EV's and Politics

Some of the most prominent EV vloggers on YouTube say repeatedly that they want to avoid political statements, that their videos about EV's are unpolitical. One, who calls himself Electric Vehicle Man, which is also the name of his excellent YouTube channel, which has lots of EV road tests and lots of debunking of negative misconceptions about EV's, also says that he is sometimes accused of being an eco warrior, an accusation which he says is inaccurate.

 

Eco warrior? I was unfamiliar with the term before hearing Electric Vehicle Man repeatedly insist that he is not one. I googled what is an eco warrior, and the first definition I saw was "a person actively involved in preventing damage to the environment." Which Electric Vehicle Man certainly is. In fact, when he says I'm not an eco warrior, he usually goes on to say, Yes, I promote electric vehicles, and I choose electricity from my utility which comes from wind and solar, and I do other things to help the environment. So apparently different people define the term differently. Maybe Electric Vehicle Man thinks that you need to actually chain yourself to a tree, or live in a tree for a month or longer, or be very strictly vegan, or even all three, or even more, in order to be accurately called an eco warrior. Maybe he has already precisely defined what he understands the term to mean and why it doesn't apply to him in his opinion. One of the good things about his You Tube channel is the large amount of precise and detailed information he provides.

Electric Vehicle Man and I definitely define the term "politics" differently. As I said, many people who make a living -- or in some cases just a supplementary second income -- promoting electric vehicles on You Tube insist that their advocacy of EV's has nothing to do with politics. How can they say that? They're constantly mentioning how the prices of EV's include government rebates worth thousands of dollars or Euros or British pounds per vehicle, rebates which are much larger in certain places than others. And they know that politicians determine the size of those rebates, and that different political parties want the rebates to get get bigger or smaller. They constantly report on factories being built which will manufacture EV's, and the involvement of governments in making the construction of these factories easier or more difficult.

Electric Vehicle Man frequently mentions that using public transportation is even better for the environment than driving an EV, and that where he lives, in his part of Yorkshire in the UK, there is very little public transportation, and also very little public charging infrastructure for EV's. Oh, and he also mentioned, when he drove an EV up through Scotland for his video channel, that Scotland not only has a lot of public EV charging infrastructure, but also THAT EV CHARGING IS FREE FOR EVERYONE IN SCOTLAND. (Which is almost 100% true: sometimes there's a small parking fee for those Scottish chargers, sometimes not. Other than that -- FREE!!!)

I tend to think that everything is political. But leaving aside this opinion of mine for the moment, it seems particularly obvious to me that the poor state of public transportation in Yorkshire, about which Electric Vehicle Man complains, is a political issue. They even put the word "public" in public transportation to make it even easier to see how it's political. Does Electric Vehicle Man really not understand that if he and his neighbors there in his part of Yorkshire became more involved in political parties and were more active in promoting and criticizing the agendas of political parties, one benefit of that is that they might get much better public transportation? Among many, many other very good things?

Does Electric Vehicle Man really not grasp that? Really? REALLY???

Some say that if you don't at least vote, you have no right to complain about anything the state does. I wouldn't go quite that far, but I do think it's self-contradictory to complain about government while not doing a thing to participate in it. And strange and quite sad.

By the way, I also think it's rather cheesy of Electric Vehicle Man to call himself Electric Vehicle Man while he not only currently owns an ICE vehicle in addition to an EV, but also intends to buy other ICE vehicles in the future. (Perhaps in large part because of the public transportation situation in his area about which he's always complaining, without seeming to DO much about it?) I think he's doing a lot of good by promoting EV's, but I think there are others who deserve that superhero title a lot more than he does, because they're a lot more committed to the cause. For example, the guy who hosts the YouTube vlog News Coulomb. It seems very clear to me that no-one is perfect, but calling yourself Electric Vehicle Man does definitely imply a level of purity. Calling yourself that and not only owning ICE vehicles, but intending to own more ICE vehicles in the future, is misleading at the very best.

Perhaps complaining about such things makes me an eco warrior in Electric Vehicle Man's eyes. And maybe that means that I and everyone like me is completely unbearable to him. Or perhaps it just means that a few things I do annoy him somewhat, without him thinking I'm a horrible person in general. Which would make the two of us about even.