A Prelude To Something More Confrontational

September 8, 2022 7:42 AM

Six months after the launch of the movement, the Tyre Extinguishers deflated [Twitter] the tyres of SUVs in nine different countries. Marion Walker, TX spokesperson, said: “Six months in and 9,000 SUVs later, our movement is just beginning. Our strength is that anyone, anywhere can take part using our website. Politely asking for climate action, clean air and safer streets has failed. It’s time for action."

The Guardian goes out for a night on the town with NYC's branch of the T{i,y}re extinguishers.

Modern SUVs offer comfort with a veneer of adventure and ruggedness, even for urban dwellers – a few Toyota Sequoias, named after the towering trees found in a mountain range 3,000 miles from New York that are on fire because of the climate emergency, dotted the Upper East Side streets.

...

However, because SUVs combine the weight of an adult rhinoceros and the aerodynamics of a refrigerator, they require more energy to move around than smaller cars and therefore emit more pollution. As their popularity has soared, so has their impact upon the climate crisis.

...

As the acts of minor sabotage mounted last Wednesday, the activists had to invoke some self-imposed rules. No SUVs with disabled stickers were targeted, nor anything that appeared to be used for certain work. A vehicle was chosen for a deflation only for the group to notice it had a “surgeon” sign in the window – the lentil was swiftly removed before the tire fully deflated. Conversely, an SUV that was deemed “so huge, so gross” had two of its tires collapsed.

posted by threementholsandafuneral (274 comments total)

This is a terrible idea and will provoke a significant backlash. Don't mess with people's cars.
posted by interogative mood at 7:52 AM on September 8, 2022 [63 favorites]

I love it. Beautiful. Lentils are much cheaper than thermite grenades, too.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:01 AM on September 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

It doesn't damage the tires just deflates them. I'd be annoyed to wake up to my tires being flat but I can't really argue with the sentiment behind it and if you have a car you ought to have a mini compressor anyway as part of your emergency kit.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 8:02 AM on September 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

SWIM has considered this for the various bro dozers that assemble in street parking any time there is a protest in a City Nearby.
posted by shenkerism at 8:03 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Yeah, this seems like a really bad idea to me, one that will definitely not serve to change anyone's minds, and the emissions from the inevitable tow truck that will show up and idle in the street while they reinflate the tires will more than offset any time the SUV is unable to drive.
posted by whir at 8:03 AM on September 8, 2022 [42 favorites]

9,000 SUV tires deflated in six months, across nine countries. By contrast, over 188,500 bicycles are reported stolen every year in the US alone [source]. But as always, only damage to the toys of the wealthy invokes moral outrage.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:08 AM on September 8, 2022 [80 favorites]

And something like 750,000 motor vehicles are stolen every year in the US. What's your point? Are bike thefts then also OK since more of some other thing gets stolen?

This is a terrible idea. It will change zero minds, achieve nothing of value, and likely will lead to violence.
posted by a faithful sock at 8:10 AM on September 8, 2022 [27 favorites]

This "nerve" being touched is precisely the reason private motor vehicles should be banned from city streets entirely. Y'all think you can leave your heavy metal shit in public places, killing people indiscriminately, handwaving it off with a "sorry, mate, didn't see ya," ruining streetscapes, stinking up the air, blowing carbon like it's got no consequences...

MetaFilter does not do car commentary well, don't expect any different in this thread. I'm dubious about the post being even worthwhile considering it's just going to provoke a whole lot of heat. From me included, but I can also meta-comment, right?
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:13 AM on September 8, 2022 [71 favorites]

I'm all for class war, but unless you start at the top, it's just a lower deck squabble while the rich folks who control everything sip champagne on the lido deck.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:16 AM on September 8, 2022 [50 favorites]

Saying "tut-tut" at the kids who are responding to their world burning seems in poor taste. "No, they should get engaged! Write their senators!" Whatever. I'll happily accept temporary inconveniences for signs that the youth are rising up.
posted by Alex404 at 8:17 AM on September 8, 2022 [54 favorites]

Love it. Buying and driving an SUV is an incredibly antisocial act and our regulators are clearly asleep at the wheel; nice to see some harmless direct action.
posted by ripley_ at 8:18 AM on September 8, 2022 [25 favorites]

I drive a 15yrold SUV, which I didn't actually choose -- it was a gift from family members who no longer wanted it at about the time I badly needed a second car to get around my transit - unfriendly city. If I had accessible alternatives I would use them, and because of gas prices I'm already looking to replace the damn thing with a hybrid as soon as I can afford it.

This kind of thing is going to hit plenty of people like me and leave frustrated, unhappy enemies where potential allies might have been made by organizing to make alternatives happen (eg by expanding public transit), at a time when rising fuel prices are already creating pressure on people to transition away from SUVs. This isn't 2003 and you aren't tackling Hummers, here.
posted by sciatrix at 8:18 AM on September 8, 2022 [46 favorites]

On the "this won't change minds!" front: there is a sentiment on twitter at times along the lines of "If we cannot have a future we can still have revenge".

This feels like a very gentle version of either that or the smashing of mills by the (misunderstood) Luddites.
posted by Slackermagee at 8:24 AM on September 8, 2022 [30 favorites]

I can't tell from the article whether they are targeting, like, every possible form of SUV or only the big behemoth ones like the Land Cruisers and Cadillacs. I don't know if it matters all that much, even, from a climate change perspective. The framing the actual deflators seem to give it is very much 'fuck the rich' but everything is either a sub-compact or an SUV nowadays, so most of the SUVs out there belong to people who are not what we'd normally think of as rich (with the usual caveats that the western middle class is, by global standards, very rich).
posted by jacquilynne at 8:25 AM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

"But why did Mookie throw the trash can through Sal's window? It just doesn't make sense!"
posted by Alex404 at 8:26 AM on September 8, 2022 [45 favorites]

I can't say this is the right approach, the ELF had better approaches in late 90s/early 00s (attacking/corporate things not individual people) Either way - I hope these people (in the US) are ready to have the FBI on your ass, so... The Green Scare was a thing and will come back no questions asked.
posted by symbioid at 8:27 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Why not target, like, vehicles owned by companies that are invested in oil and gas? SUVs that are parked across bike lanes? Any late-model luxury or sports car?

I just feel like this is very much a "something must be done, this is something" scenario, when it would have taken so little effort to lend a little more clarity and palatability to their message.
posted by sagc at 8:31 AM on September 8, 2022 [22 favorites]

Yeah this is superficially a bad idea but one of the reasons it's bad and will lead to violence is the underlying phenomenon whereby people identify with their cars and take everything to do with them deeply personally.

That is not only one of the main... uh... drivers of car-related environmental, social and economic troubles, but also the one driver that nobody wants to talk about, because it is personal and not something anyone can credibly blame on someone else.
posted by klanawa at 8:33 AM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

Hang on, more context: okay, they're organizing for and around primarily European cities and cities that do have transit (I think?); the TX abbreviation isn't a local organizer designation but a shorthand for the organization itself; the only US city I see mentioned is a wealthy area in NYC.

....okay, I guess?? So this is direct action that mostly seems to be about pissing individual but wealthy people off on a relatively small scale? For *checks notes* a global and systemic problem, in a way that actively invites people with fewer options to identify with and defend people who are deemed wealthy and privileged enough to be targeted?

Like, okay? I think there's probably better uses for that energy but maybe it makes more sense in the European context in which Tyre Extinguishers was designed for?
posted by sciatrix at 8:34 AM on September 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Fuck this idea. Not all of those people are rich. As DFW reminds me in that This is Water graduation speech, maybe some of them were in bad accidents and only feel safe in a bigger SUV. And maybe some of those people were then late to work and lost their jobs because they were late.

Agreeing with targeting vehicles owned by the oil, gas, and auto industries, though. They are the ones who are causing this environmental crisis, and profiting off of it as they have been for decades or more. Also agreeing with the sentiment that most vehicles don't belong in cities. And having not read the article yet, I also wonder if they are targeting things like the F-150 Lightning, the electric Hummer, or any old SUV or truck that MIGHT have an electric conversion.
posted by Snowishberlin at 8:38 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

people identify with their cars and take everything to do with them deeply personally

It's the single most expensive thing most people will ever own. No shit people take it personally.
posted by ryanrs at 8:41 AM on September 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

People aren’t going to be mad because they identify with their cars. They’ll be mad because they’ll be late to work, a doctors appointment, or whatever task they are using the car to do. Only partially deflating the doctor’s car is silly, do they think most doctors and nurses have identifying stickers on their car?
posted by hermanubis at 8:44 AM on September 8, 2022 [22 favorites]

This happened to a woman I know. I mean, that's how it started, but it got worse. The restraining order doesn't really mean much, he's still allowed to own a gun FFS.

If you're using DV abuser's tactics you're probably fucked in the head.
posted by adept256 at 8:50 AM on September 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

Two wrongs don't make a right but neither is punching a nazi.
posted by aniola at 8:55 AM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you're using DV abuser's tactics you're probably fucked in the head

I guess I'm fucked in the head then, because I live in a city centre and I am all for deflating SUV tires. They should not be in a city centre. They're shit for air quality, they make roads horrendous for buses to navigate because they're so wide, and they make the roads unsafe for cyclists.

Seriously, so much of the bullshit of owning an SUV is externalised to everyone around you. I am ok with some people returning those inconveniences to the owner. If I was in charge of the country I would ban them from motorways and from parking in city centres, the reason they're allowed to be so high is because they're supposed to be off-road vehicles
posted by stillnocturnal at 8:56 AM on September 8, 2022 [31 favorites]

The right move, I think, would be to deflate the tires of all the SUVs still in dealer lots. But that seems a bit higher stakes.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:59 AM on September 8, 2022 [20 favorites]

I dunno. When BLM was first doing protests shutting down streets and businesses, I felt similarly: this is a bad tactic that will just make enemies.

But I kept thinking about it and considering why it made me uncomfortable and about how much of the status quo is built around preventing people like me from ever being uncomfortable while outsourcing all the discomfort onto certain specific types of people.

Climate change is a big enough issue that every tactic can (and probably should) be deployed. If we don't try everything, we aren't trying hard enough.
posted by rikschell at 9:00 AM on September 8, 2022 [76 favorites]

*purchases battery powered compressor* *creates further waste and depletion of lithium reserves*.
Where were we?
posted by aesop at 9:03 AM on September 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

Meanwhile the extractors keep pulling fossil carbon out of the ground, unaffected and uninterested by the squabbling among people who will eventually purchase and burn their product one way or another.

If you really want to get people to stop driving gas-guzzling SUVs, let gas prices go up. Make the cost of fuel reflect the cost of clean-up and mitigation. The only thing this does is reinforce the idea that climate change is a culture war issue, and the only people that benefits is the oil extractors.
posted by biogeo at 9:04 AM on September 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

My main complaint is that they're using perfectly good lentils and beans. Stick to gravel, the legumes are food!
posted by aniola at 9:05 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

maybe some of them were in bad accidents and only feel safe in a bigger SUV.

So they are being doubly selfish. First by driving an oversized vehicle and second by discounting the safety of cyclists, pedestrians and small car drivers for their own feelings of safety.
posted by Mitheral at 9:06 AM on September 8, 2022 [31 favorites]

Telling someone traumatized that they are twice as bad seems not good.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:08 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Hybrids and electric cars are fair game. We cannot electrify our way out of the climate crisis - there are not enough rare earth metals to replace everyone’s car and the mining of these metals causes suffering. Plus, the danger to other road users still stands, as does the air pollution (PM 2.5 pollution is still produced from tyres and brake pads).
posted by Going To Maine at 9:09 AM on September 8, 2022

In America, causing a tow truck to rescue a soccer mom somewhere after hours is a bad intervention for global warming. The parents and the kids will forever vote against whatever movement this represents. Putin phoned this one in, again.
posted by Brian B. at 9:10 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

No pass for electric vehicles, but they're willing to give a pass to someone who has a sticker on their car that says they're a surgeon? This just seems so half-assed and parodical.

I guess I disagree with the idea that we need to try everything. We need to be trying everything that might work.
posted by sagc at 9:11 AM on September 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

Okay by me. I favor driving the smallest car possible (even though I'm a tall guy) and have no patience with those who require twice as much vehicle in order to feel safe. Also it seems that rather than soccer moms, the targets are in neighbourhoods of the ostentatious rich.
posted by Rash at 9:13 AM on September 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

As a life-long cyclists who never has owned a car and never wants to own one - it's really funny to me how outraged people will get about some deflated tires and how barely even bothered at all people are about how many pedestrians and cyclists have been injured or killed in so-called fatally euphemistic "accidents" with SUVs and vehicular homicide barely even registers because those are just unfortunate accidents and nothing can really be done about them because you know and cyclists know that cycling is dangerous and risky and it's an accident and well that's the cost of modern life isn't it oh well.

Excuse me, I need to go touch grass and quell this urge of taking an all white spray painted bike, lighting it on fire and throwing it through window of the nearest big stupid fucking turbodiesel truck I see.

Clearly my perspective is entirely out of whack and I have absolutely no reason to be outraged about any of this because deflating tires is lame and an over-reaction.
posted by loquacious at 9:15 AM on September 8, 2022 [68 favorites]

On trauma and climate-induced catastrophe, Ministry for the Future is one of those "topical, but don't get too into expounding on it" books and I think it has a very pertinent section where people who survive disastrous heat waves & other newly-normative disasters start banding together to make sure wealthy nations who think themselves insulated from risk share in the fate of the world as well.

It doesn't sound like these movements are necessarily that, but I wouldn't be so sure to think that is out of the question. We can shunt off blame all we want, "it's the corporations, it's the fossil fuel companies, it's the military", but we aren't doing anything about them either, so eventually inaction will fall on broader shoulders whether it's deserved or not.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:16 AM on September 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

Shit, at least throwing a ghost bike through someone's windshield would have a clear message.
posted by sagc at 9:17 AM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

>” It's the single most expensive thing most people will ever own. No shit people take it personally.”

If I owned a Fabergé egg, I wouldn’t just leave it out in the open taking up public space then

The idea that vehicles like this are anything but a luxury is about as Americentric as ideas come
posted by Skwirl at 9:22 AM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

I have an SUV because I live way out in the mountains and there's a lot of snow in the winter and I do a lot of driving. And every few months there's another medical emergency in my house and I have to take my son (with a genetic disorder) or my wife (with ESRD) to the emergency room at the excellent large city hospital which is two hours away (because, like I said, I live in the mountains), or I have to make a late-night run to the 24-hour pharmacy a few towns over. And because I live in the mountains, there's no taxi service and no Lyft and the ambulance service we do have would just deliver my wife or my son to the crappy rural hospital which doesn't even have an MRI and which would then have to hire another ambulance to take them to the large hospital and at this point we're well into the next day.

I do have a handicap parking tag (that hangs from the rearview mirror) for my son, but he doesn't like me to keep it out because he's just 12 years old and doesn't like to be seen as the kid with the handicap even though that's exactly what he is, but he's 12, so I keep the tag in the glove box and only take it out when we're actually in the parking spot.

All this is to say that someone could look at my car and not know my story and easily put me next on the Tyre Extinguisher list. And I can not imagine a more hostile and shitty example of virtue performance art than someone deflating my tires just because someone doesn't like my choice of car. And I shouldn't have to win the disability olympics to make this point. We can all imagine plenty of scenarios where someone's life would be directly and negatively impacted by this kind of activism selfish and useless and narcissistic vandalism, from missing a medical appointment to losing a job to even losing a life.

I think I've seen this film before, to quote Taylor Swift, and I didn't like the ending. Early one morning back in 1970, four men tried to blow up the Army Math Research Center in Madison, WI to protest the Vietnam War. Unknown to them, the building was not deserted as a few graduate students and researchers were checking on their experiments in the physics department in the basement of that building. Robert Fassnacht lost his life, leaving behind a wife and three small children. Three others were seriously wounded.

Did the ends justify the means? The Army Math Research Center was hardly damaged at all (the blast took out the physics department instead). The Vietnam War lasted another five years. And Fassnacht's family never got back their father.

I'm not so naive to think that violence is never the answer. Sometimes, violence is the only answer. But making a violent act is taking on a terrible responsibility. People's lives and livelihoods can very well be at stake. But hey, at least some young activists got to feel like they were "doing something".
posted by fuzzy.little.sock at 9:23 AM on September 8, 2022 [47 favorites]

These comments have reminded me of a piece from MLK.

"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
posted by Trifling at 9:23 AM on September 8, 2022 [28 favorites]

Trifling, that seems like a downright insulting comparison. To MLK, to be clear, and to the fight for civil rights.

Like, is there ever room to criticize tactics? Can that be part of the discussion? Or should we just embrace any and all actions by people we agree with?
posted by sagc at 9:25 AM on September 8, 2022 [21 favorites]

Fuck this idea. Not all of those people are rich.

Nonsense.

The article says that they were targeting the Upper East Side, one of the richest parts of the country. They're doing this in a city where the average income of car-owning households is twice that of non-car-owning households. It also says that they're making decisions about what vehicles to target, picking and choosing.

They are literally removing air, a mild inconvenience, to make a point, and people here are dropping monocles, taking it personally, and worrying about the effect on the working class.

Ridiculous.
posted by entropone at 9:26 AM on September 8, 2022 [57 favorites]

I am out there risking my life every single day I get on a bike and go for a ride. I do it because the alternative is to risk someone else's life.

Drivers tell me "wow, that looks like fun! Be safe!" ...and then they get in their SUV and drive off on a road that was designed to save them a few seconds at the expense of all us non-drivers, and the climate, and whatnot.

Putting lentils in peoples' tire valves looks like FUN!
posted by aniola at 9:27 AM on September 8, 2022 [31 favorites]

It's the single most expensive thing most people will ever own. No shit people take it personally.

That's obviously not what I mean. People identify through their cars. We have relationships with them. We speak through them. We have to be critical of our personal relationships with our cars. Car advertising wouldn't look the way it does if this were not true. It works for a reason.

This is in addition to all of the socio-economic shit re: urban design, class, work, poverty, etc.
posted by klanawa at 9:29 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

You stir up shit about crime on the subway, and fearful people buy cars.
Maybe if you stir up shit about horrible things happening to their cars, they'll decide it's not worth it and ride the fucking subway.
posted by phooky at 9:29 AM on September 8, 2022 [33 favorites]

In conclusion, deflating tyres/tires is a land of a contrasts.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:29 AM on September 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

Like, is there ever room to criticize tactics? Can that be part of the discussion? Or should we just embrace any and all actions by people we agree with?

I think that there's a way to criticize tactics while retaining a sense of solidarity and avoiding infighting and paralysis.

For me, that looks like saying, "I would not personally do that, and there might be better ways to spend energy, but I support somebody else's right to make that decision and take that action, because it is in service of overall shared goals, and we're only going to get there together."

In some forms of consensus decision-making, there are three stances you can take: agreement, neutral, and block. Choosing to block something is a big fucking deal, and should be treated as such, because you're forcing the rest of your group to address your specific concerns or leave you behind.

But social media encourages us to voice blocking opinions loudly and often. But I think it's better to just stick your thumb out to the side - not my thing, but I'm not going to stand in the way of it happening.
posted by entropone at 9:32 AM on September 8, 2022 [22 favorites]

Interesting metacommentary from a spokesperson for the group: "It's strange how every SUV we seem to deflate seems to belong to a pregnant doctor who has to drive immediately to her farm"
posted by anthill at 9:33 AM on September 8, 2022 [62 favorites]

This is such a bad idea it's almost making me suspect a false flag. It'd be a perfect approach if you wanted to pit street level citizens against each other.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:34 AM on September 8, 2022 [25 favorites]

People here got really pissed at me here before when I suggested that mefites were out of touch.

As a life long bike rider, if I catch you fucking with my truck, don't be surprised if you get chased off under threat of crowbar. By me or my neighbors. Is "Don't be an asshole" really so hard to understand?

It's mind boggling to see people who think this would be a good idea.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:37 AM on September 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

It'd be a perfect approach if you wanted to pit street level citizens against each other.

I think it's a pretty low-consequence way to have an important conversation about an urgent topic.
posted by aniola at 9:37 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

That's an incredibly broad definition of "conversation", and possibly of "low-consequence".
posted by sagc at 9:39 AM on September 8, 2022 [14 favorites]

What a ridiculously bad idea, especially in the US, because guns.
posted by Beholder at 9:39 AM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

People aren’t going to be mad because they identify with their cars. They’ll be mad because they’ll be late to work, a doctors appointment, or whatever task they are using the car to do.

Funny story: I used to get literal death threats shouted at me while making a perfectly legal left turn on my bike that held up traffic a little bit. From people who lived on my street -- neighbours! There was even a little man-on-a-bike painted in the lane, directing me to wait at that spot. Funny how I never got the same treatment blocking the lane while turning left in my truck.

It's almost as if cars have an affect on drivers' psychology and their tolerance for minor inconveniences, particularly with regards to non-car road users, especially given that most traffic delays are caused by other motor vehicles.
posted by klanawa at 9:40 AM on September 8, 2022 [48 favorites]

I don't mean to be insulting, but rather for us to take a step back and think, "Why are we so worried about people on the Upper East Side being mildly inconvenienced?"

Sure, this could result in a bad day for someone. But so do protests, so do strikes, so do Critical Mass events. Would I personally shove lentils in random people's tires? No. Have I wanted to take a sledgehammer to someone's SUV that they've parked across both the sidewalk and bikelane? Daily.
posted by Trifling at 9:41 AM on September 8, 2022 [32 favorites]

This is such a bad idea it's almost making me suspect a false flag.

I believe it is. One thing someone has figured out is that meddling with new shiny showoff trucks, the sign of a Trump voter, is a sure fire way to instigate a civil war. It might be the only way to make a paranoid Trump supporter spin out of control.
posted by Brian B. at 9:43 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

What a ridiculously bad idea, especially in the US, because guns.

I do notice they're not targeting luxury pickup trucks.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:43 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Yes, 2N2222 has it. Being an asshole in real life does, it turn out, sometimes have consequences. And that should be a lesson to people who do shitty things with their vehicles and to people who do shitty things to others' vehicles.
posted by cupcakeninja at 9:46 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

If you deflate someone's tires you are not having a conversation with them you are engaging in passive aggressive vandalism and running away.
posted by interogative mood at 9:46 AM on September 8, 2022 [27 favorites]

Don't be an asshole" really so hard to understand

People who own SUVs just to drive around the city and take up all the room are being assholes. Owning an SUV when you live and work in a city should be as inconvenient and unpleasant as living with them is for the rest of us, and if citizens have to do that because the government won't, well. I say good on them. Be the change you want to see in the world, and I want people to think twice before buying a giant fucking SUV they don't need.

For real though Europe aint America and in the UK nobody is going to get shot.
posted by stillnocturnal at 9:46 AM on September 8, 2022 [26 favorites]

People here got really pissed at me here before when I suggested that mefites were out of touch.

There are a lot of people here basically agreeing with you, although in perhaps more nuanced ways. Maybe the reason people get pissed at you is because you position yourself as some kind of maverick when you're not and/or don't actually read what others have written. When you're out of touch, as it were.
posted by klanawa at 9:47 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wonder what the tenor of the room would be if, instead of targeting something that is a marker of affluence, they were temporarily disabling window A/C units.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:48 AM on September 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

looking out my window, I can see two vehicles that I know for sure are owned/driven by people with disabilities. Their cars are their freedom in an immediate way.

I'm someone who sold my car in the aftermath of the first Gulf War because I wanted no part in encouraging my culture's dependence on fossil fuels. I managed very well for a good quarter century riding a bike, walking, taking transit etc. But then I had to take care of an elder. We really needed a car, living as we did we did well outside of any transit service. Without it, she would have had to leave her home of many years, relocate to a "home" -- some form of institutional housing.

I get the anger that drives these kinds of tactics. I've lived it. But honestly, all I see it accomplishing right now is provocation. And we have enough of that already for fuck's sake. Don't we?

is there ever room to criticize tactics? Can that be part of the discussion? Or should we just embrace any and all actions by people we agree with?

More and more, I'm of the opinion that we are our tactics. If our tactics are angry, ill-conceived, needlessly provocative, well we shouldn't be surprised if we find ourselves in angry, ill-conceived and provoked circumstances. Reap why you sow and all that.
posted by philip-random at 9:49 AM on September 8, 2022 [20 favorites]

I don't bike, but my current roommate and several of my friends and coworkers do. Drivers absolutely need to be aware of cyclist safety precautions and treat cyclists with respect and safety on the road, no matter what they're driving; keep out of bike lanes, and give cyclists space without crowding them. That should be standard and it is unacceptable that it often isn't.

I'm.... not entirely sure what that has to do with SUVs qua SUVs. I'm also not entirely sure how this particular activist initiative will impact drivers of SUVs to be less dangerous to other vehicles using the public roads. It seems to me that if anything it's likely to increase assholish behavior to cyclists, not decrease it.

(Although again: this is a European group with a primarily European presence and UK leadership, which has AFAICT branched into one US city.)
posted by sciatrix at 9:49 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you deflate someone's tires you are not having a conversation with them you are engaging in passive aggressive vandalism and running away.

I didn't deflate anyone's tires but I am in this room patiently having a conversation with a bunch of people who think it's ok to drive around in something that has a reputation for killing people and is definitely destroying the planet, and I'm doing it because of those delightful tyre-deflating, lentil-distributing, kids-these-days.
posted by aniola at 9:51 AM on September 8, 2022 [42 favorites]

I would also consider their website and tweets a part of being in conversation.
posted by aniola at 9:52 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

One thing someone has figured out is that meddling with new shiny showoff trucks, the sign of a Trump voter, is a sure fire way to instigate a civil war.

I'm not sure why we need to be positing shadowy outside forces here. They've been calling for civil war for (take your pick on duration, depending on the scope of 'they'). There's been *how* many decades of repeated reports of "Surprise, white supremacists, militia groups, Oath Keepers, Dominionist Evangelicals , Three Percenters,(but I repeat myself), etc. have been making concerted efforts to infiltrate & recruit from police, military, etc. and we should probably do something about that".

We don't need to be letting them off the hook by ascribing their intent to outside groups. They've already made it clear how much their intent is a violent purge of American society with any resistance being used as an excuse for the intensifying violence they were already planning on.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:54 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Owning an SUV when you live and work in a city should be as inconvenient and unpleasant as living with them is for the rest of us

Surely it is? They, too, must contend with all of the other SUVs in the city. (But who is “us” in this instance? Those without SUVs? Those without cars? Those who may own SUVs that are outside of the city? It’s actually a kind of vague group.)
posted by Going To Maine at 9:55 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I would also consider their website and tweets a part of being in conversation.

I think if I pantsed someone wearing ugly jeans and then dropped a flyer on them saying “DON’T WEAR UGLY JEANS OR I WILL PANTS YOU www.yourjeans.sucks” I’m not sure my victim would consider themselves in conversation with me.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:57 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is a terrible idea and will provoke a significant backlash.

I’m intrigued by your vision of necessary, radical social change that doesn’t provoke a backlash. It would be a first in the human history.
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:01 AM on September 8, 2022 [41 favorites]

Owning an SUV when you live and work in a city should be as inconvenient and unpleasant as living with them is for the rest of us

As someone who has a job in the city that doesn't align with public transportation hours, and who can't afford to replace an inherited SUV, it already is. I do not terribly much appreciate being in a position where I have to pay to operate a dangerous piece of heavy machinery (And any automobile is a dangerous piece of heavy machinery, not just SUVs) for close to two hours a day unpaid. But I also like, you know, eating, and having a roof over my head. I suppose that's selfish in a sense.

Look. taking a wild swing might feel good, because, sure, some of those people are jerks. But you'll hit people that don't deserve it and it won't fix systemic issues. And those people who don't deserve it, they'll be just as petty and human as you are being in wanting to do something to them, and that's going to redirect energy away from, you know, solving problem and saving ourselves, into positions held out of spite.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:03 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I think this is going to alienate and frustrate people, not change minds.

They'd be better off standing outside car dealerships with signs that say "Don't want the planet to burn? Buy an electric car instead"
posted by carriage pulled by cassowaries at 10:04 AM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

So, how do one distinguish casual vandalism from protest, in this case? If I walk outside and my Escalade has four flats, my first thought is going to be “fuckinagoddamn”, not “Oh, the peasants are upset about air quality again”. Are they leaving a placard admitting to nuisance, or worse, in some cases, vandalism?

At some point, it seems this is going to escalate to real property damages, or worse, and some protestor is going to have to pay the consequences.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 10:05 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Not sure I follow the equivalence of physical assault and public humiliation for one's personal appearance to what Tyre Extinguisher kids are doing...

Re: another part of this lovely conversation, introducing 'cyclists' seems to be something happening on its own in this dicussion. Not sure how that vague out-group relates to the actual organizers or the climate crisis.
posted by anthill at 10:06 AM on September 8, 2022

Hybrids and electric cars are fair game. We cannot electrify our way out of the climate crisis - there are not enough rare earth metals to replace everyone’s car and the mining of these metals causes suffering. Plus, the danger to other road users still stands, as does the air pollution (PM 2.5 pollution is still produced from tyres and brake pads).

There is some logic in this, but why not then target all private vehicles (electric or ICE)? Also, here in North America, many of the car manufacturers now do not even offer the smaller models available in the EU and other parts of the world. It's SUVs all the way down....
posted by piyushnz at 10:07 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm reminded of the people who've been killed by being hit by a car that drove past while they were changing a flat tire...

...do this for long enough, and someone could well get killed pumping up a tire.

And that's going to be

a) a tragedy; but also

b) TERRIBLE PR for the people letting down the tyres
posted by carriage pulled by cassowaries at 10:08 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I’m not sure my victim would

Number of victims killed by a deflated tire? Zero. Number of victims killed by cars every day: thousands.
posted by aniola at 10:09 AM on September 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

People can and are killed by deflated tires, in the long term and the short. Just last night I met someone working at a local Waffle House who had a tire explode, causing them to swerve into a wall. They were just back in work and wearing a body brace. Deflating a tire might not cause it to explode, but it increases wear, and that could eventually cause blowouts.

What does it even solve to bring up the number of people killed by cars every day? Are you protesting cars or just rich folks' cars? What?
posted by JHarris at 10:13 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Here's their leaflet that it looks like they're leaving in windshields
posted by aniola at 10:15 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Number of victims killed by a deflated tire? Zero.

number of people shot because they messed with someone's tires?

this is way too dangerous a thing to do in many places in the usa
posted by pyramid termite at 10:16 AM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

it increases wear,

So does... driving the thing?
posted by aniola at 10:16 AM on September 8, 2022

It increases wear significantly, okay? Dangerously.
posted by JHarris at 10:17 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

aniola, you do realize that these people are still going to do pretty much the same amount of driving? It's not like it's a zero-sum game, where deflating the tire ensures less driving in the future.
posted by sagc at 10:18 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Dangerously. Got it.

It's not like it's a zero-sum game, where deflating the tire ensures less driving in the future.

Presumably that's what the flyer and the online conversations are for, but I'm repeating myself, so I'll show myself out.
posted by aniola at 10:21 AM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'd guess the reason 'cyclists' are taking part in this conversation so much is the focus on SUVs. While they might be safer for the people inside, they're much more dangerous for those of us walking or biking. As such, we have pent-up feelings.
I get it's infrastructure's fault that so many people need a car to do basically anything, but why does everyone need an SUV? Here's hoping the current gas prices mean sedans come back in style.
No one thinks that lentils are going to stop people from driving. The real target isn't the individual SUV owner, but rather media outlets. Would this conversation be happening without their action?
posted by Trifling at 10:24 AM on September 8, 2022 [15 favorites]

Law firms specialize in tire-related deaths and injuries due to tire pressure, both too low and too high.

According to the most recent research conducted by the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), vehicle equipment and maintenance failures account for about 6% of commercial truck accident deaths and about 3% of car accident fatalities. Of these equipment and maintenance failures, “tire factors” was listed as the most frequent cause of accidents.

What is also dangerous is that causing someone to drive even a little distance on a deflated tire can damage it significantly. When they later try to fill it up properly, it can suddenly explode from the damage.

Every year, dozens of people are seriously injured or even killed while filling their tires with air. Adam Sproul, 28, suffered a traumatic brain injury and his friend was killed when they were filling a tire at a repair shop in New Hampshire.
posted by Brian B. at 10:24 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

If we can't ban them we should make their owners miserable, period. I cannot comprehend the amount of pearl-clutching going on in here about deflated tires. It's a little embarrassing to witness.
posted by zenhob at 10:25 AM on September 8, 2022 [21 favorites]

Y'all think you can leave your heavy metal shit in public places, killing people indiscriminately...

MetaFilter does not do car commentary well

Truly a mystery for the ages.
posted by Candleman at 10:27 AM on September 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

To people who are looking at this and people supporting it as "Metafilter is awful," I want to say (only on my behalf) that we're a discussion site, and people are discussing it, and a lot of people are opposed to this? I don't think the first group or the second should be taken as representative of Metafilter as a whole. We've never been a monolith, but a diverse group with a lot of different opinions.

Going to bring this up in Talk I think.
posted by JHarris at 10:27 AM on September 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

This is such a short-sighted idea. And disgusting from the human relations viewpoint. An infinitesimally small portion of successfully targetted SUV owners will spend more than 1 second reconsidering their vehicle choice. Most of the rest will just get back to exactly whatever environment-degrading activities they’d been engaged in, and the remainder will respond to this by dialing it up.

Suspect the founder(s) of the movement is/are concerned as much with attention, validation and purpose, as with the larger goal. And this, this is just easy. Is it addressing the actual causes of problems? Or does “… feeling frustration mount over US inaction on the climate crisis” mean you should just give up and go after low hanging fruit? What this world doesn’t need more of: people making choices solely to serve the feelings the don’t like, without stopping to think of the bigger picture. Maybe they could think a bit more about the impacts, otherwise they’re not that different then their image of the people their targeting.

I hate supersized SUVs — based on safety alone they should be pulled off the streets — but the judgmental, self-righteous mindset that leads one to do this bullshit… i mean, you know FUCK ALL about the life conditions of the person who drove that SUV today. Maybe the driver’s mom owns the vehicle, but fell ill and her daughter brought her in that SUV to the hospital around the block, but at 11pm when she leaves the hospital exhausted to go get 4 hours or sleep at home, she instead has to deal with an hour wait for a service truck.

What a bunch of self-serving twits. Feeling proud and righteous about being complete dicks to humans they’ve never met, while own-goaling their aspirations right into the enemy’s fodder-bucket.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 10:29 AM on September 8, 2022 [14 favorites]

I can't help but notice that among people of the more liberal mindset there seems to be this attitude that absolutely anything that is even slightly inconvenienceing is always a terrible idea that will force people to vote for Nazis. Any sort of direct action, anything that isn't throwing money at the Democrats and voting harder, is going to turn people into Nazis? Really?

"Damnit, I didn't want to vote for a Nazi but someone deflated my monster truck's tires so I guess I have to now, MAGA MAGA MAGA!"

No, MeFi, that's not how it works.

The world is on fire, everyone is going to die of climate change, and MeFi is scolding kids who have the audicity to try to actually take action other than voting harder? No people, the problem isn't that those horrible kids are doing something wrong, the the problem is that you've tied yourself up in so many knots you're terrified of any action.

Maybe most MeFites gave up on everything but voting harder and writing letters, but other people haven't and I'm glad of it.

If I wasn't 48 and in a position where an arrest would force my family onto the street I'd join 'em.

And yes, maybe there is a bit of "soemthing must be done, this is something" thinking, but JFC it beats endless rounds of "vote harder" bullshit. We've been voting harder, it doesn't work.

If you've got a better idea, that they can actually do not some suggestion for fancy suicide like storming the gates of Exxon HQ, then start proposing it and doing it, but don't scold the people who are actually trying to fix the problem becuase you're too lazy and cowardly to do anything.

If you're complaining that this will piss people off, you've missed the point. The point is to piss people off.

If every SUV driver stopped driving monster trucks it would improve matters. Not hugely, but somewhat. Irritating them until they give up their deadly status symbols on wheels sounds like a better idea than anything the whiners here have done.

2N2222 I can't speak for them of course, but I'd imagine they'd argue that you violated the "don't be an asshole" rule by driving a monster vehicle that endangers others simply by being on the road and pours out CO2 by the megaton to kill us all.
posted by sotonohito at 10:34 AM on September 8, 2022 [48 favorites]

I live in this city, I have met many people who have lost children or been permanently injured when drivers blithely ran them over and faced zero consequences. Over a hundred traffic deaths in the city this year alone. Not to mention the devastating impact of emissions on the poor communities they paved through with highways.

I support this action, because it’s the next best thing to setting them all on fucking fire.

Yes, including yours, with your very special unique reason why change is impossible because you couldn’t possibly live in a city designed to make your vehicle unnecessary.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:35 AM on September 8, 2022 [41 favorites]

(Looking over the entirety of the thread, maybe it doesn't need to be talked about in Talk yet? Maybe I was overreacting. I would just remind people that there's all kinds of opinions here.)
posted by JHarris at 10:39 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

As usual I can't help but feel like the discussion would be improved if people RTFA, and knew this was happening only in large cities in Europe and NYC (thanks to people already pointing this out), cities where the expense of owning an SUV and the presence of transportation alternatives means that A) people's plans are not being affected in a major way and B) no one is stuck driving an SUV that doesn't want to be.

Another point, to all the people pearl clutching that this isn't affecting the REAL problem causers like oil execs, this action did actually get the SUV of a former CEO of BP and current chairman of Russian oil and gas co L1 Energy Lord John Browne, the Baron Browne of Madingley: https://twitter.com/T_Extinguishers/status/1533717916906143745
posted by JauntyFedora at 10:51 AM on September 8, 2022 [20 favorites]

I cannot comprehend the amount of pearl-clutching going on in here about deflated tires. It's a little embarrassing to witness.

okay. I'm sure there is some pearl-clutching. But what about all the comments that are neither clutching for pearls nor aligning with the Tyre Extinguishers. To my eyes, they are in the majority here.
posted by philip-random at 10:53 AM on September 8, 2022

“Damnit, I didn't want to vote for a Nazi but someone deflated my monster truck's tires so I guess I have to now, MAGA MAGA MAGA!”

I don’t think anyone has said this. Calling an action “counterproductive” isn’t the same thing as “gonna make them vote R if they weren’t”. Most likely, at an individual level it will irritate and inconvenience people, and be a minor story for a few news cycles, including one outrage cycle on FOX, and will then become a folktale about bad woke protestors in some circles. (Heck, it surely already is, given the response here.) It seems unlikely that it won’t cause anyone to not buy a new SUV out of fear of deflation, but the news coverage might influence one or two folks to not by one, and will make everyone think that youths are angry.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:53 AM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

MeFi is scolding kids who have the audicity to try to actually take action other than voting harder

serious question: what if the action is kind of dumb. just trying to calibrate the ol scoldometer here.
posted by inire at 10:59 AM on September 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

I’m intrigued by your vision of necessary, radical social change that doesn’t provoke a backlash. It would be a first in the human history.

First rule of change is controversy. You can't get away from it for the simple reason all issues are controversial. Change means movement, and movement means friction, and friction means heat, and heat means controversy.

-Saul Alinsky
posted by entropone at 11:02 AM on September 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

I cannot comprehend the amount of pearl-clutching going on in here about deflated tires. It's a little embarrassing to witness.

I think the point is that someone wants someone else to clutch their pearls over tires. The disagreement is in the predicted outcome. I haven't seen an argument for deflation that couldn't also be used to emotionally justify physically assaulting the owner or destroying their vehicle outright, or selling it for parts. It's the kind of activity that sociopaths would flock to for cover, and then embarrass everyone involved by maybe loosening lug nuts instead and causing a death, to prove they are more hardcore.
posted by Brian B. at 11:07 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

In defense of ye tire flateners, sociopaths can ruin any protest activity, and there’s a reason why they make a point that the only thing they do is let the air out of tires.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:09 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

(But yes, we are supposed to clutch our pearls over this, definitely. If we didn’t, the whole exercise would be pointless.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:10 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's the kind of activity that sociopaths would flock to for cover, and then embarrass everyone involved by maybe loosening lug nuts instead and causing a death, to prove they are more hardcore.

Of course... driving is also the kind of activity that sociopaths flock to for cover, too. And leads to deaths on a mass scale.
posted by entropone at 11:10 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

If "they" targeted vehicles owned by oil and gas companies, the response would be "working class people drive those, you're imperiling their jobs, why don't you target the cars of the executives". And then if people targeted the executives personally, it would be, "you're going to scare their families, who didn't do anything, also what if little Joanna needs to be driven to a doctor's appointment".

I mean, I've been to this particular rodeo before - Americans are taught from the cradle to respond to any kind of protest, good bad or indifferent, with "it is too disruptive and targets the wrong people, so unfair". You could be handing out homemade cupcakes at City Hall to get people to take a "let's undertake moderate reforms" leaflet and you would be accused of withholding cupcakes from people who disagreed and potentially poisoning children with sugar and/or gluten.

What if we read with and not against? What if we looked at protests as sympathetic allies rather than as outsider critics?

I'm of the opinion that social change happens when a lot of people are varying degrees of pain in the ass. Americans learn from the movies that social change happens when Very Good, Peaceful People hold a candlelit vigil which touches the hearts of the nation, but this is not born out by facts.
posted by Frowner at 11:11 AM on September 8, 2022 [57 favorites]

> It's the kind of activity that sociopaths would flock to for cover, and then embarrass everyone involved by maybe loosening lug nuts instead and causing a death, to prove they are more hardcore.

Driving an SUV in a major city is already sociopathic, and those particular sociopaths have already escalated this situation several times, as SUVs used to be smaller and less dangerous than they are now. I'm more worried about the actual anti-social behavior that has already escalated multiple times and made cities more dangerous every time, than theoretical anti-climate-collapse sociopaths.
posted by zenhob at 11:17 AM on September 8, 2022 [16 favorites]

Every vehicle targeted for deflation in the linked article is a luxury SUV — a Land Rover with a Hamptons parking sticker is mentioned and there are photos of a BMW, an Audi, and a Porsche. These don’t belong to working class people who depend on them for their livelihoods.

Fortunately, the owners of these particular vehicles in this particular neighborhood have a wealth of other transport options for getting around town (the shiny new 2nd Ave Subway, numerous buses, Citibike, walking, an increasing number of electric taxis and rideshares, etc. etc.), not to mention a very reliable train and several bus options for getting to the Hamptons, and they are highly unlikely to be greatly troubled.

Also, it should be obvious that the conversation that this very limited action is meant to provoke isn’t only between activists and a handful of rich SUV owners on the Upper East Side who also have homes in the Hamptons.
posted by theory at 11:20 AM on September 8, 2022 [14 favorites]

Also, it should be obvious that the conversation that this very limited action is meant to provoke isn’t only between activists and a handful of rich SUV owners on the Upper East Side who also have homes in the Hamptons.

I suppose it’s the conversation we’re having right here, right now. But I kind of assume that most mefites are generally of the opinion “SUVs bad, unless you have a specific need for one, in which case ok”. So, instead, we complain about tactics.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:23 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Agreeing with targeting vehicles owned by the oil, gas, and auto industries, though. They are the ones who are causing this environmental crisis, and profiting off of it as they have been for decades or more


They have a huge responsibility regarding their actions to subvert attempt at reducing gas consumption, and climate change denial. But lets not kid ourselves, the demand comes from consumers, we built cities & suburbs that require cars to live in, we opted to buy the bigger vehicles like SUVs/pickups, we're very much the root cause of this issue.

My dream would be for (enough?) world governments to simultaneously nationalize oils companies and work together on a plan using the profits/assets from those to remediate the damage, reduce production and accelerate the transition to an almost oil-free world... but heh... I don't see that happening ever.

It's such a frustrating issue because even if, lets say a state or a province, goes all-in reduces all its emissions to zero, not much is done, everybody has to do it. We can't even agree that invading other countries is bad, how we do convince Russia & Saudi Arabia (& the US) to stop producing more oil?
posted by WaterAndPixels at 11:24 AM on September 8, 2022

I haven't seen an argument for deflation that couldn't also be used to emotionally justify physically assaulting the owner or destroying their vehicle outright, or selling it for parts.

Yes what if we pretend these people are doing something much, much worse than they are actually doing? Suddenly they don't seem so good, eh?
posted by ominous_paws at 11:27 AM on September 8, 2022 [34 favorites]

I’m intrigued by your vision of necessary, radical social change that doesn’t provoke a backlash

It depends on how the movement will be perceived in light of the backlash and how the backlash will be received. Look what happened to Insulate Britain.
posted by interogative mood at 11:32 AM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Suddenly they don't seem so good, eh?

One should expect a rational argument as to why this will work, rather than simply what someone randomly deserves without warning.
posted by Brian B. at 11:39 AM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

For comparison, the activists in Kim Stanley Robinson's (fictional) "The Ministry for the Future" knock fully-loaded passenger jets out of the sky, and torpedo yachts and container ships, to make the same point.
posted by chavenet at 11:57 AM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think the rational argument is that it will irritate and inconvenience a lot of people who can afford SUVs without blocking any streets, and will generate press about people being angry about the climate. The counterargument seems to be that we don’t really know who owns these SUVs, and that by inconveniencing their drivers there may be side effects that cause more harm and generate actual negative press. That’s a real risk, but this seems much less inconvenient for most folks than, say, a street protest.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:59 AM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

Sorry, JauntyFedora, but you're wrong. It's happening in mid-sized Canadian cities, too, and not even in a particularly rich neighbourhood.

Look, I'm a car-person and always have been. I drive small cars with a low centre of gravity and a good turning radius. Some of the cars I've owned have put me in the position where pedestrians and cyclists are a threat to me due to how low I sit (amongst other factors). I'm the first person to complain about city dwellers driving big, stupid pick-ups (with crew cabins and teeny-tiny beds that can't actually carry any cargo) and SUVs that they can't actually drive (or in some cases see over the dash), but as was pointed up thread, it's almost impossible to buy an actual car anymore from most manufacturers (which is why I'm hanging onto mine for dear life).

And as much as I'm against the vehicles in question, I still say it's a lousy way to protest. It's not going to change anybody's mind. It's just going to alienate potential allies. It's harmful, it's disrespectful. It's vandalism covered up with a shiny bow of do-gooderism. And yes, I'd say the same thing even if I didn't own a car.
posted by sardonyx at 12:01 PM on September 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

In Kitchener, it's not only SUVs that are the target. As the footage shows, it's also small cars.
posted by sardonyx at 12:11 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

In Kitchener, it's not only SUVs that are the target. As the footage shows, it's also small cars.

I’m not actually clear that the footage is anything other than stock imagery of parked cars (at least in the first video). The newscasters and police explicitly say that SUVs were targeted, and the cars in the video all seem to have air in their tires. If the group hadn’t just targeted SUVs, I’d expect the reporters and cops to call it out explicitly.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:28 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

My assumption is that if real actual good social change happens, it is likely to inconvenience me and/or cause me expense. Further, I probably won't be instrumental to that social change, and hopefully it will not be directed by people like me.

I am a white college graduate with a house and a mortgage and a white collar job (no car, admittedly, and not exactly a lavish lifestyle or large paycheck). If there are protests massive enough to force national social change, they are likely to recur many times until social change happens, they are likely to be violently repressed and they are likely to be intensely disruptive. People who have bougie jobs and live the 9-to-5 life are going to be inconvenienced by, eg, rioters taking over the governor's mansion, downtowns being shut down, factories and transit being collectivized, etc.

Some of that stuff is likely to be kind of scary. I live close to the core of the George Floyd protests (was not participating due to partner's fragile health and the then-uncertainty about covid transmission in crowds; I feel bad about that but I was really worried about getting covid and giving it to partner and partner dying, tbh). I am not going to lie - I was worried about the fires getting out of control, something or other happened to the nearby power station and the power was out for 24 hours with little news coming in and that made me very anxious, the cops were attacking people and there was a very suspicious truck attack on a protest, shots were fired into several food distros, there were all kinds of rumors. And those days were just a shadow of an echo of a ghost of what's coming as the climate crisis deepens and the rich take it out on the poor.

Those were not normal days! They were, indeed, somewhat inconvenient and disruptive - all kinds of stuff was shut down. I mean, I could totally say, "why do I have to put up with this, I am not rich, I am not a bad person, I vote blue, I even go to protests when we don't have a pandemic, this is unfair". And yet honestly, it's not unfair. It was good. It was good even though it inconvenienced me personally. Things are total garbage in this city right now but there is way more political/radical/mutual aid activity.

So yeah, stuff is unlikely to get funner, but that doesn't mean that we should all just sit down politely and twiddle our thumbs until we get machine gunned by the state so some banker can build a climate proof dome on our neighborhoods or whatever.

We readily default to "this inconveniences people who perhaps do not individually deserve to be inconvenienced, many people will not like it and therefore it is a bad tactic that only foolish people would endorse" but I strongly suspect that we are only likely to encounter more inconvenience and and more things that we do not like as the crisis deepens.
posted by Frowner at 12:30 PM on September 8, 2022 [33 favorites]

People here got really pissed at me here before when I suggested that mefites were out of touch.

As a life long bike rider, if I catch you fucking with my truck, don't be surprised if you get chased off under threat of crowbar. By me or my neighbors. Is "Don't be an asshole" really so hard to understand?

It's mind boggling to see people who think this would be a good idea.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:37 AM on September 8 [4 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]

I live in the city, my job requires 2-3 hours of urban driving a day. I drove a work van, upgrade to an electric work van as soon as they became available. Very easily could have bought an SUV to use as a work vehicle. I also ride a bike for about 90% of my urban travel when I'm not working. I've been an urban bike rider for over 20 years (pre bike lanes, when we used to ride with our ulocks tucked in our waistbands bc it was as much a weapon as it was theft prevention device). I've gotten in ... dozens? ... of conflicts with cars as a bike rider, and I would absolutely ...physically confront... somebody if I caught them messing with my van. This seems like a real world test of the "fuck around and find out" principle that online people are always invoking.
posted by youthenrage at 12:34 PM on September 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

Well, if you're okay with people not being able to get their dog to the emergency vet in time, or not getting to their dying parent's bedside in time, or their kids being stranded somewhere because they couldn't pick them up, or missing a desperately needed specialist appointment they waited months to get, then yeah, this is a great idea.
posted by HotToddy at 12:56 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Media coverage will turn someone's idea of a motorist perpetrator into a victim, because it involves insurance claims and police investigation and comment. Then they will air the doorbell footage, and people will be arrested, and just like that they are in the spotlight and will become an environmentalist spokesperson by circumstances of getting caught. Being unprepared for their spokesperson role, maybe they have some petty grievances to share, some more misanthropic than others. But only after first denying other crimes they were likely accused of, because crime happens to cars everyday and that's what interviewers will wonder about. Then they ask the right wing politician what they think, for balance.
posted by Brian B. at 12:57 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is great! Thanks for posting.
posted by dusty potato at 1:02 PM on September 8, 2022 [14 favorites]

I want to bring up the window A/C unit thing again, because I feel like it may help people calibrate.

If these activists began a new project where they temporarily disabled window A/C units and left pamphlets taped to them, would your reaction be the same? Window units are, after all, fantastically bad for pollution.

Maybe you'd be totally cool with them knocking the shit out of A/C units owned by lower income people and city apartment dwellers. But my suspicion is that a fair number of people who find the SUV tire flattening totally cool would lose their fucking shit if someone banged up their A/C, because their enthusiasm for this particular kind of activism is rooted pretty firmly in "it doesn't affect me, just people I do not like."

I don't bring this up to ask anyone's heart to break over the plight of the affluent. I'm not even going to say "Fuck rich people" isn't a valid opinion. But call it what it is, if that is the case.

Anyway, I have no interest is trying to make anyone feel bad for liking this. But it's worth thinking about.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:27 PM on September 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

Metafilter: venting and legumes.
posted by protorp at 1:36 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

On the other hand, I'd like to point out that every time anyone goes on strike, someone says, "I can't get to my job, all the buses are stopped" or "what am I supposed to do about my kids, they need to be in school because of my work schedule, fuck these selfish teachers".

I mean, every part of our day to day lives is a part of our day to day lives; several businesses I used to go to burned down during the George Floyd protests and the local grocery store was out of commission for months. If I wanted, I could easily trot out the old "don't those protesters know that they are just making it harder for their very own communities" line that people used about the LA riots and probably about every riot since there have been cities.

But where does the blame lie? The blame lies on the people who pushed the protesters to desperation. If you don't want people burning shit down, maybe don't make it clear that every single other method of requesting social change is useless. If you don't want people deflating tires or sabotaging construction equipment, maybe don't lead us inexorably along the road to a climate future in which the living will envy the dead. If we don't like shit getting burned down or tires getting deflated, we need to put the pressure on the people who make these decisions, not on the people who quite rightly recognize our horrifying near future.
posted by Frowner at 1:37 PM on September 8, 2022 [37 favorites]

I dream of being able to wreck the cars that nearly run me over, every single day that I need to cross a nearby street here. If I was able to track them down and deflate their tires I would absolutely do it. I've already been physically threatened and nearly killed by these monsters, you think a confrontation in a drive way is going to stop me? Fuck those people.
posted by It Was Capitalism All Along at 1:46 PM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I can't speak to Europe, but as goes the Upper East Side, I have a hard time believing that this is going to rouse people to action or otherwise move the needle on anything.

The "liberal" UES is considerably less liberal than the rest of Manhattan. You can see it how it's faded compared to the rest of the borough in 2016 and 2020 presidential election results. Several restaurants in the southern end of the neighborhood are go-to Republican haunts, and the upper end of the neighborhood is home to folks like Jamie Dimon. It might be liberal overall, or as compared to other parts of the country (like, you know, Staten Island), but I wouldn't describe it as the most progressive place in the world.

In terms of who's impacted by this, I think it's a fantasy to think that truly wealthy people—which is to say, the folks with the power to change things—are going to be affected. Those folks don't drive. They have drivers. If they do have a car, it's probably in a garage. And if, for some reason, they have a car that they park on the street and its tires are flat they'll just call a cab. The worst-of-the-worst giant SUVs rolling around this city are private taxi fleets of Chevrolet Suburbans and Lincoln Navigators, but rich people don't own, drive, or take care of those cars. They're largely owned and driven by immigrant cab drivers who do not live or park their cars in the UES and would probably have bought a different model if that's what their clientele preferred.

Putting aside the fact that we need to stop reducing climate action to a matter of individual choices rather than systemic, governmental, and industry-wide changes, I don't know that this is how you get people to stop seeking out and buying SUVs. I'd love for people to start seeing them as deeply uncool, the anachronistic early-2000s equivalent of MySpace and skinny jeans. But I don't think 70 flat tires is going to do that.

That doesn't mean that we do nothing. But maybe the focus should be on rallying people into regulating SUVs out of existence and getting them out of the market, rather than doing something cathartic and symbolic that doesn't accomplish much at all.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 1:46 PM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

Can we please put the A/C unit analogy away? Yes, they're bad from an emissions perspective too. But...

Window A/C: Less expensive than most other cooling methods. May be necessary to mitigate health impacts of climate change.

SUV: Generally expensive to purchase and to own. No better at mitigating health impacts of climate change than many of the alternatives.

It's a false equivalence. Also, window A/C units rarely cause death or permanent injury by crashing into cyclists, pedestrians, and other drivers.
posted by sibilatorix at 1:48 PM on September 8, 2022 [23 favorites]

I don't particularly have a problem with rich people being targeted and this sort of action has some small chance of leading to something that will actually have an impact, but I think equating SUV ownership with a rich person is just not valid. Sure, rich people often drive oversized, inefficient mega-SUVs when they have no possible actual need for a vehicle with off-road capability. But lots of people drive 'normal' SUVs or similar vehicles who are far from rich, either because they need to carry enough people or things that an SUV is the only available option or because it was a second-hand vehicle that was all they could afford. Lots of people also use their off-road vehicles in the way they were designed for.

I think their action would have a greater impact and engender more sympathy if they explicitly targeted a narrower range of vehicles like the mega-SUVs and large luxury vehicles. The risk they take in, especially, targeting electric vehicles and being fairly indiscriminate is they will piss off potential allies - people who would be on their side. Targeting obvious mismatches of need vs excess in a much more aggressive way would build allies - really, who is going to care if some millionaire gets all of their Escalade tyres deflated?

As a recreational bike rider and former bike commuter, I don't equate SUVs or any particular vehicle type with danger to me and other cyclists. I equate danger with the people driving the vehicle because, no matter the vehicle type, an arsehole is still a far greater danger in a small electric car than a careful driver in the biggest SUV you can imagine. I've been run off the road twice and hit by a car once while cycling and all of those were 'normal' sedans driven by arseholes. Two of those were deliberate actions by the car driver to run me off the road and one was a driver that looked me in the eye and pulled out of an intersection right in front of me anyway (at least that one I got to kick the car door in while the driver watched me scramble up off the road).

In short, I'm all for this action, but please be a bit smarter about it, because right now this just looks like vandalism masquerading as climate action.
posted by dg at 1:56 PM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

I did not grow up affluent. I worked land maintenance jobs which included clearing fire lines and cutting firewood when I was a teenager. I had my truck's tank filled with sand, along with other equipment sabotage at the yard one night. That action alone pushed me to the other side of the climate debate argument for a better part of the decade.

For any statement along the lines of: "Sure seems to be a lot of SUV owners who are sole caregivers of elderly/sick people" consider the selection bias of where you are at. Most people posting here are in general aligned with your goals, and if there is a large contingent stating how these actions could inadvertently hurt them, maybe it's not so great an idea?

Can we please put the A/C unit analogy away? Yes, they're bad from an emissions perspective too. But...

No, I feel the A/C analogy is appropriate. California's power grid is about to slag, and the town I grew up in just burned. While the cause is yet to be determined, other fires the past couple of years have been due to poor electrical grid maintenance. This past summer, my relatives keep telling me of the record triple digit heat in the area. Can California's ageing electrical infrastructure keep up with the power demands of cooling?

I am also a cyclist.
posted by The Power Nap at 2:03 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Can we please put the A/C unit analogy away? Yes, they're bad from an emissions perspective too. But...

Window A/C: Less expensive than most other cooling methods. May be necessary to mitigate health impacts of climate change.

SUV: Generally expensive to purchase and to own. No better at mitigating health impacts of climate change than many of the alternatives.

It's a false equivalence. Also, window A/C units rarely cause death or permanent injury by crashing into cyclists, pedestrians, and other drivers.

Also, one is an appliance and one is a vehicle.

It's an analogy, not calling two things identical.

The point of it is saying that maybe some people are comfortable with targeting things bad for the environment because they do not affect them personally, just people they don't like, but would recoil at something that affected them/people they do like. If your activism ends when issues come to your door, you may not be mad about what you say you are mad about.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:06 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Well, if you're okay with people not being able to get their dog to the emergency vet in time, or not getting to their dying parent's bedside in time, or their kids being stranded somewhere because they couldn't pick them up, or missing a desperately needed specialist appointment they waited months to get, then yeah, this is a great idea.

I think the people who are doing this do think about this sort of thing — it's just that this seems pretty justifiable when you consider that road accidents cause ~1.2 million deaths per year, and are the leading cause of death other than disease globally [source], and that SUVs are significantly more dangerous than smaller vehicles [source]. And that's not even factoring in the climate impacts, which is the main thing this protest seems to be about — passenger road transportation is responsible for just over 7% of CO2 emissions globally [source].

Maybe you think this will be ineffective at convincing people not to drive — that seems to be a common complaint here. It's strange to me to think that it would have no effect — stochastic terrorism seems to work just fine at driving other changes, and I don't see why it wouldn't be effective here. Perhaps the effect will be small, it's hard to say. But people do respond to incentives, and this sort of action is a incentive.

I do understand why people would be upset by this, and I think there is some good-faith criticism in this thread, but fundamentally, this seems pretty justifiable to me.
posted by wesleyac at 2:09 PM on September 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

So were the tyres punctured or did the rebel alliance remove the valve stem pin first.
posted by clavdivs at 2:26 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

A/C Units, while bad for the environment, are also quite helpful for keeping people cool in heat waves. Like, people dying in heat waves because they lack cooling is a real and known problem. SUVs, on the other hand, are something for which people (in the areas where these actions are happening) have ready replacements. Cabs, lyfts, ubers, tow trucks - these are alternatives. There is a moderate equivalence here, but I think that most people would not find the actions analagous.

Similarly, I really don’t think raising the spectre of burning down business is a good idea. That action causes significant damage to a community and is, at least to me, beyond the pale. Deflating a tire is kind of an “is that really property damage?” question, while destroying a building is maximum property damage.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:27 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Perhaps the effect will be small, it's hard to say. But people do respond to incentives, and this sort of action is a incentive.

Deflating the tires of 50 cars in a particular municipality on one night isn’t really a lot of cars, though.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:29 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: Harassment is OK when it's people we don't like.
posted by CyberSlug Labs at 2:30 PM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

The window AC thing seems like a weird analogy to me, since window AC units are responsible for way less CO2 emissions than cars (it's hard to find good data on this, but the 10.9% residential building number here and the 8% air conditioning number here give ~0.872% of energy usage from residential air conditioning (this isn't quite right since the latter number is just in the USA, which has less air conditioning than places like China, and because the numbers are from different years, but it gives a sort of reasonable comparison)). So, I think cars are responsible for something like 8.2× more energy usage than air conditioners. But you have to keep in mind that it's much easier to run air conditioners off of renewable energy — in California, for instance, ~53% of the energy mix is from clean sources, so air conditioners are half as bad as they are in places with mostly fossil fuels for energy, and will only get less and less bad as the grid transitions more towards renewable energy. There is space in a green future for air conditioners, in a way that I think there really isn't for cars. (CFCs also need to be a part of this conversation, but I think I've already written too much of a derail to get into that).

I understand the criticism of "oh, you only think this is good because it doesn't affect you," but I think window AC units are a pretty strange comparison to make for that.

I think maybe a better comparison would be something like blockading entrances to airports — that's something that would definitely inconvenience me if it happened when I was trying to fly, but I'm pretty sure I'd still think was justified, because of the massive climate impact that air travel has — I think it is pretty bad that I fly, and I should be trying to do a lot less of it.
posted by wesleyac at 2:30 PM on September 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

I am out there risking my life every single day I get on a bike and go for a ride. I do it because the alternative is to risk someone else's life.

As a daily cyclist, I would be very surprised if you're genuinely cycling because the alternative is a risk to someone else's life. You do it for the same reason we all do: it's fun, it's economical, and it's good exercise, and it lets you feel superior to everyone else on the road.
posted by scottaw at 2:31 PM on September 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

I think the reactions in this thread prove that these actions are having their desired effect.
posted by rhymedirective at 2:33 PM on September 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

If you really want to get people to stop driving gas-guzzling SUVs, let gas prices go up. Make the cost of fuel reflect the cost of clean-up and mitigation. The only thing this does is reinforce the idea that climate change is a culture war issue, and the only people that benefits is the oil extractors.

This is the only thing that makes any sense at all about this thread. 😂
posted by scottaw at 2:33 PM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

scottaw and biogeo — if you know something effective I can do as a individual to "let gas prices go up" do let me know :)

It seems strange to respond to protests with "well you should support these policy changes instead of protesting" — typically the reason people protest is because they do not have the ability to influence policy!
posted by wesleyac at 2:38 PM on September 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

I dunno, I feel like this is simultaneously an indiscriminate tactic that'll piss some decent SUV owners off and feel like getting mad at it is a classic case of focusing on a symptom and not the disease.

As a pedestrian, bikers in my city frequently annoy the fuck out of me. Certain gorgeous trails are hazardous to walk on because the bikers who ride them are often not at all aware of walkers. I've been hit before, hard enough that I had to limp my way home.

It sucks. And yet... I know that the bikers ultimately are not the problem? The bikers ride where they ride because city support for bikers sucks. And they face the same shit from cars that I face from them, only their "walk with a limp for a day" looks more like "get murdered or damage an extremely expensive piece of equipment."

An ex of mine took a particular grievance against bikers, yelled at them when they rode by, and sincerely seemed to think that the bikers were the cause of all city problems. It disturbed me, because, for all my frustrations, the bikers aren't the issue.

Similarly, neither the SUV drivers nor the kids slashing their tires are the disease here. They're both symptoms of a deeply unhealthy culture. Yes, SUV drivers and kids can both be assholes. But everyone involved here is the byproduct of a fucked-up world that neglects human suffering and its own poisoning.

I am ultimately a pretty peaceful person who likes solutions that unite people, and is wary of "radical action" that affects overall solidarity. At the same time, people who are extraordinarily powerless will not necessarily see people with more power than them as allies, especially when said people are indifferent to their suffering.

If I was an SUV owner and this shit happened to me, I'd be pissed off, and rightfully so... and at the same time, I wouldn't see the slashers as my enemies, just as I don't think bikers are my enemies. If you drive a car, you are complicit in this fucked-up thing—not in a big way, but in a similar way that meat-eating or buying shit off Amazon makes you complicit in other kinds of fuck-uppery. That doesn't mean you have to keep smiling as people do things that materially affect you, but it does mean being aware of the context in which these things are happening, and knowing why they happen, and focusing the brunt of your ire on the real problems at hand rather than letting something more immediately annoying distract you and divert your efforts.

Not all of your ire. Just most. Because if this happens to you, it fucking sucks.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:46 PM on September 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

> the kids slashing their tires

I have seen this repeated in news headlines and AFAIK it is not true. Reactions to protests often seem to feed a ratcheting exaggeration of what actually happened.

A thought experiment: compare to the "I'm changing the climate, ask me how" sticker campaign from 22 years ago. Did it setback the climate action movement? Was the backlash less because the sticker didn't (temporarily) prevent people from driving? Or more because it was VANDALISM? Or the same because it's about the symbolism not the specifics?
posted by anthill at 2:56 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Blockading an airport seems like the wrong comparison, as that is specifically a mass inconvenience (like a street protest). Rather, perhaps this is like letting out the air in the tires of all the private planes at an airfield.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:00 PM on September 8, 2022

stochastic terrorism seems to work just fine at driving other changes

The changes you obtain may not be the changes you were hoping for. For example, increased policing of parking areas and the harassment/arrest/death of the "terrorists" (your word, not mine).

stochastic terrorism seems to work just fine

You would create a wasteland and call it peace.
posted by SPrintF at 3:17 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Internalize externalities.
posted by hypnogogue at 3:26 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, the MeFi trend of everyone agreeing "boy this conversation sure won't go well!" and then moving onto "well hypothetically I could see somebody having XYZ emotion/opinion" and progressing to "oh yeah? well hypothetically I think you're stupid and awful and a terrible person" is insanely exhausting imo, ymmv
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:27 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

As a daily cyclist, I would be very surprised if you're genuinely cycling because the alternative is a risk to someone else's life. You do it for the same reason we all do: it's fun, it's economical, and it's good exercise, and it lets you feel superior to everyone else on the road.

Since this is directly speaking to something I said, I'll respond.

On fun and economics - Biking was fun when I was 18, when I was 20. I did it because I was cheap and it was fun. Then I got involved in the bicycle community, and bicycle advocacy. I know too much now. I don't ride on planes, trains, buses or cars. It would be cheaper if I did. If I want to get somewhere, I'm doing it under my own power. There are frequently times when I'm terrified, and rightly so. Because I know so much about the risks that drivers are subjecting me to.

On superiority - There's a difference between thinking you're right and thinking you're better than. Please don't confuse the former with the latter. My basic human right to mobility is literally limited by drivers of massive motor vehicles.

On risk to the lives of others - I had a roommate when I was 20 who had killed someone while driving. The only thing she did wrong was get behind the wheel of a car and start driving. She had some pretty severe PTSD, too. I do my best to learn from other people, and to make new mistakes, especially not ones that have been made millions of times before.
posted by aniola at 3:29 PM on September 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

Seems like potentially effective direct action to me.

The point isn't to "change someone's mind". Someone driving a giant SUV in an urban area probably isn't that open to having their mind changed through rational argument anyway.

It's about changing behavior. If you increase the cost of keeping a SUV in a city, fewer people will do it. Fewer SUVs in cities mean less air pollution, safer streets, fewer cyclist and pedestrian deaths, etc.

If you had a giant SUV, and you knew that there was a 5-10% chance each morning that you'd go out and find its tires deflated, I bet after a while you'd probably get rid of that thing. Or you'd have to start parking in a garage, or a fenced lot with security, or set up some sort of crazy security system—all things that take time and effort and increase the burden of owning an SUV, so they're all a win.

And honestly, letting the air out of tires is so goddamn mild, so milquetoast on the scale of direct action... if you can't stomach that, as a way to accomplish a political goal... honestly, just walk away. You don't have to participate. But shit like this is how you actually accomplish change. This is how the world works. Nothing significant was ever accomplished against concerted opposition by asking nicely. There's an iron fist inside the velvet glove of every successful movement for social change that has succeeded in redistributing power, resources, wealth, or control.

The Right in the US is increasingly militarized and has members—who they will always disavow after the fact, but hand-hold right up to precipice—who are willing to kill and die for their beliefs, however fucked-up they happen to me. If you stage a significant protest or event these days, you have to take into account the very real risk that some nutjob is going to drive a truck through it, just to see how many people they can kill. If you operate an abortion clinic, you have to take into account that someone may eventually try to come in and shoot up the place, or wait for the people who work there to come home, and kill them. Hell: if you have a public meeting or debate these days, in many places, you pretty much have to count on a whole bunch of people with guns showing up to let everyone else know what they consider the stakes to be. The American Right deals in straight-up murder and terrorism. They don't even put a velvet glove over that fist anymore. It's right there, punching the rest of our society in the face, over and over.

If the way they've shown they're absolutely comfortable waging their "culture war" doesn't justify direct action in return, particularly on a level so benign as some tire-deflation (something that only mildly delinquent youth in my adolescent years used to engage in, purely for shits-and-giggles), then you might as well just cede the field.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:33 PM on September 8, 2022 [33 favorites]

sagc Sure there's room to criticize tactics. But, and I think this is important, there seems to be a lot more effort involved in telling these kids that they're very bad than there is in, you know, actually doing something the critics think is more effective. Cuz, you know, we're still headed towards the climate cliff with our collective foot pushing the accelerator as hard as possible. Clearly what we've tried up until now didn't work.

There are times when "we must do something, this is something" is a valid approach to a pressing problem. I think this is one such time.

I'll analogize to another time when there was a massive catastrophe looming and we had multiple approaches we could try: the Manhattan Project.

At the time the Manhattan Project got going there were several competing ideas on how to best refine uranium to separate out the isotopes needed for atomic weapons. No one knew which would work best. They solved the problem in the least efficient but quickest manner possible by implementing ALL the proposed methods for refining uranium. Once they'd been put in place for a while they were able to judge which ones worked better and scale them up.

I propose a similar approach for climate activism. We clearly don't know what works because so far our species is still rushing full speed for climate disaster. We need to get things moving as quickly as possible, a planetary infrastructure doesn't change overnight so we need all the runup we can get and there's rich people opposing us so we need all the help we can get.

We have multiple competing ideas on how to best produce action to stop climate change, we don't know which will work, and if we don't get this solved really quick we're all going to die. In this sort of situation efficiency isn't even second on the list of concerns.

So try everything.

Try deflating tires. Try sending them flowers and candy. Try being super nice. Try being super mean. Try everything. If you've got an idea let's implement it! I'm not going to try to shut down anything that isn't actually violent [1]. If I dislike what you're doing, I'm going to just do something else.

So vote harder if that's your plan. Or write letters. Or whatever. I'm behind you all the way and encourage everyone to try everything all at once. I'm just asking that you aim your ire at the climate criminals, and not the people trying to save us even if you disagree with their tactics. Take that energy and use it for your own plan. We need you doing whatever you think will work, not sniping at the activists from the sidelines.

[1] For now. Later? When things start getting really bad and the climate criminals are still putting their profits over our survival? Then we may need to revisit that position.
posted by sotonohito at 3:45 PM on September 8, 2022 [16 favorites]

Everyone saying this won't win hearts and minds us right. But it isn't supposed to, it's meant to potentially make it inconvenient if not untenable to rely on an SUV (in certain well-off parts of major cities with decent public transport). To write 3 the organisation:

"If enough people join us, it will be impossible to own an SUV in the world's urban areas, and we'l see these death machines piling up on the scrapheap."

This isn't about changing anyone's minds about the environment. It's about making you think "hrm, do I really want to deal with my tires being flat all the time?" next time you're buying a car, and pass on the SUV option, about making you decide it's time to get rid of the one you've got now.

Trying to get people to be virtuous hasn't worked. They choose convenience every time. So change the equation on convenience. It works (in theory) for the same reason that raising petrol prices would work - it makes it less appealing to drive an SUV.

So criticising this for annoying people? That's literally the point!
posted by Dysk at 3:53 PM on September 8, 2022 [20 favorites]

Yeah, this is a terrible idea.

They should use paint. That'll last a lot longer than deflated tires.
posted by mygothlaundry at 4:04 PM on September 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

This is maybe slightly a tangent, but I think there's a of general tension in the environmental movement today about how much the environmental activism should focus on giving things up for the greater good versus trying to put forward a vision of the future where it's possible to have a habitable planet without significant lifestyle changes. From the 60s until the late-aughts or so (maybe even later than that, to be honest), the mainstream environmentalist movement focused almost entirely on giving things up to help save the planet — not driving, turning the lights off, going vegetarian/vegan, etc. I think of No Impact Man as maybe the apex of this era of activism.

At some point, the popular line of thinking shifted, as people realized how ineffective individual actions like this were, and how much of the climate disaster was being driven by the profit motives of enormous companies, that were extremely hard to influence with individual action. I don't think it's a coincidence that this shift coincided with the rise of electric vehicles, and especially Tesla. There was a new idea rising, that technological advancement could allow us to keep our existing lifestyles, even improve them, while reducing emissions. This was also the era when carbon capture started to play a larger role in discussions about climate change, for the same reason — we can do everything the same way we are right now, but still end up at zero emissions! It's a compelling vision, especially for people who have been putting in a lot of personal effort, and seeing things largely continue to get worse despite it. (There's a book that sums this position up really well, but I can't recommend it without a bunch of caveats — feel free to MeMail if you're interested)

I think the current era of environmental activism we're in is a sort of fracturing between people who believe in the more modern technological solutions, and people who think that those technological solutions are a distraction from the fundamental problems that modern lifestyles are causing, and that we need a return to lifestyle-change activism, just with a focus less on personal activism, and more on collective activism — Tyre Extinguishers seems to come directly from this, with the clear message that lifestyle changes are required in order to have a livable planet, and that individual, positive reinforcement has clearly failed to bring about those changes, as evidenced by the past many decades of environmental action.

But in any case, I think we're at a sort of strange point where there isn't really any mainstream position on this stuff, even in the "environmental movement" — you find groups like this, who believe that even electric SUVs are unacceptable, but you also find a lot of people advocating for EV charging infrastructure, carbon capture, etc. I personally think that there are a lot of places where we should be aiming for abundance — electrical abundance in particular seems like a really important goal — but there are also places where current technology does not have compelling answers, and I think it is reasonable to believe that car dependence is one of those places.

This fracturing is, I think, a large part of why the response to this kind of activism isn't as negative now as it would have been a decade or so ago — we're in a moment where people have realized that the two most dominant theories of environmental activism have both failed, so people are willing to try as many new things as possible to find something that works.

I think a good overview of some of the current tension here is Freedom, Ownership, Infrastructure, and Hope by Eleanor Saitta — it's about a lot of things, but she talks about the good news on the technological side of things — improvements in lithium extraction from seawater, hybrid air vehicles — and about how that stuff doesn't matter without the political will to fix problems that rich people will be able to buy their way out of.

So I think you can look at most current environmental activism projects right now as various answers to that question — how do we get the people whose actions are destroying the environment to change those actions, when those people are not the ones who will be most affected by the destruction they're causing? Tyre Extinguishers is a clear answer to that question: you make people change their behavior by inconveniencing them until they stop. That seems like a understandable answer to me, even if it's not the best answer.

But if you think it's a bad answer — what's your answer? The strategies that the environmental movement has been using thus far clearly have not been effective.
posted by wesleyac at 4:11 PM on September 8, 2022 [16 favorites]

This tactic has been around for a while. Some folks used it in Sweden way back in 2007. Andreas Malm writes about it, approvingly, in his How To Blow Up A Pipeline.
posted by doctornemo at 4:12 PM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

I'm in favor of bold action on climate change but oh me oh my deflated tires is just too much isn't it possible that we can find a solution that *continues for 9,000 more words*
posted by AlSweigart at 4:21 PM on September 8, 2022 [13 favorites]

This isn’t going to win hearts and minds but it also isn’t going to inconvenience people to the extent that the masses will change their behavior. That’s why, to me, this feels like pure aesthetics. Like:

Step 1: Deflate some tires
Step 2: Get media coverage and start a conversation
Step 3: ???
Step 4: People stop buying SUVs? Cops, who mostly live in the suburbs and have a history of acting with impunity when it comes to driving, crack down hard on the handful of people doing this.

Meanwhile a whole lot of people are out here trying to pass a public power bill, and implement congestion pricing, and retrofit buildings. I agree that it’s worth doing a lot of stuff at once but this feels like something ventured, nothing gained. Hell, the push to keep outdoor dining sheds, and the street parking eliminated by it, will probably get more people to give up their cars than this does.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 4:23 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Not sure how much of a microcosm Metafilter is for society at large, but it seems to me the majority of people in this thread who are commenting in support of this movement are folks who were predisposed to be in favor of their cause, not folks were had their view altered by reading about their efforts. If their intent is truly to “…spark a conversation about the absurdity of driving a 6,000lb Cadillac Escalade to pick up a 60lb kid from soccer practice”, then it seems to me this is a cause bound for failure since most peoples reaction to having their tires deflated isn’t going to be “Wow, I should really rethink my vehicle buying choices”, it will more likely be along the lines of, “F those guys” since messing with other peoples expensive property is generally frowned upon in most circles.

As to the argument that they don’t need to bring people to their side, just make them nervous enough to reconsider their driving decisions. There are over 1.1M SUV’s in New York City. They better up their nightly rate if they hope to make a dent.
posted by The Gooch at 4:31 PM on September 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

The overreliance of so many city people on a personal vehicle is the problem, period; making it about one type or size (trucks/SUVs) is misguided.

There are other considerations too: is someone who puts 30,000km a year on an efficient car better or worse than someone who has a truck/SUV but does only 5,000 km/yr, using the truck mainly on the weekends or vacations?

On a happier note, we did a little Niagara wine-touring today (in a compact car. chill). The Niagara area is popular with recreational and touring cyclists and today was a perfect day, and we saw many cyclists throughout the day. And all the autos we saw slowed down and passed them carefully. Even at the fringes of Toronto. So the message about sharing the road with cyclists seems to be getting out.
posted by Artful Codger at 4:35 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

the majority of people in this thread who are commenting in support of this movement are folks who were predisposed to be in favor

Yeah, for the record, I primarily walk or take public transit, have never owned a car, can’t remember the last time I drove, have a bike that I’m mostly too scared to ride in traffic (used to, though), and would be happy to see less car ownership in my city. I just don’t think this moves the needle on that, and I feel like there are a whole lot of other, less flashy efforts going on that stand a better chance of making a real difference.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 4:42 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

So criticising this for annoying people? That's literally the point!

I regularly have this conversation about having prices reflect their true cost - imposing a carbon tax in Australia (which was a political minefield and largely resulted in an election loss) should increase the price of literally everything - heating your home, electricity bills, running your car, flying domestically / internationally, even the price of your groceries - which came to you by ship, plane or truck.

If they provided an offset for something - for example, exempting coal power plants from the tax because we don't dare raise electricity bills - then no behavior would change.

The point is, the end user must suffer, otherwise they will continue consuming the same products and performing the same behaviors. If the price of an airline ticket remains the same, why wouldn't people travel the same amount as before?
posted by xdvesper at 4:53 PM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

I feel like when the end user suffers then it becomes too easy for populists on the right to channel that suffering into mindless anger and that makes the situation worse and makes them more likely to vote for politicians that will then take that suffering away. Our current (Conservative) Provincial government has successfully campaigned on things like reducing electricity rates, fighting carbon taxes, and temporarily removing other gas taxes. While Joe Blow might believe that climate change is a problem they are more concerned about their own household budget.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:06 PM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

But if you think it's a bad answer — what's your answer? The strategies that the environmental movement has been using thus far clearly have not been effective.

I have been working personally very hard at getting people to move to more sustainable lifestyles, from E-bikes to Solar. I have had some hardscrabble victories against some of the most MAGA people in my family, and personal attacks are the biggest threat to the progress I've made with them.

Food and water security occupies the forefront of my mind, and I would honestly like to get an open source project off the ground based off of this technology. I've been doing my best to garner cooperation on this front because even the best projections for climate change are going to be drastic. Controlled Environment Ag (CEA), degrowth, efficient transportation, and more are going to be needed to mitigate the change coming our way in my estimation.

Some of the greenest builders I know are also the most ardent MAGA. I have learned much in the way off off-grid/self-sustaining housing from them. A lot of these people I know that have SUVs have practical reasons. These are not your Escalades, but 1995 Toyota 4 Runners full of toolboxes in the back.

Any large movement attracts dangerous elements, and I've personally seen things escalate. It's not about flat tires, it's about personal attacks and how that works against me and others like me.

If tire flattening is more effective than what I'm doing, so be it. Just look me in the eye when you let the air out of my tire, don't take the coward's way out.
posted by The Power Nap at 5:14 PM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

As to the argument that they don’t need to bring people to their side, just make them nervous enough to reconsider their driving decisions. There are over 1.1M SUV’s in New York City. They better up their nightly rate if they hope to make a dent.

I said it earlier -but at some level, the only point of re-commenting in a thread is kind of to clarify your own thoughts- but I think that the main point is really less to change minds or even to make drivers nervous but rather to make people understand that there is a contingent of people who are mad. Indeed, as the post title says, this can be construed as “A Prelude To Something More Confrontational”. (Sugar in the gas tanks?)

Also, as I said upthread, I remain convinced that the best version of this would be to hit a few dealerships. Penalize the suppliers, not the supplied.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:15 PM on September 8, 2022

Some of the greenest builders I know are also the most ardent MAGA. I have learned much in the way off off-grid/self-sustaining housing from them. A lot of these people I know that have SUVs have practical reasons. These are not your Escalades, but 1995 Toyota 4 Runners full of toolboxes in the back.

People who are living off the grid will likely not be affected by this, though. They are fire away from the major urban areas where the tyre extinguishers are acting.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:17 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Commenting specifically on automotive matters - having a modern vehicle is likely more important than having a smaller vehicle.

So, take for example a pair of vehicles, the Ford Fiesta hatchback and Ford Puma Light SUV, built on the same platform. The Fiesta is significantly lighter (roughly 1200kg versus 1350kg for the Puma) and has better aerodynamics due to having a lower profile (roughly 1450mm vs 1550mm). Both use the same size and family 1.0L Ecoboost engine.

I drove a 2015 Fiesta and for tax purposes I reported it consumed 7.3L/100km which was then discontinued and so I replaced it with a 2020 Puma - which consumed 6.2L/100km on the same commute.

How could the SUV - 10% heavier, and less aerodynamic - using ostensibly the same engine - outperform the smaller hatchback by about 15% in fuel economy?

Now to be fair, there has been five years of technological advancement. Cylinder shutoff, so it runs on two cylinders much of the time. Auto stop at idle start cuts lifetime fuel use in real world testing by about 8%. Incremental improvements in friction reduction in the transmission and engine.

We see this level of efficiency gain replicated across the large C-segment and even D-segment sedan/SUV pairings.

You could argue, well, what if you applied those same fuel efficiency technologies to the Fiesta? In theory it would be even more efficient. But in practice, the margins on small cars are almost zero at the industry level, while SUVs have good margins... so it might be the case (speculating here) that manufacturers can invest to add these technologies into an SUV, but not a small car.

Same for pedestrian crash safety - much of the front of modern cars are designed around pedestrian crash standards (for the European models like the Puma anyway) - lots of impact absorbing foam and plastic, some models even have explosive bolts that pop up the hood as a kind of impact absorbing airbag for pedestrians. I'll note that European safety standards have rated cars on pedestrian impact for years, while the US has been lagging very far behind - last I heard they're still discussing whether to implement it or not.
posted by xdvesper at 5:23 PM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

“Why do you need an SUV, especially in New York? It’s a vanity thing. You have freedom of choice, sure, but you don’t have freedom from consequences.”

I do think this is a real “dumb young person” quote, though. Someone deflating your tires isn’t an inevitable consequence of owning an SUV. It’s a political choice made by activists to punish you. Treating it as an inevitability is a real uncool framing that denies your own purpose. (But hey, this is probably a wee college student baby trying to sound hard.)
posted by Going To Maine at 5:23 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I know, grandma had an oil well or two and some mineral rights and the government PAID her not to dig.
How about we PAY people not to drive a SUV in an urban areas.
The 70s gas lines incentive-a-vized dad to sell the Buick station wagon and by a motorcycle when the gas thing let up, he bought a Chevette and still had the 68' VW.

Removing the valve stem pins rather the puncturing is a lesser criminal charge.

It sends a much more refined message.
I'm not keen on this because someone could get arrested or worse.
it's purile and boarders on facile.
posted by clavdivs at 5:37 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, as I said upthread, I remain convinced that the best version of this would be to hit a few dealerships. Penalize the suppliers, not the supplied.
I agree that this would be more effective and gets closer to the source of the issue than punishing individuals. However, I assume the reason they're doing this on the street only is that it's public property, so less risk of what they do being seen as an actual 'crime'. Targeting dealers would mean committing trespass and possibly being arrested. Just because they're misguided (in my view) doesn't mean they're stupid.
posted by dg at 5:37 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think the reactions in this thread prove that these actions are having their desired effect.

"Desired effect" opens up a psychological can o' worms (besides the double bind and hinting that opposition illuminates the path of righteousness).
posted by Brian B. at 6:03 PM on September 8, 2022

I was going to say something about the replacement of sedans by SUVs due to strong preference of the middle class consumer base nationally, but doesn’t NY have a different car culture entirely where car ownership in general/SUV ownership in particular might be a class marker for an upper class person?
posted by Selena777 at 6:30 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Cars on dealer lots aren't moving much. Taking the air out the tires there is a significantly smaller inconvenience for the dealer than it is for the individual driver. It also does nothing to affect the users, where again, inconveniencing the end users of SUVs is the point. Dealers are even less likely to stop selling SUVs because their last favourite employee grad to go round with the compressed air lines each morning than drivers are to stop driving theirs because they can never be sure it's going to have tires in a usable state.
posted by Dysk at 6:33 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

My level of skepticism that this will accomplish much: pretty high, unless they somehow succeed in getting a widespread self-sustaining movement going. Given that this project already seems to have a mess of edge cases and arbitrary rules, it’s hard to see it catching on.

My level of concern that this will actually make the political climate worse in a broad way: very, very low.

My level of concern that this will lead to some individual confrontations that lead to somebody getting hurt: definitely nonzero, though one could say they probably know what they’re getting into.
posted by atoxyl at 6:34 PM on September 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Speaking of arbitrary rules and edge cases, from the photos it certainly looks to me like they are happy to go after the more “compact” varieties of SUVs, which is kind of hard to make sense of from my American perspective because, as others have pointed out, that’s just what every category of car besides compact sedans or pickup trucks has been redesigned into. But I know these are Euro-based photos so presumably they’re not even dealing with the true monstrosities we get here.
posted by atoxyl at 6:41 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

These bozos would do better, from a results perspective, to put their energy into building support for congestion pricing in dense urban areas, and supporting candidates and parties that are taking big, concrete steps to fight climate change, like Joe Biden and the Democratic party in the U.S.

But I guess deflating people's tires is easier, more fun, and gives them the frisson that comes from mixing self-righteous arrogance, self-justifying cynicism, and petty lawbreaking.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 6:47 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is maybe slightly a tangent, but I think there's a of general tension in the environmental movement today about how much the environmental activism should focus on giving things up for the greater good versus trying to put forward a vision of the future where it's possible to have a habitable planet without significant lifestyle changes.

I think it's also something of a false dichotomy too, right? Like... giving things up for the greater good is going to happen, whether we want it or not; that's part of what we're seeing right now with climate change induced shortages and backorders and delays. (More of it is COVID! But natural disasters are also going to strain the global economy, as is political disruption strained and drained by natural disasters on both small and large scales and local infrastructures have to deal with new challenges.)

I just think that you do better with achieving behavioral change when you secure large-scale buy-in before you start reducing minor "luxuries." Take plastic bag bans in municipal areas, right? I've lived in places that legally mandate that you have to either bring your own bag or pay some small fee for a bag that is reusable instead of providing free flimsy bags. Those ordinances generally work in part because some large fraction of communities agree that it would be good to have to think about reusable bags while shopping in exchange for minimized environmental impacts, businesses have to adapt to provide and sell the bags to allow people to engage more effectively in commerce, and everyone has to adapt together.

Even if the goal is just to say "hey, people are really angry about this," like... I mean, I work in animal research, to name another topic that gets people really angry. Right? I was just chatting with a collaborator who was firebombed as a grad student because she was working with primates and people were very angry about that. I will tell you: hearing that someone firebombed her did not make me less committed to doing animal research. It did not make me think I should go into a new line of work. I don't have any desire to work with primates, but the people who directly harass researchers who do aren't a factor in that.

Communicating "people are angry!" doesn't automatically get those people what they want. Lots of people around me are angry. Some of those people are willing to engage in a lot more aggressive behaviors to get what they want than these folks are! The overt angriness, however, isn't a major factor in which angry people I choose to listen to, and sometimes it makes me angry right back: how dare you! Fuck you! This is a conflict now, and you were a dick to me, so now it's you against me, and fuck you. Suddenly you have a fight--and while you can sometimes use that to convince observers, it essentially never works in the moment against the person you've waded into conflict against.

I dunno, folks. I have spent literally my entire adult life treating my own emotions, when I engage in activism, as essentially irrelevant relative to the direct efficacy of my actions and my presentation, including using overt anger as well as the absence of anger as a tool in activism. Obviously that is not always possible to maintain, which is why I do not label everything I do and say as activism or politically motivated, and why I take breaks and explicitly cordon some parts of my life away from activism work. I have sympathy for acting out of frustrated emotion because you can't maintain emotional control anymore, but I don't think it's necessarily good activism.
posted by sciatrix at 6:49 PM on September 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

and again, this is a European organization working in a largely European context, so I do think it's not a great idea to frame responses to it purely in a US organizing context. I do admit also that I know less about municipal organizing in Europe, though.
posted by sciatrix at 6:50 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah, SUVs aren't the default for 'car' over here the way I gather it is in the US. Certainly nobody in the UK is driving a Chelsea tractor because they can't afford to replace it - the fuel consumption difference would have an older, smaller car earn itself back in very short order. (And yes, sometimes modern crossovers can have better tailpipe emissions than an older small car, but they will always be worse in terms of particulates from the road and tires, due to the weight. They also necessarily take more space from everyone else using public roads.)

I'm also not sure how a bunch of people in European cities are going to stop their activism to support a particular US political party. That seems unrealistic. The one faction in New York, maybe, but the bulk of these guys aren't on that continent.
posted by Dysk at 6:51 PM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

You can disagree with a lot of the specifics of this protest (I mostly agree it will be ineffectual) but the general principle - which I think can be stated if you take it more broadly as "let's make it uncool/socially unacceptable/practically sanctioned to be selfish"- is one that strikes me as sound. Anyone choosing an SUV in a major city in Europe is making a decision that benefits themselves marginally, at a meaningful cost to everyone around them, as measured in congestion and air quality. That is what this ultimately reads like to me - an impulse to not let people get away with a "fuck you all, I'll have mine" attitude without consequence. I admire that.
posted by Dysk at 7:04 PM on September 8, 2022 [14 favorites]

From
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n22/james-butler/a-coal-mine-for-every-wildfire

Malm frequently observes that climate inaction is a recursive cycle: the longer emissions continue, the more dramatic efforts at mitigation and adaptation must be. As inaction gradually closes off all possible options save the most extreme, political turbulence is inevitable. Inaction from politicians is understandable: significant blocs of voters reward progressive climate rhetoric, but it is less clear that they reward action itself. Beyond the political class, explanations are harder to find. Perhaps the extended temporal frame of climate change invites procrastination, or we are wired to expect basic homeostasis, both political and ecological, or merely prefer immediate personal comfort to the disruption of real change. Malm himself prefers to draw attention to the overwhelming difficulty of confronting the carbon system as a totality, both intellectually and politically.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 7:23 PM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

You can disagree with a lot of the specifics of this protest (I mostly agree it will be ineffectual) but the general principle - which I think can be stated if you take it more broadly as "let's make it uncool/socially unacceptable/practically sanctioned to be selfish"- is one that strikes me as sound.

In the US there are 11 famous purple states that decide presidential elections. They don't often have subways and the urban areas are usually covered with freeway access. They all watch the national news and react accordingly. They are heavy on SUV ownership as a family wagon and will identify each time with the owners of any SUV in Europe or wherever. And most importantly, they are all "uncool" places that don't feel any guilt whatsoever if some idealistic person thought they could shame them with threats.

Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History identified 11 purple states in the 2004 presidential election: Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
posted by Brian B. at 8:15 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

One could argue that caltrops and supersoakers full of sodium silicate would be better, but this is a fine start.
posted by eotvos at 8:30 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

They are heavy on SUV ownership as a family wagon and will identify each time with the owners of any SUV in Europe or wherever.

If there's one thing we can certainly all agree on, it's that European climate activists main audience should and must be suburban American SUV-driving swing voters in eleven specific swing states. Because everything, as we all know, is ultimately about American electoral politics and electing Democrats! Nothing else matters.
posted by ssg at 8:41 PM on September 8, 2022 [29 favorites]

Nothing else matters.

If you don't care about the US elections, then say so. Minimizing the reach and importance is fine with me, but I take it seriously as a backlash.
posted by Brian B. at 9:04 PM on September 8, 2022

In like 1998/1999 in SFCAUSA there was someone around Dolores Heights, the Mission, and the Castro that was putting stickers on SUVs that said: "I'm destroying the Environment Ask Me How!"

I believe that they came off in water. Deflating tires is just going to lead to a flurry of SUV sellers to offer onboard engine powered air compressors to self-rescue against this.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 9:15 PM on September 8, 2022

This isn't activism. This is cowardly, self-aggrandizing crime with a thin veneer of self-righteousness.. You're angry at systemic injustice, and somehow think that committing property damage based on 'oh that looks like an acceptable target' will make anything better? What stunningly short-sighted moral bankruptcy.

Want to protest SUVs? Sure! I'm 100% for it! Go hold a protest. Hold it in the city center. Hold it right as work is getting out, even. Or in the morning as people are commuting in. Mass inconvenience and disruption is a useful form of protest.

Actively hurting individual people because 'they were asking for it' is cowardly, selfish, and inherently unjust. If you can't bother standing up for your convictions in daylight, I'm certainly not going to believe you care all that much about them.
posted by Ahniya at 9:23 PM on September 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

Deflating tyres is going to get a lot of these pseudo 'activists' shot (and axed and bludgeoned where guns are lacking) they're working the wrong end of the chain.
posted by unearthed at 9:58 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I own an SUV, I'm poor, and it was given to me by friends (and it looks just as ghetto as a 16 YO car usually does). I also live in a city center, we can go back to that poor thing because that's why I live here. It would inconvenience me if someone deflated my tires. I would be very cranky. At least until I used my electric tire inflator thing and refilled them.
I think some of you are taking this shit entirely too goddamned personal. Do you live on NY's upper east side and drive an Escalade? No? Then lighten the fuck up, Francis (that's a film reference to a particularly immature film).
I applaud these kids for doing this. I applaud anyone for taking a stand and action, unless it's Nazi's, then fuck 'em. Does that make me a hypocrite? OK. I can accept that. I'm still happy about this, but then, I'm poor, and a dick.
posted by evilDoug at 10:02 PM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

A great example of exactly what I was talking about. Since you brought up Nazis, OK, what are Nazis are famous for doing? Hurting people they thought deserved it because of the danger they decided their victims presented to society. Are you really comfortable with keeping that kind of company?

I was not expecting to have to point out that seeking satisfaction by committing crimes on people you imagine deserve it is both ineffective and evil. Especially since Europe and America are democratic societies where actual protests happen all the time, it's not like protesting is going to get them banned from the social credit system.
posted by Ahniya at 10:22 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Did... did you just compare deflating SUV tires to NAZIs?! This is my flabbergasted face.
posted by aniola at 10:47 PM on September 8, 2022 [18 favorites]

This isn't activism. This is cowardly, self-aggrandizing crime with a thin veneer of self-righteousness.. You're angry at systemic injustice, and somehow think that committing property damage based on 'oh that looks like an acceptable target' will make anything better? What stunningly short-sighted moral bankruptcy.

'self-aggrandizing crime' seems a far-fetched description of someone taking off a tyre-valve lid, inserting a lentil, and screwing the lid back on. The lentil under the lid presses on the valve and air escapes. Undo the lid, remove the lentil, and the air stops escaping. There is no property damage. What is the actual crime? Name it.

What stunningly short-sighted moral bankruptcy.

Ha! Yet owning an big-ass fossil-fuel powered luxury off-road vehicle in a crowded city resplendent with alternative transport options while half the country burns or suffers under drought due to climate change is morally cashedup?

Since you brought up Nazis, OK, what are Nazis are famous for doing?... Are you really comfortable with keeping that kind of company?

Are you really comfortable so obviously misreading what the poster you are railing against actually said?
posted by Thella at 12:01 AM on September 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

Do many people still angry about how this won't change minds, it isn't meant to. Print these individuals, and others who drive SUVs, off is the point. You're not making some gotcha point when you say people will be angry and not sympathetic. No shit! It doesn't matter, if these guys keep letting air out if SUV tyres, at some point the SUV owners will be angry but also looking for an alternative that will actually be useful as a vehicle. Doesn't matter how angry they are, at sove point convenience and practicality win out. That's why people should say they care about the environment drive SUVs - practicality and convenience. These guys are trying to use those same forces to force people to not drive SUVs, whether they care about the environment or not.

People getting angry is how this whole thing works.
posted by Dysk at 1:25 AM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think this rules -- increasing the burden of owning an SUV is great, sparking conversation is great, and I think there's value in this as an action itself.

I also think that there's huge value in this just being a visible direct action. It moves the goalposts on what is acceptable response to the IMPENDING APOCALYPSE THAT IS THE CLIMATE CRISIS which is great. I hope a million copycat direct actions spring up as well -- for example the French parkour kids running up the sides of buildings to turn off building electrical waste.

I get why people would be offended / upset / concerned about this, and that's valid. I'm not gonna try and convince you otherwise.

What I will say is this: the future we are all hurtling towards right now is extremely grim and we need emergency level action to save as many people and biomes as possible. No matter what, the number of inconveniences that one experiences is going to increase as the climate crisis continues to accelerate. And it is worth yet again mentioning that the people bearing the brunt will be the global South who are NOT the main contributors to the problem, cough USA cough.

So to my mind, the calculus is pretty easy:

Now -> increasingly shitty world -> climate apocalypse

Now -> increasingly shitty world + increasingly "inconvenient" direct action -> climate apocalypse, maybe a little less severe due to direct action


Not only am I fine with the latter, but I feel a moral obligation to support and participate the direct actions that might (or might not, but with a threat this large let's throw it all at the wall, direct action wise) make the apocalypse slightly less shitty.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:49 AM on September 9, 2022 [14 favorites]

You know what pisses off or discourages potential allies? US-centrism and US liberals or supposed liberals who can’t understand that when something happens somewhere else in the world it might not be about them. RTFA and get over yourselves already.
posted by eviemath at 5:10 AM on September 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

There is no property damage. What is the actual crime? Name it.

I’m no lawyer, and have no intention of playing an amateur one here, but if what these folks are doing is perfectly legal as you suggest one wonders why they are doing it in the dead of night instead of in broad daylight, why they do so wearing masks, and also why on the night the journalist from this article joined them they were “wary…of security cameras” or why “NYPD has circulated grainy footage of a previous deflation operation in an attempt to identify the culprits”.
posted by The Gooch at 5:20 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

There is no property damage. What is the actual crime? Name it.

in the uk, it’s clear-cut criminal damage. ‘damage’ isn’t limited to permanent / temporary physical damage to property, but extends to permanent or temporary impairment of value or usefulness, which very obviously applies to letting down tyres. some examples in the cps guidance here.

of course, whether or not it’s a crime has relatively little to do with whether or not it’s morally justifiable, likely to be effective, or any of the other things discussed in the thread.
posted by inire at 5:33 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's probably like "criminal mischief" or some such bitsy charge. They don't want to be arrested, and want to accomplish their goals.

There you go ^ "criminal damage."

I like it. It feels like where the future of climate activism is headed - I can see more actions like this increasing.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:36 AM on September 9, 2022

if what these folks are doing is perfectly legal as you suggest one wonders why they are doing it in the dead of night instead of in broad daylight, why they do so wearing masks, and also why on the night the journalist from this article joined them they were “wary…of security cameras”

I would imagine they're doing that in large part because they're wary of psychotic car owners beating them with crowbars for stealing their air.
posted by reynir at 5:45 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Back in the day, people wore fur coats. Nowadays, people don't so much. There was significant pressure to get people to switch to alternatives, and a lot of it had to do with social pressure. But also, a lot of illegal protest involving fake blood and/or red paint thrown on furs in public.

Say what you will about the tactic, but there were rich people who did not give a fuck what animal rights activists had to say about the morality of their furs, and gave up the fashion only because of the paint.

I imagine if Metafilter had been around back then, we'd have concern trolling about how these rich people were going to catch cold because their coats had been ruined. Or how it'd just cause more environmental damage because a new coat had to be produced.

Using purely legal tactics is never going to work, because these people either are above the law or write the laws. Back in the day you could shame them, but they're able to insulate themselves from social pressure too, so it has to be inconvenience, because the next step is actual violence.
posted by explosion at 5:58 AM on September 9, 2022 [15 favorites]

US-centrism and US liberals or supposed liberals who can’t understand that when something happens somewhere else in the world it might not be about them. RTFA and get over yourselves already.

I mean, yes, but the TFA is about people doing this in NYC, so on this one, I'm not sure they're wildly in the wrong. There's probably articles out there about the Tyre Extinguishers that aren't primarily about Americans and places the whole thing properly in a European context, but unfortunately this wasn't one.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:24 AM on September 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

I also think it's a mistake to assume that the goal is point for point "make people afraid of getting their personal tires deflated if they drive an SUV and therefore they will make their next car a bike".

When you do something like this, you get a lot of media coverage. The media coverage may be negative toward you, but a lot of people do in fact end up better informed about the issue. Further, you're planting seeds - someone may be like "that's a lot of garbage" today because it threatens what they believe, but in the long term I have noticed that people, including me, tend to reflect on things and can change their opinions. It's hard to change someone's viewpoint in the moment because that is threatening, but people do mull.

Also, when you do stunts, you help people become visible to themselves and you help create a consensus. If you banner drop a banner that says "Nazis out of the South Side", lots of people see that and think, "oh, other people are working on this, I can too" or "yeah, I'm the type of person who wants the Nazis out of the South Side, fuck those Nazis, those are my people up there".

Lastly, I know that there is no really good way to say this, but I will try: Collective action isn't about the individual. Like, for instance, I have been on strike. When I was on strike, perfectly good people who I knew and liked had to pick up the slack from my strike. Perfectly good people who had a right to expect service had to do without. I'm sure that some of those people came away thinking "fuck the union, labor activism just makes more work for people like me". Some people in the union voted against the strike - it is very seldom a 100% strike vote.

But that in itself - even if those people were anti-union ever after - is not a reason to accept terrible working conditions and benefit and pay cuts. The point of a strike is not to achieve social change by making each affected individual personally happy.

So often I see "well those hippies were so disrespectful and that made me decide to join the army" discourse, where people very clearly think that it really is about them personally, and that if they individually join the army then the movement is obviously a big dumb failure. This is not how political stuff works.
posted by Frowner at 6:32 AM on September 9, 2022 [23 favorites]

Well, I can tell you that it is one step from deflating tires to murdering one completely innocent baby every day on live national TV because you have taken over the TV station at gunpoint while punching all the secretaries until the entire world junks its SUVs.

Only when each single SUV has been certified by the international anti-SUV guerilla murder army as completely disabled will the baby-murdering stop, and if your SUV is in any way operable when you register it as disabled, even if a single headlight turns on, they will murder you too.

That's the way political movements work! Historically! And philosophically! So that is what will happen!
posted by Frowner at 6:37 AM on September 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

The first 1.5 children per family should be exempt imo
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 6:39 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I recognize that the main focus of this protest is European cities, where there might be more status or ego involved in the decision to own a Chelsea tractor (... love that term).

Nonetheless, making the protest about SUVs and not every personal vehicle IS missing the big point that there is simply too much reliance on personal vehicles period, in most cities. If you regularly drive a subcompact or even an EV in the city, instead of using an alternative like public transit or cycling, you're still adding to the problems.

If every SUV was suddenly replaced by subcompacts... you still haven't put a dent in climate change. Traffic would still be awful. And pedestrian or cyclist deaths would still be significant.
posted by Artful Codger at 6:44 AM on September 9, 2022

One more little comment: "the ends [should/should not] justify the means" isn't a useful statement at all.

"The ends justify the means so if you accept letting air out of other people's tires then you can murder babies to blackmail people into getting rid of SUVs to save the planet" is obviously not remotely descriptive of actually existing environmentalist or social justice movements.

Its converse, "the end never justifies the means" would mean that if you were to block a street to prevent the execution of an obviously innocent man being railroaded by the state and the knock-on effect was that I was late for work by five minutes and my boss frowned at me, then you should not block that street. The end never justifies the means, I was harmed by your means, I did not consent to be harmed, so you are in the wrong.

Obviously we are all always arguing about which ends legitimate which means and we have all already accepted that at least some ends legitimate some means, even if all we mean is "it is okay to interrupt people's walk to the subway by trying to hand them a leaflet about voting".
posted by Frowner at 7:06 AM on September 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

If nothing else, this thread has proved why trying to end climate change is such a difficult task and may well be doomed to failure and we as a species doomed to extinction.

That so many people who are ostensibly on the side of ending climate change are reacting with such visceral anger, horror, offense, whatever at such a minor insignificant action is really not a good sign.

We've gone from "some kids deflated a few tires" to people turning it into "kids slashing tires" and then to "oh so we should just murder babies then?"

Notibly absent from the discussion is anything about the enormous threat climate change represents and how that might be prevented. Notibly absent are people saying "here's X action that is proved to be effective".

Nope, it's all defense of SUV's as totally necessary to get old crippled babies to the hospice in a snowstorm, passionate defense of private property as more important than survival of our species.

And that's on MeFi, not FOX or 4chan or Truth Social or whatever. MeFi! A theoretically "liberal" place. And here the group consensus is that doing anything even slightly inconveniencing to SUV drivers is worse than dying of climate change.
posted by sotonohito at 7:21 AM on September 9, 2022 [23 favorites]

Artful Codger, what comes first though, the chicken or the egg? Right now infrastructure doesn't support widespread commuting by public transport in many places. I remember taking public transit out of necessity and having to sneak into my low wage job because I was late through no fault of my own - and as a pink collar employee I had the "luxury" of sneaking - someone in another department would have lost the job. Should people drop their cars and lobby for more extensive routes that may take years to materialize, or should we make the best possible transportation choices until they do while taking reliability and the affordability of housing near our jobs into account?
posted by Selena777 at 7:28 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I find myself thinking of this "comic" about climate change frequently.

image description: a single white comic frame with hand drawn thick pen text, text in a box on top of frame says "Climate Change: A Timeline" with a credit attribution to @SEMI_RAD and below it is a single bar divided into differently colored chunks.

The bar begins with:
- about 45% light blue labeled "Climate Change Isn't Real"
- followed by 45% orange labeled "OK, Climate Change Is Real, we're Just Not Convinced It's Caused By Humans"
- followed by 7% red labeled "Oops"
- and ending with 3% Yellow labeled "FUCK"

Where we are on this timeline now probably varies a bunch with each individual but generally speaking I think we're somewhere in the OOPS bucket and rapidly approaching the FUCK bucket. And again it bears repeating that the reason we aren't ALL in the FUCK bucket right now is that MeFites are mostly from countries that are not yet suffering the worst effects of climate change while remaining the largest contributors to emissions.

The stuff that I think probably lies ahead of us in the FUCK bucket includes a lot of direct action IF WE ARE LUCKY. And as Frowner has so eloquently described multiple times in this thread already, direct action is inconvenient because that's how social change happens!

So I guess my point is this: if you are someone who is offended or upset or wants to debate finer point of tactics re: the Tyre Extinguishers, that's all well and good. But it would probably be a good idea to consider building up some internal resilience when it comes to being inconvenienced by direct action.

If we're lucky and brave, there will be a lot of climate crisis direct action, and if we're even luckier, some subset of that action will be effective enough to save some lives and biomes. But it is not going to get more delicate and peaceful moving forward -- it's going to get more intense, inconvenient, messy, and disruptive. And it should.
posted by lazaruslong at 7:30 AM on September 9, 2022 [12 favorites]

Even to the extent that everyone on MetaFilter is right-thinking, the vast majority of us (and I'm including my vegetarian, cycling, self-absorbed self) are complicit in the climate crisis.

"But why are they targetting us? Let's go after the oil men!" This thread pretty clearly demonstrates that if we took down the oil men, we'd all anxiously wait for their replacements, and breath a sigh of relief once our convenience is returned, and we have new targets on which to project our anxiety.

I'm a strong believer in democractic action, and I think the world-order in many ways is shifting in the right direction. It's just not shifting fast enough. So if there are people who are willing to create friction in the present to fight the crisis of the future, I'm here for it. If your first reaction is to deconstruct their tactics you're probably missing the point.
posted by Alex404 at 7:51 AM on September 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

...what comes first though, the chicken or the egg? Right now infrastructure doesn't support widespread commuting by public transport in many places....Should people drop their cars and lobby for more extensive routes that may take years to materialize, or should we make the best possible transportation choices until they do while taking reliability and the affordability of housing near our jobs into account?

Letting air out of a few SUV tires won't move the needle on any of those goals though, will it?
posted by Artful Codger at 7:59 AM on September 9, 2022

yes.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:02 AM on September 9, 2022

well shoot just let us all know then how it shakes out
posted by lazaruslong at 8:03 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, let's all just appreciate the irony that someone is willing to equate deflating an SUV's tires with kidnapping children, even though SUVs are killing children in large numbers.
posted by Alex404 at 8:03 AM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

A completely useless comment that will be buried at the bottom of this thread but maybe that's appropriate given the nature of these acts.

It's basically a protest against the freedom of people to choose.

If you want to target the wasteful nature of SUV ownership, target government policies that make their ownership easy. Support higher gas prices and taxes on fuel inefficient vehicles.

As for targeting oil companies, they are only a business the furnishes the very real need for the fuel that can largely be credited for the worldwide prosperity we have enjoyed for the last century. Are we required to reduce our reliance on such fuels? Yes. But your protests belong in Washington, not the upper east side.
posted by Phreesh at 8:27 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you want to target the wasteful nature of SUV ownership, target government policies that make their ownership easy.

Yes, and the MTA in NYC alone carries more people daily than every airport in the US combined, but airports get huge federal subsidies and mass transit gets crumbs.

Or that scooters are governed to 20 mph, but you can easily buy a car that goes 200mph.

Or the latest Biden Plan is mostly give outs to highways.

The governmental polices in the US are terrible, and liberals are not better than conservatives on this particular issue.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:32 AM on September 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

MetaFilter: somewhere in the OOPS bucket and rapidly approaching the FUCK bucket
posted by chavenet at 8:38 AM on September 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

Deflating SUV tires is about as far from kidnapping children as it is from reversing climate change. We can debate endlessly whether the end justifies the means, but it's a much harder case to make when the end "accomplishment" is nothing more than annoying/harming people who make decisions you disagree with. Which is fun and all, but not exactly likely to win anyone over to your side.

And I cycle commute most of the year, don't drive any motorized vehicle, and prioritize voting for pro-environment politicians (to the degree that they exist), so I'm far from being in the targeted group. I just think it's a very pointless, misguided and even counterproductive idea if the goal is to actually avoid climate disaster. Though it seems like the real goal is more to take out collective frustration on a group that's been somewhat arbitrarily designated as "enemies".
posted by randomnity at 8:46 AM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

They don't want to be arrested

In other words, they don't want to be inconvenienced.
posted by cinchona at 8:48 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you want to target the wasteful nature of SUV ownership, target government policies that make their ownership easy. Support higher gas prices and taxes on fuel inefficient vehicles.

Yes. This is particularly important in North America. "Light trucks" and SUVs still enjoy special treatment from the US govt, and automakers love this because those vehicles generate their biggest profits.

(and we're all called-upon to judge what "moves the needle" because if we're sincere in our desire to bring about useful changes, we need to advocate and protest in ways that are not just performative or excitingly transgressive)
posted by Artful Codger at 8:48 AM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm firmly on the "personal virtue won't save us" side of things. So no, I don't expect letting air out of tires to encourage more virtuous action and therefore end SUV use.

Just as with lawns, the solution is to ban them not to try to encourage individual virtuous behavior. Individual virtue won't save us.

But I do see it as people at least trying something. Becuase so far the result of everything else we've tried is zilch. I'd rather see ANY action than just more blather about voting harder and writing letters to your congressperson.

At the very least it gets young people involved in a movement and that may carry over to other more effecctive action later.

And, also, while I know individual virtue won't save us I'm 100% down with annoying people who make decisions that are maliciously harmful and bad. Just because individual virtue won't save us doesn't mean we should wallow in vice and celebrate the people who are taking the worst possible action the can.
posted by sotonohito at 8:52 AM on September 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

the fuel that can largely be credited for the worldwide prosperity we have enjoyed for the last century

The last century :(
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 9:01 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

but it's a much harder case to make when the end "accomplishment" is nothing more than annoying/harming people who make decisions you disagree with.

That's the thing - people here disagree that what you said above is the only end accomplishment.

Which is fun and all, but not exactly likely to win anyone over to your side.

Again, not the point.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:03 AM on September 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

They don't want to be arrested

In other words, they don't want to be inconvenienced.

Being arrested is FAR from an "inconvenience."
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:04 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

I have a Subaru SUV and and I'm not car-literate enough to know if that's a big SUV or a small one or what. Anyhow, I don't feel great about it, but I also can't afford to do what I assume people want me to - park it and replace with a small car (no I'm not going to cycle, the biggest use of the car is to move my kids around).

I think it would be far more useful if groups of people got together and learned how to convert these cars to electric. I'm really looking forward to that kind of movement happening.
posted by kitcat at 9:15 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Being arrested is FAR from an "inconvenience

For people who belong to the demographic of, I assume, the typical Tyre Extinguisher? No more than an "inconvenience," it's pretty safe to say.

But in any case, shouldn't the preservation of earthly life trump every other concern?
posted by cinchona at 9:15 AM on September 9, 2022

Uh no. Being arrested has far reaching effects. For anyone but the very rich.
posted by tiny frying pan at 9:19 AM on September 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

And here the group consensus is that doing anything even slightly inconveniencing to SUV drivers is worse than dying of climate change.

Keyword: slightly. I think most people know when they are being hypocritical. The SUV attack in Europe translates to pickup trucks in the US if we're being honest. But we're ignoring pickup trucks here generally in order to copycat what kids will do in Europe to small set of imported vehicles with no political risk, while their native sports cars are listed as top twenty worst polluters ever made or conceived. So, why not target trucks in the US? I would suggest that people who drive them empty are dangerously delusional about who they really are, willing to pay triple to put on that cowboy-hunter-rancher persona, and they live so far away too. Unsecured SUVs are safe, no guns or dogs chasing anyone over barbed wire. But SUVs aren't part of someone's sporto-rancho delusion, and they most often function as utility vehicles for multiple passengers, typically a limo or family, and there's the problem. Asking a kid to let the air out of his mom's tires, just so he can fill it up with the bike pump the next day, is stupid. And if not his mom, then someone else's mom. Now we're in hypocrite territory again. I still think the best reason to not do it is that it loses in an election year when silent money is looking for emotional angles to the culture wars, for attack ads, and what a coincidence that we're in one now. Not every emotional issue makes good sense in politics, so its best to first do no harm to one's cause and check the support numbers.
posted by Brian B. at 9:19 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Support Conservative Media
Don't let liberals in media silence conservatives.
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I'm not sure that a source like that is going to be reliable on "What's good for Democrats?" (even putting aside the US-centricism because the topic's split between "mostly EU" and "Lower East Side New York")

And we *really* don't need to be dragging in "what about Defund the Police?", this is clearly enough of a topic as it is without trying to turn it into yet another megathread.

The Political Insider publishes the authentic independent and conservative voices of political insiders and award-winning contributors who believe in personal responsibility, limited government, free markets, individual liberty, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

I'm sure they have only the best advice in mind for how to make Democrats steamroll the GOP while averting the worst of augmented climate risks.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:26 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think the discussion of what the US or North American equivalent - in cultural and economic as well as environmental significance - of the types of SUVs being targeted in European cities is useful. Agreed that big, expensive trucks that aren’t used for work, by people who don’t live down roads that require such a vehicle, might make more sense in context. Especially the dumb-ass rolling coal ones.

I’ve been looking into new cars for the past year+ (wait times for electric vehicles in my corner of Canada are very long), and I would kinda like something that could tow a small teardrop trailer (which would not include any just regular old cars available in North America, annoyingly), so I’ve actually looked at trucks and SUVs. Advertising copy aside, they are most definitely not functionally necessary for the vast majority of North American drivers. (Off-roaring is a hobby, not a functional need. Having good snow tires and driving skills makes more of a difference in winter weather than type of vehicle, and I live in a place where a notable proportion of roads are in paved and many of the supposedly paved roads are in abysmal condition yet can still access anywhere I actually need to get to in my car.) Which means if you see a brand new large non-electric/hybrid vehicle, the owner made a specific choice to purchase that over likely other workable options that pollute less and kill fewer pedestrians, bicyclists, or other drivers. And new trucks or SUVs are not cheap. So even though I would like to be able to get a small teardrop trailer and a vehicle that could pull it, unless my preferred ev becomes available before my current car poops out, I can look at that whole situation and realize that maybe that’s just one of those areas where I need to make a small sacrifice in what would be nice but not necessary, and make alternate choices. This is not an unreasonable ask of your average driver: aside from a relatively small subset of use cases where they are actually functionally necessary and supply chain delays mean the hybrid alternative is not actually available, there is basically no excuse to be buying a new vehicle these days that gets under around 30mpg. Say 25mpg if you regularly have to cart lots of people around.

I too know people who have been in accidents that make them anxious about driving-related stuff. The ones I know have either taken a defensive driving class and otherwise deal with their anxiety, or they don’t drive. (Which, yes, is feasible in rural North America, though not at all convenient and sometimes downright unpleasant. Not having a vehicle would add quite a bit of stress to my life, for example. But I do know many people in my area who either don’t drive or don’t have/can’t afford vehicles.)

In the bicycle use end of things, keep in mind that the majority of people in the US who commute by bicycle either can’t afford a car or can’t get a driver’s license (eg. due to immigration status issues), or both. It isn’t something that many folks have a choice about.
posted by eviemath at 10:16 AM on September 9, 2022

I'm surprised that I don't know how to feel about this. My aged compact car has the same MPG as my partner's modern SUV. I'm not sure where you'd draw the line, or if a line should be drawn. As a driver I'm inherently part of the problem, but as a human living under capitalism in a country whose policies and infrastructure have exclusively catered to cars for the past century, I've been set up to fail.

All I know for certain is that if this happened to me it would be a major emotional and financial burden, as a poor working class person, so I guess I'm glad it's (currently) only happening in wealthy areas? But then I think about how I live in (the poor part of) the relatively wealthy part of the city, and I'm right back to not knowing how to feel about it. It feels a bit like blocking the highway; I can't disagree with their motives but I can't help but worry about unforeseen consequences harming others. That's probably ironic of me.

lazaruslong: But it would probably be a good idea to consider building up some internal resilience when it comes to being inconvenienced by direct action.

Hahaha. Internal resilience at inconvenience. This genuinely made me laugh out loud. Not in a condescending way, because I absolutely agree with you, but in a morbid "hahaha oh no, oh fuck, oh—" way.

I don't know how the rest of you on planet earth are doing, but the vast majority of people where I live appear to be on an emotional hair trigger. The mental health crisis was bad enough before COVID, but now people seem to be completely incapable of self-regulating or coping with the least perceived provocation. Nowhere has this been more apparent* than on the road. I've seen more road rage in the last two years than I have in the last decade. More tailgating. More brake-checking. More red lights and stop signs flatly ignored. More near misses with pedestrians. More rolling coal. More shouting matches. More fights in parking lots and fast food drive-throughs. I have never felt more unsafe as a pedestrian in my small city.

Last summer I decided to take a short walk for some fresh air and exercise, and while in the middle of a marked crosswalk (with a sign and everything) in front of a daycare on the edge of my neighborhood, I had a guy in an SUV slam on his brakes at the last second, and he felt the need to save face by huffing loudly and yelling "hey why don't you drive there, buddy?!"

This summer, in a marked crosswalk only one block away, I had an elderly woman come frighteningly close to running me down after she jumped the light to make a left turn, and she wordlessly bellowed at me the entire time and as she drove away, both hands clawing the air on either side of her head.

I have had dozens of similar close calls while crossing roads in the last two years, all during the day, all in marked crosswalks, or in residential neighborhoods, or both. It boggles my mind. There is so much resentment and open hostility here towards pedestrians and cyclists who inconvenience violently fragile drivers by daring to exist. I simply refuse to imagine what relying on the internal resilience of my neighbors would look like were they faced with direct action like this.

Great link, great discussion. Lots of folks here talking about it, so it's got to be accomplishing something, right?

*Not counting the internet
posted by rustybullrake at 10:16 AM on September 9, 2022 [10 favorites]

the biggest use of the car is to move my kids around

One of the most common uses of e-bikes is to haul kids around.

This talk "biking with babies/rodando con bebes" has an English language video within the video from about 6 minutes to about 17 minutes. (I think the interviewees are based in Toronto iirc.)

I've helped people make that transition before, and I'd be delighted to help you as well. Anyone reading this please let me know if you need help making the switch.
posted by aniola at 10:22 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

But your protests belong in Washington, not the upper east side.

These things are not mutually exclusive.

Nor should they be. Because if the only action is protests in Washington, they'll just be ignored, like so many have already.

Protests qua protests don't do squat. I can tell you as someone who lives inside the Beltway: protests are like the weather. Sometimes you get on the Metro and a bunch of people are holding signs, all jazzed up about going to the Mall and getting their protest on. And you kinda look at their signs, and maybe you give 'em a little thumbs-up or whatever, or maybe you give 'em the old death stare. But in neither case is there any real threat that they're going to do anything.

Protests only work as a demonstration of how many people are angry and motivated to act about an issue. (And social/networking events, which isn't nothing, but it's not going to do very much.)

Mass, nonviolent protests work because they carry an implied threat: we're nonviolent right now, but that could change. Once you take violence, economic harm, and property destruction off the table, it's just a bunch of people standing around, waiting for the riot cops to come and beat the shit out of them and haul them away to spend a few hours in the tank. (Remember all the anti-globalization protests in the late 90s? They were fun. And that's why globalization ground to a halt in 2001!—oh, wait, no, the literal opposite thing happened. Because it was mostly just a bunch of college students waving signs and occasionally torching a Starbucks or whatever. Did anyone at the World Bank actually give a shit? I am quite certain not.)

For a mass movement to have a real shot at change, it needs at the very minimum a vanguard of individuals who are willing to bring real pain on the people who need to acquiesce to (i.e. stop opposing) that change. From there, you can put forward a more reasonable-looking front person who can negotiate. But nobody's going to bother to negotiate with the reasonable-looking guy/gal, unless there's the real threat that not negotiating might end up worse for them. Who do you want to deal with: MLK or Malcolm X? Millicent Fawcett and the NUWSS ("quiet, constitutional campaigning"), or Emmeline Pankhurst and the WSPU ("attack[ing] property in a more organised way, vandalising pillar boxes, setting fire to empty buildings and smashing shop windows")? That's the choice you lay out.

You need leverage if you want to conduct an effective negotiation against someone, or a group of people, whose interests aren't aligned with yours.

Targeted violence, or property destruction, is pretty effective. It shows you have the means to carry out threats. Deflating tires may not seem like much, but it shows that there are people out there who have the organizational structure and willingness necessary to conduct direct action. (Untargeted, mob violence, is IMO not particularly effective.)

The message should be: "we're deflating tires today: better start talking—we could do more". Sure, the immediate reaction by the Establishment is probably to close ranks and scream about "eco-terrorists", but that's just the initial, reflexive reaction of any power structure that's threatened. It shows you have, if not their interest, at least their attention.

Do I think there are perhaps more egregious examples of environmental harm that they could go after, instead of just SUVs? Sure. But SUVs are also terrible in their own right (the pedestrian/cyclist/children's safety issues), so they seem like a pretty legitimate target, particularly in the very upscale parts of heavily urbanized, strikingly unequal places like London or NYC.

I'd be open to arguments that sinking some mega-yachts or wrecking the engines of private jets would be better, but those are hard targets. And as corrupt as the political class in the US and Britain is, most of them aren't rich enough to have mega-yachts or private jets; that's reserved for a very few at the very top (who should definitely be made to feel the pain, but I think their control over society is perhaps overstated). And I'm not one to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Start with the SUVs of fatcats in Chelsea and the Upper West Side, and if that catches on and turns into a movement with the ability to carry out more sophisticated actions, then maybe the yachts and jets (in their fenced marinas and locked hangars) can be on the table.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:41 AM on September 9, 2022 [13 favorites]

Tyre Extinguishers is beautifully subtle and discomfiting and I am intrigued as to how it would be received in certain Australian suburbs. Brings to mind the princess and the pea. Or David and Goliath.

Is it the perfect protest? Hell no. But those 600 lentils have at least made you feel something.

If you disagree with a lentil placed in someone else's SUV tyre because you fear the statistically unlikely impact on your own life for emotional, financial, safety or practical reasons than you might want to consider the far greater likelihood of the climate crisis causing people just like you to lose someone or something you cherish, to have significant financial impact and to increasingly make everyday life more inconvenient, uncomfortable or plain deadly.

Successful mitigation and adaptation is going to require shifts everywhere through the system, from mega corporations all the way down to you and me. We can chose the emotional, financial and practical implications of adapting and mitigating what we can or we can deal with the emotional, financial and practical impacts of an unmanaged climate and haphazard response.
posted by pipstar at 1:12 PM on September 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

But we're ignoring pickup trucks here generally in order to copycat what kids will do in Europe to small set of imported vehicles with no political risk, while their native sports cars are listed as top twenty worst polluters ever made or conceived.

That isn't what this is about. The archetypal Chelsea tractor is a Range Rover or Discovery, both British cars. I'm pretty sure they'd target ridiculous huge exotics like the Bentley Continental GT you linked, but you don't tend to see them parked on the street at night. They're also far less numerable.

...and you'll note that their concerns are at least as much about local air quality as it is climate change. (This isn't surprising - one of the trademark experiences of having been in London for me is blowing my nose and the stuff coming out being black.) A car's weight is at least as much a factor in PM2.5 production as tail-pipe emissions are (e.g. OECD: heavier electric vehicles with battery packs enabling a range of 300 miles (483 km) emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than equivalent conventional vehicles.)

So yes, they're targeting the big heavy vehicles first and foremost.
posted by Dysk at 1:37 PM on September 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

pipstar I...

I feel so incredibly foolish.

In all that talk about frozen grandmother babies in the snow going to a hospital I didn't notice that the people expressing such deep, deep, concern that an inconvenienced SUV might cause harm to the hypothetical grandmother baby in the snow that I didn't even notice they were COMPLETELY IGNORING the part where said grandmother baby in the snow will die of climate change related awfulness if we don't fix it.

Why is the dread flat tire (horror) a dire threat that must be countered immediately while dying of climate change produced war, famine, strife, and so on is something to be shrugged off and ignored?

It's so big a problem, an omission, I totally missed it. Thanks!
posted by sotonohito at 1:47 PM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

If people collectively worked half as had at stopping catastrophic climate change as people are at grasping at their pearls in this thread about letting air out of SUV tires, we'd have long ago solved it.

Oh no, a protest is minorly inconveniencing people?! All of whom are disabled brain surgeon farmers who live in rural areas on their way to save the world, naturally, just like when cities try to remove parking to put in safe bike infrastructure.
posted by urbanlenny at 1:57 PM on September 9, 2022 [12 favorites]

I think this is going to alienate and frustrate people, not change minds.

The goal is not to change minds. The goal is to shut down all SUVs in urban areas.

The only problem with the plan is it's not scaleable. As soon as it becomes effective, SUV owners will invent a device to lock down their tire valves.

Then we start slashing.
posted by mrgrimm at 2:27 PM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

This tactic works – the press is already advising people against buying SUVs
posted by Tom-B at 3:56 PM on September 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

The crops are failing, the forests are burning, ice is melting, the permafrost is thawing, the soil is eroding, the deserts are expanding, the deadzones are expanding, wild populations are plummeting.

Business as usual is a murder-suicide pact. The short term private financial and energy returns on fossil fuels mean that militaries, corporations and rogue actors will still exploit them even if the SUV owners and Lentil-tyre terrorists came together to sing "we are the world". The past and present choices of the rich and powerful drove human global society off the cliff.

If reversibly deflating the tyres of upper manhattan drivers isn't polite enough and targeted enough, you won't enjoy the future or whats left of it.

________ the _______s before they finish _________ing us.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 4:26 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Hilarious how much the Twitter comments reflect the conversation here. Almost comment per comment! "This is vandalism, important people own SUVs, this is a terrible way to get people on your side," all the hits!
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:31 PM on September 9, 2022

(One person says this will kill children (?!); others threaten violence; many say they are "slashing" tires; "I cannot support your movement"; this leads to more emissions anyway dummies; "What you are doing is vandalism, bordering on attempted murder"; "don't play god"; destroying people's livelihood; "I’m buying 5 SUVs then!!")
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:41 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

SUVs are terrible even in a automobile focused planning world. On practically every positive metric SUVs are worse than alternatives like wagons, sedans, and minivans even if you have to haul a gaggle of people around. They are devastatingly worse for couples and singles. They weigh more which means they burn more fuel and do more damage to roads. They are higher meaning they do greater injury to pedestrians and cyclists they hit which they do more often because of their height. They take up more space which means more public real estate in the form of roads and parking has to be devoted to them. Real estate that at least in the US case is some of the most expensive per square meter on the planet. Many of them are so massive that in the USA many of them qualify for special tax advantages over more modest cars because rule makers figured no one would operate such a ridiculous vehicle unless they needed it for business purposes.

And yet marketing has got us so attached to them that some people think that a proportional response to reversible flat tire is bodily harm up to and including death.

If this movement really gained traction, like there was a 50/50 chance someone you interacted with during the day had a tire on their SUV deflated, and they could stay focused on SUVs, I could really see this having an impact. People hate that sort of randomly occurring annoyance. First of course some people would stop parking SUVs in public spaces overnight. Second their would be a much nashing of teeth on neighborhood forums, letters to the editor, presentations to any government body willing to listen. Letting the air out of a tire would become a top shelf felony in 16 states. Some brown guy bending over to tie his shoe would get a beat down or worse.

SUVs would just lose some of their "coolness". Would be great to have more significant choices in sedans, wagons, and minivans again.
posted by Mitheral at 5:18 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Speaking as someone who has literally put their neck on the line against fossil fuels (my neck was U-locked to the gates of a fracking plant and the keys were miles away), I have some insider understanding of what drives protest action like this. First, the fairly insipid non-violent* direct action undertaken by Tyre Extinguishes is an explicit release valve for some of the anger they feel against the urban elite owners of luxury SUVs who are among the class of elites upper and upper-middle income earners who should be doing so much more in their public, business, and private lives to mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change. In many ways, I see this action not primarily as a publicity act, but as a moderating act for the activists themselves to blow off energy and engage more potential members who are attracted to the stealth aspects of protests like these.

For those of you looking down at the lentil in the tyre valve and catastrophising its effects, try looking up at the climate instability now rolling over the world. Think you won't be affected? You'll be affected.


*for a range of values of the term
posted by Thella at 7:07 PM on September 9, 2022 [9 favorites]

“Should We Ban SUVs?” Adele Peters, Fast Company, 23 October 2019

P.S. A rare reverse Betteridge.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:09 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

For those of you looking down at the lentil in the tyre valve and catastrophising its effects, try looking up at the climate instability now rolling over the world. Think you won't be affected? You'll be affected.

Por que no los dos?
posted by Jarcat at 7:41 PM on September 9, 2022

Think you won't be affected? You'll be affected.

I agree, but nobody argued against global warming, merely against stalking and bullying. Direct social division is very effective at electing dictators. I think this could be handled at the family level though. Do it to your relatives, and tell them. Open a dialogue. If not, then don't bother with people you never met that might get fired from a job for being late.
posted by Brian B. at 7:50 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Por que no los dos?

Because time is limited. You think that you have far more time to come to grips with climate change than you do. You think the effects of climate change are much more singular than they are. It's not a town-destroying flood here or a forest conflagration there. It's the slowing of ocean currents, the upset of seasons, the disappearance of pollinators. These things will happen sooner rather than later because people are looking down at the lentils.

Think of it this way. Where does big oil and big gas want you to look?

If your (general your) only contribution to combating climate change is to criticise, your opinions have no value.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

posted by Thella at 10:31 PM on September 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Lets Play Venn Diagram.
Your circles are
A) Things that don't make the damage to earths life-support worse.
B) Things that prepare your community for the age of disasters and the fragmentation and collapse of human socieities
C) Things that your owners ( who profit from exploiting the earth and its peoples) will allow you to do or succeed at.

What lies in the union of A and B and C?

Put another way: in all the comments about tyres in this post, what else should be done or done instead?
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 12:07 AM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Amusing to observe what Metafilter's discourse about the 1960s civil rights movement would be like vs. what Metafilter would like to imagine its discourse about the 1960s civil rights movement would be like.
posted by Kwine at 7:12 AM on September 10, 2022 [15 favorites]

Put another way: in all the comments about tyres in this post, what else should be done or done instead?

let me flip it around on you. Are you seriously suggesting that all that can be done about the ubiquity of the internal combustion engine and the poison it spews into the world, physically, psychologically, culturally, politically ... is to randomly let the air out of tires of vehicles which look at a glance to belong to rick fucks?
posted by philip-random at 8:23 AM on September 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

I drive an SUV, though being British and driving a British SUV it's still very compact and nowhere near as big as the USA beasts appear to be (indeed it's not a lot taller than most cars around) though yesterday I discovered one of my tyres had been let down. SFAICT it was not a puncture, but "No SUVs with disabled stickers were targeted" appears to have been ignored as my car has stickers on all sides (I'm a wheelchair user.) I would love to replace it with a purely-electric vehicle or, better, none at all, but the former don't yet have the necessary range and the latter is impossible as I live in the countryside at the top of a hill. Even then I drive very little (I only filled the fuel tank yesterday for the second time this year, at great expense.)

At some point TPTB will need to recognise that without wide-spread frequent public transport, running on electrified power, it will be impossible to meet net-zero targets.
posted by Inanna at 8:35 AM on September 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

> Put another way: in all the comments about tyres in this post, what else should be done or done instead?

Speak up. Be a responsible consumer. Support climate-friendly politicians and candidates. Vote. Vote, vote, vote. Get other young people to vote.

I would look more favourably on this SUV air-letting stunt if the organizers are effectively leveraging their notoriety to increase climate awareness and voter turnout.
posted by Artful Codger at 10:29 AM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you'd like it better if it was something completely different...then...ok.
posted by tiny frying pan at 2:13 PM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

I agree, but nobody argued against global warming, merely against stalking and bullying. Direct social division is very effective at electing dictators. I think this could be handled at the family level though. Do it to your relatives, and tell them. Open a dialogue. If not, then don't bother with people you never met that might get fired from a job for being late.

See my point above about catastrophising. Where is the evidence for stalking, bullying and job-losses on the Upper East Side for paycheck-to-paycheck wage-earners who are fired because their new Mercedes SUV had a flat?

Open a dialogue... what a joke. This discussion was started over three decades ago. But selfish rich people are going to continue acting as selfish rich people because they are under the misapprehension that they are entitled to say 'I can't hear you' while blocking their ears.
posted by Thella at 1:53 PM on September 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

I applaud the Tyre extinguishers as heros. I've high hopes they curb SUV sales too.

I also agree with Kadin2048 that really major social progress occurs when politicians realize they must work with the "nice guys", or else risk real damage from the "nasty guys", but..

We've fucked up our environment so badly in part because environmental activists are never "nasty guys" and their actions are never "a prelude to something more confrontational". Anyone who chooses non-violent direct action would never choose real violence. It's simply not in their world view nor their skill set..

Although the FBI hated MLK, his civil rights movement succeeded in part due to CIA support, which existed because the Black Panthers were talking with the USSR, a major threat in the CIA's view. We've never had similar threats with which environmental movements could force compromise, so the environment basically always looses.¹

Afaik, you cannot even construct some such credible threats within one country, not without a real mass movement, which sounds far off right now. It's always simpler if some foreign government creates the required threat.

It's actually worse since as Joe Tainter says human societies have never voluntarily given up energy sources, but sometimes conflict between societies reduces energy usage. In particular, a stronger UN could not stop us burning fossil fuels either, because it too would favor the economy.

Instead, there are two realistic mechanisms by which real climate progress looks possible:

First, any government could realizes CO2 emissions is a resource, meaning if they can militarily prevent others emitting CO2 then their own economy benefits. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu discusses climate change on multiple levels, with this being the deepest one.

Second, any government threatened sooner than others, like India or Pakistan, could realize they should prevent others' CO2 emissions using their military. In Ministry for the Future by KSR, after high wet bulb temperatures begin killing millions in India, an organization called the Children of Kali carried out sabotage, shoot down airliners, etc., but presumably they were India's military aided by locals around the world.

At the end, if our species is to survive, we'll need an international norm that sabotage and military strikes against CO2 and methane emitting infrastructure no longer constitute acts of war, likely itself established by wars.

At a psychological level, it's traumatizing when you finally realize we live in an H.P. Lovecraft novel. I applaud the Tyre extinguishers, and news of their actions always brightens my day, but I also envy them for finding solace in this way.. I've trouble understanding the subtlety of how small actions help pave the way for the really essential government actions I describe above, but I hope so..

¹ There do exit other mechanisms by which social progress occurs, like courts imposing small scarifies upon companies, like seat belts or cigarettes warnings, but mostly radical movements like women & gay rights succeed because they actually benefit corporations.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:01 PM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito.”
posted by aniola at 7:04 PM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Mod note: A few comments deleted. This thread isn't the place to argue and/or snap at each other, thanks!
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 4:09 PM on September 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

The first day I lived in a city was September 7, 2001 and I discovered how amazing a good public transit system could be. I had a car but it turned out I didn't need it and I sold it and just relied on public transit and sometimes a motorcycle which was way cheaper than a car.

In July 2012 I had some money and thought that I needed a car so I bought my first ever new car. I loved it. It was a 5-speed Mazda3 and a beautiful blue and so much fun to drive. Ten years later it was long paid off and still beautiful but I now choose to only live in cities where there's good public transit and Lyft and I can catch a train or rent a car on the rare occasions where I need to go farther away. I just never needed to drive anywhere so it only had 32,000 miles on it. Last Thursday I took it to CarMax and sold it in less than two hours.

I love the Tyre Extinguishers' mission and their efforts but I'm not sure that their message will land how they hope it will. For me the climate change crisis led me to make a fuel-efficient, low-mileage used car available to someone who can use it.
posted by bendy at 12:29 AM on September 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mod note: A couple deleted. A terse link to Kaczynski in response to the assertion that climate activists are generally peaceful comes off more like "climate activists are bad guys, ackchyually," than pendantic "ooh, ooh, let me find an exception to your claim," though I'm pretty sure the motivating impulse was the latter. Let's not manufacture new outrage in this thread.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:10 AM on September 14, 2022

I don’t fully buy into this as an effective strategy, but it has at least made me spend a lot of time thinking about what *could* be effective, and what I can do personally. My gut reaction on this is that we need to spend our ability for deep thinking and our labor on systemic replacements so that no one needs to rely on fossil fuels anymore.

Some of my friends did canvassing prior to the Washington state vote on a carbon tax, and they spoke to people who will be significantly impacted by climate change, but for whom any additional costs seemed insurmountable. It is hard to convince someone to think even about the medium term when they can’t keep their houses in repair today, and have long commutes in cars with bad mileage on top of long work hours.

Perhaps they would be more willing to vote for fossil fuel controls if they had work options that didn’t require that inefficient car. I hope our state does a good job of deploying the Inflation Reduction Act money for more efficient homes too. These people should see no upfront cost to themselves.

There was a mention upthread of the red paint campaign against fur coats, which I think is very similar as a moral issue. Should we attribute our success to the red paint, or the substitution of puffer coats, or a warmer climate? We also need deep thinking about what has really been effective in the past.
posted by puffinaria at 1:27 PM on September 15, 2022

Should we attribute our success to the red paint, or the substitution of puffer coats, or a warmer climate?

It's definitely not option three. Non-fur costs existed for ages before the red paint campaign as well. Likely the paint wouldn't have worked quite as well without alternatives, but the change in attitude just happens to line up fairly nicely with the paint thing.
posted by Dysk at 2:40 AM on September 16, 2022

Re: red paint, I had associated this tactic with PETA, but realized I couldn't put a name to an instance of it happening specifically. A search online indicates some people saying it happens, others saying it's an urban myth, and PETA's own website appearing to make light of it in a way that encourages it without directly telling people to do it. (I am not a fan of PETA's tactics, they seem to be more sensationalist than effective, and there is no lack for stories about their disingenuousness. I hear Bill Maher is on their board, with confirms the hell out of all my preconceived notions.)
posted by JHarris at 11:57 AM on September 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Around environmentalists being extremely peaceful, I above spoke as if the Tyre extinguishers were mostly an environmental movement, but in reality they're largely a public safety movement because SUVs kill kids.

In other words, environmentalists and climate change activists never thought up even this benign level of non-violent direct action by themselves!

Around the endgame, we already have many European cities and countries tightening automotive regulations in diverse ways, so I suppose the Tyre extinguishers being "mosquitos" about SUVs might speed this up by shifting the Overton window. As a few examples:

- Zurich removes parking spaces every year, so like if you own a property/business in Zurich with parking then they'll periodically make you remove a parking place or two.
- I've various friends & in-laws who mentioned no longer being permitted to drive their vehicles in various cities.

At some point, I hope the Tyre extinguishers expands from doing SUVs partially for public safety to doing all ICE vehicles, in an effort to support or accelerate the EU ban on personal vehicles with ICEs planned by 2035.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:53 AM on September 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

^ For those similarly confused about why US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement would be operating in Europe, buried in the link one can find that ICE = internal combustion engine in this context.
posted by eviemath at 5:40 AM on September 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Instead, there are two realistic mechanisms by which real climate progress looks possible:

First, any government could realizes CO2 emissions is a resource, meaning if they can militarily prevent others emitting CO2 then their own economy benefits. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu discusses climate change on multiple levels, with this being the deepest one.

Second, any government threatened sooner than others, like India or Pakistan, could realize they should prevent others' CO2 emissions using their military. In Ministry for the Future by KSR, after high wet bulb temperatures begin killing millions in India, an organization called the Children of Kali carried out sabotage, shoot down airliners, etc., but presumably they were India's military aided by locals around the world.

At the end, if our species is to survive, we'll need an international norm that sabotage and military strikes against CO2 and methane emitting infrastructure no longer constitute acts of war, likely itself established by wars.

Yikes. Climate doomerism has really poisoned some people's brains. Or maybe you were disposed toward political violence anyway? I don't know. But... wow.

If you want to know the "realistic mechanisms by which real climate progress looks possible", maybe read this article. Note, in particular, the following quote:

Since 2010, the cost of solar energy has decreased by 85 percent, wind energy by 59 percent onshore and 71 percent offshore, and lithium-ion batteries by 89 percent.

The tide is shifting toward green energy and other forms of decarbonization. Most people haven't realized it yet. And certainly it's early days. But major governments, as well as a great deal of private capital, are moving quite decisively in that direction.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:11 AM on September 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

The tide on personal vehicles would turn faster, and the burden would be more fairly distributed, with a more realistic price on gasoline (petrel). Remove fossil-fuel subsidies, and add a carbon surcharge. Make gas prices more closely reflect the full life-cycle impact of its use. The energy crisis of 1973, and the CA-led restrictions on emitted pollution, resulted in a greater desire for smaller and more efficient vehicles. Til gas became abundant and cheap again.

Realistic fuel prices give people more freedom to choose how to manage the transition. When gas is more precious, people will be more selective and frugal with its use. Some might continue to drive as before, but with a more fuel-efficient vehicle. Some might use alternatives like transit or bikes to commute, and use their vehicle mainly for getting away on weekends and vacations. Some will choose to live without owning a vehicle, and live closer to their work instead of some far-flung suburb.

It is claimed that higher fuel prices will hurt lower-income people who right now have to commute, or have no realistic alternatives. Yes, it will, that is partly the point. We have to become less dependent on vehicles and cheap gas. Something must drive the necessary changes, to make people demand infrastructure, to force governments to provide the options, to make employers locate closer to transportation hubs.

Of course, a responsive government may have to provide some initial support to the people most burdened by higher fuel prices... but if people don't feel the pinch of higher gas prices, they won't change. Most importantly, they won't demand alternatives. Change won't come til people demand it, and vote for it.

But I do understand why fossil fuels are subsidized (and where), and why higher fuel prices are politically unthinkable. Cheap energy makes a mediocre unbalanced economy look like a rockstar.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:47 AM on September 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Of course, a responsive government may have to provide some initial support to the people most burdened by higher fuel prices... but if people don't feel the pinch of higher gas prices, they won't change. Most importantly, they won't demand alternatives. Change won't come til people demand it, and vote for it.

Punishing people is not always the best way to get them to change.

Pretty much the entire global auto industry is now committed to electrification over the next decade... and most major governments are strongly backing this transition.

So alternatives are already on the way. And whether gasoline prices go up or not, once EVs are reasonably affordable, have good range, and can be recharged quickly and pretty much anywhere, people will embrace them because they'll be an obviously superior choice.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 11:46 PM on September 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thing is, EVs don't fix the problems that the Tyre Extinguishers are trying to tackle, they actually make them worse (all else being equal). BEVs are heavy, and that means longer braking distances which, alongside making less noise, is likely to lead to more dead kids. It will certainly lead to more brake pad and tyre dust in the air (local particulate pollution) and on balance, according to the studies I've seen, are fractionally worse for local air quality than equivalent ICE cars.

Big, heavy personal vehicles area a problem in densely populated areas, regardless of how they're powered.
posted by Dysk at 12:01 AM on September 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

> Punishing people is not always the best way to get them to change.

I'm all ears...

The main problem we face in the first world is overconsumption. There are more efficient ways to move people around. We shouldn't all need to own personal cars for basic getting-around. But, especially in N America, our world is designed around the car, not around people.

EVs are a step forward, but it's already clear that we can't replace all ICE-powered cars one-for-one with EVs and our problems would be solved. We'll just have different problems. Ditto for self-driving cars, however powered.
posted by Artful Codger at 1:18 PM on September 22, 2022

We've all heard those climate minimizer arguments before, like Musk promoting EV bullshit due to disliking public transit, or Nordhaus' Nobel prize for claiming +4 C to be optimal, never mind those 6-7 billion dead, mass cannibalism, etc.

In 2021, we built roughly 200 MWh of solar, and 18 GWh of coal. It's wonderful solar prices make a shift plausible, but actually the tide has not shifted yet.

I do not otoh buy Simon Michaux' arguments per se, but likely enough truth there so that renewables and batteries shall remain below whatever growth targets economists demand, and thus coal, gas, etc. shall continue. Worse, coal's EROI likely remain below renewables.

All this said, we're still closest to this decarbonization for the electrical grid of course, but we've so many other CO2 & methane emissions that require fixing.. At the easy end, industries avoid conversion costs by burning coal & gas directly, so many likely need direct refracted solar, which lacks much investment so far. At the harder end, we need to mostly end meat eating, personal cars, air travel, international shipping, concrete making, etc. How?

It'll be the stick not the carrot.. As I cited above, we've zero historical precedent for human societies giving up energy like this, including calorie sources, except when they risk conflict by not doing so. I'll applaud of course if technology and governments achieve real climate progress by working together, making the stick only locally police, but realistically we'll only achieve real climate progress by governments working against one another and risking real conflicts.

As an aside, Francis Fukuyama criticized Ministry for the Future by KSR of being unrealistic, and Danny Crichton similar but less strongly, but their critiques only show lack of imagination in what KSR leaves unsaid.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:26 PM on September 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

wow, that video from Steve Keen was great. thanks, jeffburdges.
posted by lazaruslong at 2:45 AM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love Steve Keen's talks, do listen to Economics to prevent social collapse: To Extinction Rebellion (37 min) too.

Also Climate Change Economics the right way and the fraudulent way (1h33m) winds up technical but good.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:13 PM on September 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Bookmarked. Might even be worth a Keen FPP one of these days, great stuff. Thanks!
posted by lazaruslong at 1:34 AM on September 30, 2022

The recent videos effectively replace the idea of degrowth with rationing, moving it from an abstraction to something more concrete. It is still economics, but more sociopolitical as a policy, debating rights and efficiencies. As Keen said, we can't ration the poor because they already live below thresholds. However, there is their future children, and depopulation targets will emerge as it becomes apparent under "rationomics" that one is sacrificing in order to allow others to have more children, as self-rationing does today.
posted by Brian B. at 8:39 AM on September 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

We've reactive rationing under capitalism, communism, etc. too, but yes pro-active rationing becomes post-growth or degrowth.

We cannot ration homeless Pakistanis with ruined fields, but we can ration the western poor, restrict everyone to 500 g of meat per month.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:01 PM on October 4, 2022