Canada expects to announce this week that all new cars will have to be zero emissions by 2035, a senior government source said, as Ottawa is set to unveil new regulations in the latest example of countries around the world pushing for electrification.
Wow, you’ve given me a lot to think about, and I appreciate you sharing your insights.
I agree with your comments about the political Right, and that tribalism is generally stronger than critical thinking in most people (and - alarmingly - this trend appears to be increasing).
It isn’t increasing per se, it’s just being more ruthlessly exploited.
We’ve come out of a weird 50-70 period in history where the normal political consensus was…not normal…and all sides of the political quadrangle have been trying to figure out where they stand, economically and politically. There’s actually been a lot more favour-trading and ideological drift as liberals, conservatives, anarchists and authoritarians all tried to figure out where they were on the map. What we’ve seen since the fall of the USSR and the neoliberal failure to address the 2008 financial crisis is just a kind of regression to the mean, where our “tribes” felt more secure staking out territory and establishing political shibboleths.
But yeah, the Right has been particularly unpleasant about it. In their defense, this is because the early-90s “triangulation” movement on the Left kind of cut the Right off at the knees–you could be a big-business douchebag and not care about what people smoked or slept with–and forced the powerbrokers on the Right, if they wanted to survive, to stake out illiberalism and nationalism as their safe space.