And yet the number of global private flights was at an all-time high in 2022—5.4 million.26 Of these, an 85 percent supermajority are private flights within the United States, jaunts of climate-destroying, carbon-intensive convenience taken by the American 1 percent, making up around one-sixth of total domestic air travel.27 But even if the numbers weren’t dramatic, and even if air travel weren’t a stubbornly unelectrifiable source of fossil fuel consumption, I think there’d be something worthwhile about challenging private jet usage just on principle. A marketcrafting strategy has to maintain credibility with the public, and that means the state has to show itself willing and able to protect public interests from its partners in the capitalist class. Private jet owners are a perfect target.

In the English language, few critics have tackled this issue as well as Max Ajl, whose 2021 book, A People’s Green New Deal, refuses to shy away from the global nature of the questions at hand. “Much of left-liberal climate talk is based on administering rather than eliminating capitalism,” he writes, accurately, “and as a result is built on a seldom acknowledged foundation of assumptions regarding the global distribution of wealth and consumption, and the institutions with which it is tied, in terms of why emissions are produced and their consequences, which are intimately related to which lives matter and which lives do not.”51 What good is a dense electric vehicle charging network in Poughkeepsie to Grigris, the Chadian dancer turned petrol smuggler? Freezing the consumption of everyone in the world at current levels preserves global inequality, leaving some people cruising in EVs and some people burning wood as cooking fuel.

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.

The larger financial markets aren’t as yet any better focused than the VCs are. A meta-analysis from the Climate Policy Initiative found that, while estimates for needed annual climate-related investment in global agrifood systems range from $212 billion to $1.267 trillion, they tracked the actual investment at only $28.5 billion.73 The energy transition has lured asset managers deeper into the climate-related energy, transportation, and water sectors, where private-equity deals jumped from around $60 billion in 2020 to nearly $150 billion in 2022.74 But that doesn’t necessarily bode well: As Brett Christophers points out in his book Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, real asset funds would rather buy stuff that already exists, wrench more money out of it, and sell it on. They much prefer it to building new infrastructure, which is the plan in less than 20 percent of these investments.75 “What the evidence both before our eyes and in fund performance data shows,” he writes, “is that actually holding the asset—let alone stewarding it—is really not what the business is about.”76 For financial actors, “exposing” themselves to the green transition’s upside is not the same thing as building and maintaining it.iii A number of electric car manufacturers, however, have raised significant capital.

Field’s signature example is the US synthetic rubber program. Though historians traditionally consider the program to have been an industrial miracle, he finds a series of preventable errors. First, cheap rubber imports from Southeast Asia made US firms unwilling to hold significant reserve stocks—What if the price goes down?!—or invest in planting large amounts of guayule, a shrub indigenous to the American Southwest from which it was proposed to extract significant amounts of rubber.iv This left the United States so underprepared when Japanese advances cut off rubber supplies that the country was forced to restrict automobile travel not for lack of gas but for fear of running out of tires. Industry dragged its feet, refusing to invest in synthetic capacity, since it assumed the cheap natural rubber would start flowing again after hostilities concluded—an attitude that ignored the fact that the United States could lose the war. When the synthetic program did get up and running with government money, the oil industry insisted on using petroleum (rather than easily produced alcohol) as a feedstock, unnecessarily slowing output at a crucial time. Field concludes that the wait for synthetic rubber delayed the American invasion of France on D-Day by a year.77 “The decision to structure the program around an almost exclusive emphasis on petroleum as a feedstock,” he writes, “worked at cross-purposes with the immediate objective of winning (or at least not losing) the war.”78 We can imagine a future historian saying something similar about today, trying to answer the perplexing question of why, at a historical turning point for the planet, humanity spent such a large percentage of its collective resources on electrifying Americans’ cars: The decision to structure the transition program around electric vehicles worked at cross-purposes with the immediate objective of cooling (or at least not heating) the world.