The Guardian Invents A New Term For ‘Climate Deniers’
Aside from the Americans and Japanese, few countries have done more to make automobiles reliable, cheap, and fun than the United Kingdom
They gave us arguably the most fun economy car of all time, the original Mini. They gave us the most beautiful car ever made, the Jaguar E-Type. The Beatles gave us arguably the best non-Beach Boys road song of all time, “Drive My Car”.
But after giving so much to the automobile, the political left in the UK is turning further against it.
And while activists throwing paint on Stonehenge and soup on Van Goghs in London museums to protest oil use is one kind of ridiculousness, they can be dismissed as the fringes.
The U.K. Guardian, I wish, could be dismissed thusly — but the lefty rag is one of the most-read publications in the English-speaking world, sadly.
And it’s really trying to make the phrase “petro-masculinity” happen.
For the second time this year, the outlet has run a piece about this supposed phenomenon, this time by the annoying alarmist George Monbiot, who was given space for an opinion piece last Thursday:
“Driving that’s too fast, too dangerous and utterly lawless: why do we tolerate this petro-masculinity?”
Beats me. What’s “petro-masculinity?” Well, per Monbiot, it’s “SUVs and pickup trucks driven without care or conscience” and “the MAGAfication of transport.”
The term, explained in the Guardian’s first “petro-masculinity” think piece in April for Earth Day, was invented by political science academic Cara Daggett.
It, Andrew Boyd wrote in that slice of fatuousness, “describes a pernicious fusion between fossil fuel use, climate change denial, and defense of authoritarian white patriarchal masculinity.”
From Boyd:
For most people, petro-masculinity dramatically erupted into public view during the 2022 Twitter/X showdown between manosphere bully Andrew Tate and Greta Thunberg.
“Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” Tate tweeted at Greta, along with a photo of him pumping gas into one of them.
Picking up on the sexually boastful undertones of those “enormous emissions”, Greta slyly clapped back: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalld***en****@******fe.com.”
Now, I’m personally of the opinion that in a showdown between Greta Thunberg and Andrew Tate, the only real possible winner would be everybody, and only if they could shut up about everything else but each other and not bother all of us for the rest of their lives.
But I digress. We go back to the Monbiot piece, where he describes all kinds of “petro-masculinity,” including street racing, speeding, and modifying your car.
Or truck, as the case may be:
Now I live in Devon, where there’s a different culture of antisocial driving. Here it’s mostly middle-aged men in “lifted” pickup trucks, which have been modified to be as loud and smoky as possible. Two local SUVs have been refitted to “roll coal” from twin exhaust towers mounted behind the cab, releasing a dense black cloud of soot when the driver hits the “smoke switch”.
Adapting your truck for this purpose means buying a “delete kit” to bypass the vehicle’s emissions control system, retuning the engine and fitting bigger injectors. The practice emerged in the US, both as an anti-environmental protest and as a form of amusement. It is largely deployed against cyclists, pedestrians and electric vehicles. I’ve seen these two trucks doing it, blinding the drivers behind and choking everyone around. Of course it’s illegal. But it doesn’t seem to be a priority for the police in my area.
Yeah, I’d say knife crime and rape gangs are probably a bigger issue for the British police than lifted trucks which “roll coal” — but I’m not a Guardian columnist, which means I’ve heard of these things.
He also lamented the rise of the SUV, which represents over half of new vehicle sales in the United Kingdom:
And what are they for? On narrow country lanes round here, tourists in these “off-road” vehicles won’t back up if it means touching a hedge, in case the high-gloss finish on their Wankpanzer Childkiller SUV gets scratched.
In one of the poshest parts of London, the Chelsea Truck Company advertises “iconic urban 4x4s”. “Iconic” appears to mean huge. But what the hell is an “urban 4×4”? And why is it legal?
We have to wonder what a ‘Wankpanzer Childkiller SUV‘ is.
What he doesn’t mention, of course, is that the popularity of the SUV is in large part due to do-gooders who would read the Guardian, at least in the United States; when fuel efficiency regulations were passed in the 1970s, there was a carve-out for vehicles that were supposed to be used for real off-roading and farm work.
These SUVs were classified as light trucks — and by the 1990s, as Autoblog noted in a June article, automakers realized they needed to invest less money into engineering a vehicle that qualified as a light truck, even when it was actually just a glorified station wagon where you sat up real high.
Thanks, meddlesome bureaucrats and clueless environmentalists!
But yeah, petro-masculinity, man. What’re you going to do? That’s why they get these “urban 4x4s.” It’s all testosterone. And how do you get through this ‘MAGAfication’ of petroleum?
To Boyd, the other Guardian opinion writer who used this preposterous term, the antidote is clear: “eco-masculinity.”
Through media literacy, social critique, hand-to-hand ideological battles on the internet, and clever culture-jamming and lampooning, climate and other activists are working to decode petro-masculinity. They’re pointing out how ridiculous and “constructed” and self-defeating petro-masculinity is for men, their communities, and the planet itself, and hoping, over time, this will help unravel the thick association between fossil fuels and aggrieved masculine identity. Thunberg’s take down of Andrew Tate is one example; this article, I suppose, is another.
So men, this Earth Day, let’s commit to untangling ourselves from petro-masculinity, and stepping in to our eco-masculinity. Let’s mobilize our ingenuity and gather our courage – and feel our grief, if we need to – so we can remember how much we actually care about this beautiful, miraculous planet we all live on together. And then let’s step up to protect it. After all, what’s more “protector masculinity” than protecting the Earth?
Literally anything. Rolling coal. Listening to Pink Floyd or Yes. Watching a Pete Buttigieg media briefing. Playing gridiron Football. Almost everything, literally.
The term is ridiculous on many levels, the first being the desperate attempt to make the awkward neologism happen, as if it were just a natural outgrowth of the English language.
And what is “petro-masculinity?” As much as Boyd tried to define it through Daggett, Monbiot’s Thursday column is the perfect representation of what they’re trying to make it: any kind of driving that’s remotely fun.
No, you shouldn’t be street-racing — but to this clod, if you’re not tootling to work below the speed limit in an underpowered, overpriced, cramped EV, you’re some kind of petro-masculine jerk.
You may say this is a minor quibble, a quirk in the media void that doesn’t merit attention. But no, make no mistake: unless this is called out for how silly it is, the scourge will spread, and [more and more liberal outlets will use the neologism].
The Guardian is always the canary in the coal mine when it comes to woke piffle, and that canary is deader than Monty Python’s parrot right now.
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