Clean Technology Should Be Fixing Bad Government, Not Funding It

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Like Donald Trump or hate him, one thing’s for sure: Elon Musk’s recent commitment to donate $45 million per month to a Trump Super PAC has stirred up a lot of controversy. Along with a full-throated endorsement after the attempted assassination, it’s pretty clear that Elon Musk is taking money earned running a clean technology enterprise to both fund and amplify people who are openly and rabidly hostile to things like EVs, solar, wind, and battery storage.

But this article isn’t going to scold Elon and tell him that he needs to instead support Joe Biden. While Biden has done a lot of good for clean technology (something we’ve repeatedly covered here), readers on all sides of the political landscape aren’t very impressed with the Democratic Party, either. Specifically to clean technologies, things like loosening emissions regulations to allow more plug-in hybrids are a good example.

Instead, I want to explore the problem on a deeper level and then suggest some ways that clean technology can contribute to fixing the problem instead of feeding it.

The Problem The Average Person Sees

Most people who don’t live in the MAGA or progressive echo chamber are thoroughly disgusted with both parties right now. Looking only at current events, we’ve got two old men hogging the chance to run for an office that younger people would do a better job running. Endless political bickering leaves all kinds of societal problems unsolved because nobody’s willing to compromise on anything. Both sides cast the other side (and its voters) as a threat to the future of the country, with nasty rhetoric leading all too often to hatred, violence, and the increasing threat of civil war, which is disgusting because most of us know that people from the other party are good people. They’re our friends, family, and neighbors, after all!

To really see what’s behind all this, we have to zoom out a little more. Globally and over longer time periods, we’re seeing a lot of stagnation in political thought. The same old fights between traditionalism and new things, capitalism vs communism, oligarchy vs democracy, religion vs secularism, and other dualities keep playing over and over like a song we’re sick of hearing. In decades and sometimes centuries, we aren’t seeing any new ideas come along and supplant these old competitions. Despite all of the technological progress we’ve made, where’s still fighting old fights from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries!

We’re stuck in these old paradigms so deeply that when someone like Elon Musk gets sick of one party, he sees no alternative but to switch sides and throw his support behind the other because he wants something from them. As imaginative and innovative as even Elon Musk is, even he couldn’t come up with a fresh idea or a new way forward in the political realm. So, we’re stuck with clean technology funding people who want to set it back.

The Politics of Fear & Apathy

Breaking entrenched ways of doing things isn’t easy. While the average person is disgusted with the U.S. government and most other global governments, we fear trying to take off-ramps because the other guy might catch up to us if our side slows down even a little on the road to doom. It has gotten so bad that most politicians don’t even spend time creating awesome images of the future to inspire voters, as they’re too busy spreading fear of the other guy. And voters eat it up, because they don’t like their guy, but fear the other one enough that they go ahead and vote for the evil of two lessers every time.

Third parties have tried to break this Catch-22, but haven’t had any luck. Ross Perot, the Libertarians, the Greens, the Forward Party, the new Liberal Party in the United States, and many more people just can’t convince enough voters that they’re anything but a spoiler. The existing political and economic structures would need to be broken up before any alternatives can have even a snowball’s chance in hell.

The even bigger issue is that most of us are simply too busy trying to stay afloat to get engage seriously in fixing these problems. Unless you’re one of people who are paid to engage with politics, government, and such, the challenges of paying for housing, groceries, utilities, and everything else takes up too much of your time. Other life obligations take up most of the rest, making it tough to even go vote once or twice every other year.

It’s not apathy as much as too many demands on our lives.

The Rent-Seekers That Keep This Problem Entrenched

One of the ways the whole broken and corrupt system keeps us from tossing it out is by having its nasty tentacles in everything. Things that should have never been political, like what religion one practices (if any), who you start a family with, how your kids are raised, what cars you drive, and even what brands of coffee you buy have all been put in the D or R box these days.

Once politics is involved in yet another important area of your life, they now have access to your fear button, and they push it to get your vote or your money (or both) over and over and over.

The only way to expel politics from literally everything is to take the economic power out of the hands of the people who benefit from shoving politics where it doesn’t belong. Oil companies are a big one, but now we’re seeing companies like GM and Starbucks and wealthy people like Elon Musk put their names into the fray because they think doing so will lead to rewards, or at the minimum avoid retribution when somebody like Donald Trump gets into office. The only way to stop this rent-seeking behavior is to stop paying the rent.

But nobody wants to be homeless, go without groceries, or go without electricity and water service. Nobody wants to walk to work or go without a vital shot of caffeine to get through the day. Nobody wants to give up their income to stay afloat, even if that means giving up four decades of your life with no guarantee that you won’t die early or be too old and sick to enjoy retirement (assuming you ever even can retire).

Most of us are left with no choice but to be another cog in the murder machine, and let them use the fruits of our own labor to fund and perpetuate the system as the rent-seekers make more things political so that they can get more ill-gotten gain.

How Clean Technology Can Help Us Stop Grinding For These Bottom-Dwelling Parasites

Want to stop rent-seekers? Stop paying them rent! I’m not literally saying that you should stop paying for housing and go live on the street (something that happens to a LOT of people without much of a choice, to be fair). I’m talking about stopping the funding of entities that gain wealth in the economy without adding an equivalent or greater amount of value to it.

For example, if you do what many of us have done and buy an EV, you stop giving oil companies your money. This means the oil companies have less money they can use for lobbying, which in turn diminishes their ability to control the government and keep people dependent on oil while getting massive subsidies. If enough people do this, the cycle gets broken, and oil executives will have to go find honest work like the rest of us.

The same can often be true for your utilities. While many people living in rural areas get energy from electric co-ops, investor-owned utilities often take part of the money you give them to get even better sweetheart deals and subsidies from government. Cutting them out with solar power means less money for them to use against us all.

Even housing can be this way in many places now. Cartels of developers, HOAs, and corporate landlords bidding up the price of a home, controlling it, and getting special rules for their industry suck us dry to make a few people wealthy. While this is something most people feel powerless to boycott, it’s possible. Tiny homes, living in RVs pulled by an EV and powered by solar panels, or moving to a rural area with cheap land and living off-grid are all ways to stick it to the man on this one.

This idea might seem extreme, but there are many people doing this:

If you can get to the point where your cost of living is low, you’re free to cut back on contributing to the rent-seeking. Instead of selling yourself to the highest bidder (who probably didn’t bid very high), you can instead enjoy more of your time and be more choosy about what work you do and the ethics of the projects or companies you contribute your life to.

There are many names for this idea. Some call it Agorism or the counter-economy. In China, they call this 躺平, or “lying flat.” When practiced in groups, we might even call it a commune. American rent-seekers often call it “quiet quitting” and “coffee-badging,” among other things.

The main idea is that people are exiting the system that grinds them to death (sometimes literally) for the benefit of the rent-seeking parasites who inject politics into more and more things so that our fear can lead to them getting even more money and power. Cut off the funding, and we might get a chance to start pruning the tentacles back and regain control of our lives.

Whatever you want to call this idea (and this probably depends on what angle you’re looking at it from), it’s not something you have to take an all-or-nothing fundamentalist approach to. Even if you only cut down what you’re giving the rent-seekers by a few hundred bucks a month (with something like rooftop solar) while still otherwise keeping a normal lifestyle, you’re helping fix the problem by cutting back your contribution to it.

The Empire Strikes Back

Sadly, these technologies have been hijacked and centralized, and now sometimes serve the rotten system. While solar panels can liberate a family from its home electric bills or enable a van dweller to have air conditioning and internet, they can also be used by the rent-seekers to hoover up subsidies and keep you paying for greenwashed services.

Not all utility-scale renewables are like this, as some are run by ethical companies trying to make honest money providing a valuable service to the public. There are some that game the system, charge a premium for the power, and then use part of that premium for lobbying and other rent-seeking activities while not paying their people well.

In other words, it’s not about scale as much as it’s about ethics. Like any technology, it can be used for good or for varying amounts of evil.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba.