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I think the major reason is not anything more complicated than "libs like renewable energy and often get annoying about it, so I like the opposite of renewable energy".
It's not that much of an exaggeration to say that you could get some right-wingers to jump off a bridge if you told them that the libs were against jumping off bridges, and vice versa that you could get some left-wingers to jump off a bridge if you told them that Trump was against jumping off bridges.
Ironically the Orthodox Church has always had a very strong relationship with nature and ecological preservation. Just do an Amazon search for books on Orthodoxy and ecology. If the standard right-winger thinks renewable and clean energy is something that makes you a liberal then they clearly aren’t aware of the threads within their own tradition.
And then do search on actually existing Orthodox countries environmental practices.
To be fair, the church was suppressed in the majority of their populations for a large part of the 20th century. Not that I really think they would have been great friends of the environment even if the church had not been suppressed. There wasn't really much of a choice, unfortunately. They had to either industrialize hard or be invaded at worst or reduced to economic backwaters at best.
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...this seems confused, to me?
Firstly, almost no American right-wingers are Orthodox, because almost no Americans are Orthodox full stop. It is entirely to be expected that Eastern Orthodoxy plays practically zero role in the formation of beliefs on the American right. Most American right-wingers do not feel that Orthodoxy is part of their heritage and therefore pay no attention to it. Orthodoxy is simply not a relevant part of the American political or cultural landscape.
Secondly, Orthodox Christians are not a particularly right-wing demographic. Per Pew there, in 2023-24, 50% of Orthodox identified as Republican or leaning Republican, versus 6% in the middle, and 44% for Democrats. By comparison, Evangelicals are 70-6-24, Mainline Protestants are 52-8-41, Catholics are 49-8-44, and Mormons are 73-4-23. Mainline Protestants are more right-wing than Orthodox!
Thirdly, if I search Amazon for 'Religion X and ecology', I will find a huge number regardless. Just doing it now, Catholicism gets me 108 results, Protestantism gets 63, Evangelicalism 27, and Orthodoxy 22. Orthodoxy, at least on the metric you gave, does not seem particularly impressive.
Fourthly, I'd argue that citing authoritative works from a person's religious tradition is often ineffective in changing a person's mind, especially if the citation seems to be made aggressively or in bad faith. The obvious case study would be Laudato si', hailed with great enthusiasm by liberal Christians of all varieties, ignored by most others, and yet used by the former to try to pull conservative Catholics in their direction. Did this work? Not really. I think when one tries to cite a religious tradition, it's more important to be closely embedded in that group's actual practice.
On a final note, I do not for a second disagree with the idea that Christian doctrine, regardless of denomination, tells us to take care of the Earth and its resources. It very clearly does.
However, I think that Orthodoxy is not especially unique or more active in proposing care for the world than other traditions, I think most American right-wingers do not perceive Orthodoxy to be part of their tradition at all, and I'm not sure Orthodoxy should be seen as particularly right-wing at all.
I wasn’t referring to American Orthodoxy specifically, maybe that’s why it’s somewhat confused. Policy-wise, I obviously can’t speak to the footprint the tradition has in steering the politics of places like Greece or Russia. But if people want to associate environmentalism with left-wing ideologies, they’re fairly ignorant because it has a big impact in the thinking of Christians.
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I was just at dinner at the home of a guy who refuses to recycle aluminum cans. He asked me if I was a "good recycler" so you know he sees the entire thing as moral signalling. He foregoes the refund and just puts them in the trash on principle. I tried to explain that aluminum is the type of recycling that makes the most sense, but he's up to his eyeballs in the culture and he won't do it.
Locally, last I checked:
A heuristic of recycling being useless is accurate for 75% of those material categories. He's wrong about the last one, but I find it hard to blame someone for not knowing about how energy-intensive refining aluminum from bauxite is and how much easier it is to recover from cans and other scrap.
I think a lot depends on whether he puts the aluminum in the trash because he has a heuristic that recycling is useless or whether he puts it in the trash because it's a symbolic way to attack the libs.
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There's one particular plastic -- clear polyethylene -- for which recycling makes sense, and recycled material costs MORE than virgin (presumably because of government incentives to recycle).
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The thing is, from the context I suspect that it's less like the guy had checked how useless various types of recycling are and just pattern-matched aluminium with the rest of them, and more like he has a rock that says "recycling is fake lib shit".
Yeah, I'm guessing he didn't do a full cost-benefit analysis before deciding on a simple strategy he could use in everyday life, but there's still a reason why he has that heuristic.
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I’m sure he’s excellent with managing money too.
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Or, say, get urban IPA-drinking millennial libs to buy Bud Light, or the alt right to listen to Kanye West.
Not many people remember years ago when there was debate about how automotive EV’s will ever become mainstream and you’ll never get people to switch over to using them. Next thing you know Elon (or rather the marketing department) came around and made it look “cool” to own a Tesla. Now you see them almost everywhere in the big cities. My mechanic however recently told me there’s something of an undercurrent of desire among people looking to go retro and away from all the bells and whistles. A lot of people want older cars little more advanced than a decent radio and power locks and windows; and I’m with them on that. I shook my head in disbelief years ago at the thought of “firmware,” or having to install a software patch on my car. Just give me something affordable, reliable and industrial; and that can be maintained. That’s all I need.
I think you are looking for a "fleet vehicle". Its what companies buy in bulk to serve their business needs. They usually have a minimum of creature comforts (suck it up employees, you are on the clock). They are usually built to be properly maintained, but also survive long periods of "severe" use. Think taxi cabs, cop cars, rental cars, plumber/electrician vans, etc.
I have no idea how you actually buy one of these vehicles, but I strongly assume it is possible.
Downside for you is that these vehicles are probably still built up to spec for safety regulations. And certain computer based driving features are increasingly being considered safely enhancements. Like rear view cameras, auto brakes, etc.
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I know very little about cars. What is it about highly computerized cars that makes automobile manufacturers want to manufacture them? I doubt there was ever much demand for computerized cars before the manufacturers began to make them, but I could be wrong of course. Do customers actually get some extra value out of their cars being computerized? Is it more that the manufacturers like being able to easily get data from their cars and change the cars' behavior without having to modify hardware?
I think you are wrong. Regardless of vibes, many customers have been and probably continue to be willing to pay more, sometimes a lot more, for smarter cars, for extra features, for added convenience and performance. People definitely do get extra value from the infotainment, from all the power options, from the different driving modes and driver profiles, from automatic functions and driver assist systems. Not everyone, but the customers who don't get value from any of those things are extremely niche, and probably so cheap they're not going to buy a new car anyways.
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The main advantages to carmakers is that it's a lot easier to make and especially to scale across multiple products and that it's easier to make changes after production, etc, even if you don't add any new functions or telemetry vs, say, 90s cars.
For a car to drive smoothly requires a lot of things to happen just right at the right times, in the right way, like a complex ballet performance. You can get there with exquisitely engineered mechanical parts, electrical parts, electronics, discrete computers or centralized computers (and yeah in a physical way, computers are electronics which are electrical parts, but the degree of complexity and flexibility is different). Having mechanical parts do all of this complex ballet is possible, but difficult; tolerances have to be extremely precise, the materials quasi perfect... It's slightly easier to fudge some of the things with simple electrical parts. For instance, instead of smooth high quality gears and cranks just put an electric motor and limit switches to control a window (it's also easy to make a cheap, bad window crank tho). It's even easier to have electronics like purpose made chips do some of it instead; a servomotor doesn't need to have as much complexity built into it to avoid decapitating a child whose head was out of the window when it started closing. And a computer makes it all even easier, you can start producing the car first and worry about how much strength the motor for the windows are able to push after, and if a regulatory agency changes it (or if different jurisdictions have different limits) you can still use the same part and just change the programming.
The big change from the 90s and early 00s to now is that we're going from multiple discrete computers, which can be limited and hard to access, to less, but more powerful, central computers. That's easier for the dealership to access (according to the industry though, giving independant mechanics access will get women raped in parking garages*).
For consumers, there's some advantages. You can have "modes" that change the throttle response of the car, you can have simulated shifting on CVT transmissions, you can have more complex features for controls like locking window controls for the back row from the front row, more complex security and safety features, a mechnical or electrical car is trivial to hotwire. You can also have features like accident detection that can, on top of calling emergency services on your behalf in some of the more advanced cases, in simpler cases it could automatically unlock the door so it's easier to evacuate. The cases where the consumers are (rightly) complaining is when manufacturers, following Tesla's lead, are replacing physical controls that are easy to use without looking with modal touchscreens (which require more attention from the driver to use). Part of this from the manufacturer is because it's cheaper, part of it is because there's the impression that futuristic means clean means no buttons.
And then of course, they like getting their telemetry data.
*Sadly I can't find the actual ad anymore.
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Computerized car engines give you more efficiency, more power, less pollution, and more reliability than mechanical ignition and injection systems did.
Computerized driver controls I'm much less sanguine about. Nothing I might want to fiddle with while watching the road should be controlled by a modal UI, much less by a touch screen, rather than by a knob or button whose function is determined by a shape and position I can actually discern by touch.
Well, this is perhaps the source of the design problems, not just the design decision, isn't it? Some of the common examples of risk compensation are claims that car drivers take more risks when they know they have anti-lock brakes or seat belts partially protecting them from the consequences, but software producers, including car software producers, also have incentive to take more risks when they know they have automatic patch application partially protecting them from the consequences. Do you really need to fix all the bugs before launch now, or can you just fix the worst of them and then try to get to more of the rest before buyers get too pissed?
If my theory here is right, then computerized car engines could actually get worse as cabin computer connectivity gets more popular. If your buyer can't do an ECU firmware update without going into the shop, they're going to be pissed if they ever need an update, and you'd better make sure that engine computer is solid from day one, whether or not there's a bug in the radio UI. But if you have an internet connection that lets you slip an ECU firmware update in without the buyer even noticing? Getting software solid is expensive, and you could probably save a lot of time and money by just getting it mostly solid and then waiting for the diagnostic data and the bug reports...
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When you put it that way, I guess there's some investment ideas I could probably get from it.
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