The Great Driving Right Show: Cars, Climate Collapse and the Inverted Crisis

How the far right rises through climate conspiracism and pro-car politics.

Apocalypse is in the air. And the far right knows it. Since the pandemic, it has successfully cultivated crises, conspiracy theories, and coalitions to fight a green energy transition. Mobilising online and in the streets, far-right actors cast decarbonisation measures as a ‘war on cars’ endangering individual liberty, the nuclear family, the nation, and western civilisation.

In The Great Driving Right Show, the Zetkin Collective traces the evolution of these conflicts and shows how, as the climate crisis worsens, the political right constructs an ‘inverted crisis’ in which climate action – not climate change – represents the gravest existential threat. Rising through this shared strategy are movements and parties from anti-road-pricing saboteurs, ‘freedom’ convoys and farmers’ protests, to the Trump-led opposition to electric vehicles. Powering such actors are not only fossil-fuel and automobile interests, but an ever-expanding cycle of moral panics about climate and racial justice protesters, trans people, and migrants.

With the planet at stake, we must confront the new climate denialism and the violent mobility regime fuelling the rise of fossil fascism.

The Zetkin Collective is a ecosocialist group of scholars and activists. Their first book was White Skin Black Fuel: On the Dangers of Fossil Facism, coauthored with Andreas Malm. Four of the collective's current members are the authors for this book: William Callison is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, CUNY. George Edwards is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. Jacob McLean is a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Tatjana Söding is a human ecologist and climate justice writer based in Berlin.