Owning an all-electric Tesla vehicle was once the ultimate status symbol for the environmentally conscious climate crusaders who are now trading their protests for outright vandalism and destruction. Haters of Donald Trump and Elon Musk are intentionally sabotaging their own cause by spray-painting, keying, and burning electric vehicles, dealerships, and charging stations around the country. While lecturing about climate change, they are burning the Tesla EVs that were the face of the green energy future that was supposed to save the world from global warming.
Anyone with the money to do so could choose to drive a Tesla. For many who have described climate change as “the existential threat” of our time, electric cars offered more than a stylish and high-functioning car. They offered the driver a chance to signal to everyone on the road that they cared about the environment and were willing to invest a considerable amount of money to display their climate credentials.
Irony lies in the fact that those dollar amounts would have been even greater had not Barack Obama and Joe Biden insisted that the US government chip in $8,000 or so per vehicle in an effort to achieve their goal of displacing gasoline vehicles with electric vehicles. Another irony — those vehicles are powered by coal-fired power stations.
A 2023 Gallup poll found that 78% of Democrats prioritized the environment over the economy, promoting electric vehicles as a main component of their pro-environment policies, regardless of the cost.
No one has done more for the electric vehicle market than Elon Musk. Just five years ago, Tesla made up 80% of the US market. And the Biden administration doubled down on tax credits for electric vehicles, as well as government mandates to force even more production of EVs. The reality is that if Elon Musk cared only about profit and his business prospects, he would have supported President Biden’s reelection. And if Joe Biden’s administration had been truly serious about tackling fraud and waste within the US government, as well as our serious national debt, Elon Musk would likely have been happy to work with them to help accomplish this if asked to do so.
But it wasn’t Joe Biden who asked him, it was Donald Trump. As a consequence, even though just a year ago Elon Musk was deemed a hero for creating the most advanced vehicles that do not rely on fossil fuels, today he is viewed as an enemy of the state and is receiving death threats from the very people who adored him last year.
One could easily argue that protests against Tesla reveal the true priorities of many environmental groups and advocates, who are prioritizing partisan politics over genuine environmental concerns. Irrational hostility toward individuals who do not conform to their political views appears to “trump” (pun intended) concern over the environment.
There are plenty of examples of environmental hypocrisy such as the Sierra Club’s campaign against Tesla’s battery factory in Nevada. Although they claim that the factory is harming the local environment, similar factories owned by other companies have not faced the same level of scrutiny from the Sierra Club.
Internationally, the government of the United Kingdom is moving ahead with plans to bulldoze 4,000 acres of pristine countryside to install a solar panel farm. (A healthy 4,000-acre woodland removes about 18,000 metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere per year). The government of Scotland recently embarked on a deforestation campaign, destroying over 16 million trees that absorb and utilize carbon dioxide to replace them with windfarms.
Closer to home, California Democrats are excited about plans to mine lithium from Death Valley National Park — home to at least 26 native species, many critically endangered — as part of the state’s electric vehicle mandate. And during his final week in office, Joe Biden pushed through billions of dollars in loans to mining companies seeking to operate in California and Nevada.
But what is happening in Belem, Brazil may just top all of them for sheer destructive audacity and hypocrisy. Tens of thousands of acres of the legendary and irreplaceable Amazon Rainforest are being cut down to allow a new highway to be built in preparation for the November globalist “Conference of the Parties” (COP30) climate summit.
We are talking about the Amazon Rain Forest, which is hailed to be the world’s most biodiverse region, with an estimated 400 billion individual trees from over 16,000 species, 40,000 plant species, 3,000 freshwater fish species, 1,300 bird species, 430 mammals, and over 2.5 million insect species. The Amazon, home to ten percent of the known species on Earth, many of which are found nowhere else.
All this to give the climate activists a more comfortable ride to lecture the rest of us about deforestation, biodiversity loss and carbon emissions from within the heart of the Amazon jungle.
This type of destructive behavior contradicts everything the most vocal climate activists, and most elected Democrats, claimed they wanted just months before Donald Trump took office in 2025. While they were promoting laws and rules and regulations and restrictions to support their climate change ideology and to give themselves and their party some purpose, their movement was less about fossil fuels and saving Mother Earth than power and control over the rest of us. Their hypocrisy is revealed by every match struck to inflame not just an automobile, but the misguided passion of their acolytes.
Terry McLaughlin, who lives in Nevada City, writes a twice monthly column for The Union. Write to her at terrymclaughlin2016@gmail.com.
