Why don’t we blame car companies for climate change?
Big Oil is constantly vilified, while car companies often get a free pass.
The United States has a car problem.
U.S. emissions jumped 6.2% last year compared to 2020, and the transportation sector accounted for the steepest rise, with a 10% jump in 2021. That change is largely due to an increase in cars and trucks on the road as the country reopened.
This isn’t new. The transportation sector regularly accounts for the largest slice of emissions, especially as electricity has switched from coal to less emitting sources like natural gas in recent years.
But despite their clear role in driving the climate crisis, car companies have largely avoided the same vilification of similar high-emitting industries like oil and even animal agriculture. Why is that?
It’s not because cars are more prevalent than oil or meat. Sure, nine in 10 households have a car, but nearly every American is plugged into a grid that is powered by fossil fuels. And despite the rise of meatless meat, at least 98% Americans still eat animal products.
Car companies are happy to continue fueling the climate problem, especially if they can fly under the radar. For decades, lobbyists defended the rise of the internal combustion automobile, pushing sprawling highways and resisting any change along the way. Because of that, transportation emissions have largely remained stagnant over the last 30 years.
To deflect blame, the industry has employed many of the same tactics of misdirection and greenwashing as high-emitting industries repeatedly dragged through the mud.
The recent shift to electric vehicles doesn’t erase that: Electric vehicles still only make up around 2% of the American car market. Despite the transition to electric being long overdue, car companies are celebrated when they make even the slightest shift to electric vehicles:
For example, General Motors is applauded when they include Will Ferrel in a Super Bowl commercial that’s main message is… Norway’s better at driving zero-emission vehicles than we are? Who do you think let that happen?
And industry giants like Ford dominate the news cycle when they roll out the F-150 Lightning, an all-electric pickup, without pausing to think if we need pickups in the first place. A 2019 survey, for example, shows that 75% of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (read: never).
This transition to electric cars isn't an altruistic move by car companies. If it was, companies would have made them decades ago, when everyone realized it made little sense to burn oil to power one-ton machines to move one person.
Instead, these recent moves are driven by profit and regulation.
The all-electric vehicle company Tesla, despite being a fraction of the size of big car companies, is now valued at over $1 trillion. And last year, Tesla delivered almost 1 million cars, nearly doubling its previous year’s numbers.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is going all-in on electric vehicles, calling for half of new passenger cars and trucks to be electric vehicles by 2030.
To be clear, electrifying cars is only necessary because for decades, the country — from the federal government to city planners — prioritized individual car ownership over public transit. Living in a country of cars, we now have little choice but to accept the reality of our situation.
But the climate crisis isn’t blameless. And after decades of polluting, neither are car companies.