As the impacts of climate change become ever more apparent capitalism seeks to rebrand itself as green. We are told that if we calculate our personal co2 footprint, buy the right (expensive) products, and do our part to recycle we can save the planet. This is categorically false. There is no way to consume our way out of this crisis. Nothing less than a fundamental shift away from the endless growth that capitalism requires can stop the glaciers from melting, the forests from burning, and the displacement of humans and animals from their habitats.
The shift to electric vehicles that is being promoted by governments across Europe and the car companies that these states subsidize is part of this thinly veiled attempt to recuperate the climate catastrophe called capitalism. There is nothing sustainable about an electric car. Every step in the global supply chain that ships an electric vehicle made in the United States to our doorstep in Amsterdam involves the exploitation of workers and the destruction of the planet. The mining of minerals for the battery alone is an incredibly destructive process. Lithium extracted in Chile contaminates local water sources, cobalt mined in the Congo involves child labor, and nickel dug out in Indonesia leaches heavy metals into the ocean. Not to mention the steel, titanium, aluminum, and plastic needed for the body of the car. These raw materials are in short supply and the scramble by states and corporations to secure access is fueling a new wave of colonialism across the global south.
Once our car has been shipped half way across the world we can sit in traffic on our way to work with a clean conscience knowing that there is no co2 that is being pumped out of our exhaust pipe. Except that the energy to power the electric charging stations has to come from somewhere and in the Netherlands as in almost every other country in the world more than half of this energy still comes from fossil fuels. The growing renewable energy sector faces the same polluting problems as the manufacture of an electric vehicle: the batteries needed to store energy are anything but clean and the transport and manufacture of energy infrastructure is incredibly resource intensive. By switching to supposedly renewable alternatives we are simply outsourcing the environmental devastation required to maintain our ever growing energy supply to poorer parts of the world.
That’s why last night we sabotaged a dozen electric charging stations around Amsterdam by filling their charging ports with construction foam. These stations are owned by TotalEnergies, one of the seven super major oil companies. No amount of greenwashing can clean a company that’s been polluting the earth for a hundred years.
Sabotage capitalist normality.
