as the ‘Anti-Greta’, while anti-fascist and pro-refugee slogans are co-opted to defend the automobile: ‘Kein SUV ist illegal’, no SUV is illegal, reads one AfD poster. In the UK, leading the anti-ULEZ march on Downing Street was a coffin, an appropriation of a symbol commonly used by XR to signify a funeral for the planet. Just as some elements of the climate movement have recently begun to radicalise their tactics in the direction of sabotage – most evident recently with Les Soulèvement de la Terre in France – so too has the anti-climate vanguard turned to vandalism, targeting not fossil technologies but the almost pathetically inadequate tools of actually-existing energy transition, like bollards and cameras. In Greece, as massive fires blazed for weeks, the far right put an inverted twist on ‘anthropogenic’ climate change by claiming that migrants were the real culprits behind the fire. Adopted by media and politicians alike, the conspiracy spread faster than the flames, all while far-right activists ‘arrested’ migrants, forced them into car trailers and drove them back to the border. While the material crisis and its causes are denied and downplayed, its real effects and symptoms are fed back into the far right’s conspiracy architecture: all these fires and floods must be the fault of the Other. 

Michelle Stirling, the Friends of Science spokesperson, provides some insight into just how intentional many such uses of inversion are. She was asked how to combat fifteen-minute cities and the climate ‘zealots’ behind them who say things like, ‘it’s an existential crisis, [so] how can you talk about the economy at a time like this’? Her response to these hysterical types: ‘it becomes a real street theatre thing, and you have to be willing to confront that and copy what they do, even. I mean, I went down to City Hall in 2020, I think it was, with a little sign in Swedish. And I did a video on the steps … calling for “Sundays for Climate Reason”. Just like Greta … So you know, you have to be willing to take their memes and flip them on them’. 

On the surface, all of this might appear as a form of trolling: acts of transgression that might play well algorithmically, but have minimal effect in the ‘real world’. Such inversions should be taken seriously, however, as a strategy to reclaim the climate narrative from the left. The forces of the right, with strength of commitment and resources to match, self-consciously invert the crisis by abusing slogans, diluting principles, and breaking orthodoxies. In the years to come, we must expect the strategy of inversion to play out in new arenas, with memes and tropes adapted and redeployed for the issue of the day, be it combustion engines, gas stoves, short-haul flights or meat diets.

In the context of ecological crisis and an increasingly mainstream far right, the narrative (along with reality itself) is ‘flipped’, to use Stirling’s words, and climate action comes to be seen as the source of creeping authoritarianism. Or as Jordan Peterson puts it in another poem: 

DIE you NetZero tyrants 

Leave us alone 

Leave our cars alone 

Leave our flights alone 

Leave our heating and fires alone 

… Stop forbidding the roads 

Back the hell off 

Or reap the whirlwind 

Go panic about the apocalypse by yourself 

In the dark.

Blurring the lines between text and subtext, such incitements may read as flippant, but they nonetheless represent a serious threat, particularly given the cult of violence that orbits the car. By existentialising the ‘threat’ of climate action – these are ‘tyrants’ who want to ‘enslave’ you – the crisis is inverted, and a new kind of vanguard is cultivated, one capable of and willing to form fossil capital’s ‘whirlwind’.

In ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Stuart Hall showed how the crisis of Keynesian social democracy was exploited by Thatcher and her allies to build a new ideological consensus around the neoliberal project. Thatcherism, he wrote some forty-five years ago, is in a struggle with other forces to construct a new hegemony by proposing a radical break, which nonetheless ‘takes the elements which are already constructed into place, dismantles them, reconstitutes them into a new logic, and articulates the space in a new way, polarising it to the right’. To achieve this ‘ideological transformation’, Thacherism worked on the ground of ‘already constituted social practices and lived ideologies’, thereby articulating a new common sense. Today, amidst the deepening crisis for fossil capital, the right seeks to defend the status quo, a truly radical act in the face of the realities of climate change. This time it is dismantling and recombining – or, as we have shown, inverting – the elements of a nascent green transition. The inversion pivots on the car as an already constituted social practice organising the material and psychic investments of a world in crisis.

As in Hall’s time, ‘the “swing to the right” is not a reflection of the crisis: it is itself a response to the crisis’. Thus the tendency we witness in this conjuncture for capitalist states of various political stripes to manage the crisis in increasingly authoritarian ways. By criminalising climate activists, they identify the same ‘enemy of the state’. By expanding oil exploration or reinforcing the automobile industry, they defend the same system of fossil capital against an energy transition that may proceed ‘too quickly’, which is to say, at the expense of the ruling classes. By promulgating discourses that scapegoat migrants, governing parties increasingly operate on the discursive terrain previously occupied by those to their right. By managing surplus populations displaced by climate and other disasters, governments prioritise the regulation of mobility at the border over emissions into the atmosphere. For the capitalist state, after all, it is easier to discipline people than to discipline capital. 

In this context, the inverted crisis is an imagined response to real crises which it cannot redress but which can be instrumentalised by driving politics to the right. The discourse around the ‘war on the car’ constructs a dystopian image of a world without privately-owned automobiles. We are not to consider the merits of fewer cars, more public transport, walking, and cycling; instead, we are to see such initiatives as the machinations of a global totalitarian surveillance state. This hallucinatory dystopia forecloses the cultivation of desires for a world other than it already is. The inverted crisis is thus parasitical on the real crisis towards which the climate movement is oriented; it feeds on it, while eating away at the collective capacity for mitigation. It is itself a form of climate obstruction, undercutting any attempt made to address the crisis. 

Soon, as the material crisis spirals, more dramatic mitigation and adaptation techniques will be demanded. A necessary and escalating climate movement will only provide ever more grist for the far right’s conspiracy mill and become a preferred target for its vigilantism. The only way out of such a spiral, of course, is to force fossil capital from the driver’s seat.

 

 

The Zetkin Collective is an ecosocialist group of scholars and activists working primarily on the political ecologies of the far right. The authors of this piece are William Callison, George Edwards, Jacob McLean and Tatjana Söding.