If there is a commodity into which the marketcrafting transition strategy crystallizes—and there is—it’s the electric vehicle. While the IRA’s tax credits for energy generation are agnostic, the extensive support for EVs is specific. Despite creating all sorts of international problems, cars are the crux of the American climate strategy. On the surface it makes sense: Internal combustion engines are the cause of the lion’s share of direct American household fossil fuel consumption, especially as the grid decarbonizes. But as I’ve said, it’s indirect consumption of fossil fuels—through agricultural products, plastics, and basically everything we consume, period—that drives emissions. It’s easier to change the cars than it is to change where people are going. If the marketcraft strategy is a compromise between a reasonable democratic approach to the climate crisis and the demands of capital, how much reason do we have to sacrifice to the status quo? And how can we be sure it’s not too much? Here’s one indicator I think we can use: The number of cars should go down, not up.

A reasonable society would not have nearly a car for every person. That America does is a sign that we live in an unreasonable society. We as a public subsidize cars in innumerable ways, including by ceding much of public space to their coming, going, and parking.ii Much as they did with cigarettes, researchers are continually discovering new ways that cars are bad for society: As I write, there is new attention on toxic pollution from tires, pollution that has turned rainwater runoff deadly for spawning coho salmon on the West Coast.68 And then there’s the climate crisis: In 2023, a team of physicists from Imperial College London concluded, in admirably plain language: “[A]s well as implementation of emission-reducing changes in vehicle design, a rapid and large-scale reduction in car use is necessary to meet stringent carbon budgets and avoid high energy demand.”69 Building a lot more cars, it suffices to say, will not help with that.