The stories from that place in past years and their consistency... How workers or nannies are treated like literal slaves, sanctioned or not (or at least out in plain sight and completely unpunished). Nepalis, Philipinos and similar nationalities with 0 possibilities to defend themselves, and often even run away since passports were forcibly taken.
That place has absolutely nothing in common with western morals and mindset, rather being few centuries behind. Think about it next time you buy any product from there (and good luck with oil obviously, so this crap falls on most of us in tiny pieces).
But I guess military bases there trump some pesky human rights, as long as they are not westerners.
To put Saudi power into perspective: MBS hacked Jeff Bezos's phone by personally sending him a compromising link, killed one of his employers, and and Bezos prohibited the release of the documentary about the killing in Amazon Prime.
Saudis have oil, but they have also bought significant share of US economy. They are minority owners in Twitter and many other businesses.
> The film struggled to find a distributor for eight months and was not able to run on a large streaming platform like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. It is widely believed this was due to those platforms' fear of offending the Saudi Arabian government and possibly losing subscribers.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dissident#Alleged_manipula...
"Western morals"?! Those same western morals which awarded the recent soccer world cup to Qatar in spite of pre-existing, regular, un-changed trend of deaths of labour workers? The entire Gulf Arabia has had a long-established culture where labourers, "… workers or nannies are treated like literal slaves, sanctioned or not…"
Thousands died over the course of the construction of the entire infrastructure for the World Cup. Every country that participated in the World Cup played on the graves of the dead.
Is it "western morals" to patronise death by physical abuse, to play on the graves of the dead?
By the way, many countries and peoples are still waiting for the "western morals" to bear forth apologies and compensation for the African/Atlantic slave trade.
Calm down your righteous emotions by few notches, few corrupt (technically or morally) people in places like FIFA et al don't represent western overall values. The fact you can freely bash them without consequences like lashing to death or public beheading (or just cut to pieces when renewing your passport) is a testament to this.
Unless your EV is powered by 100% renewables and you completely avoid plastic products somehow you're probably still consuming it in some way. Ethical consumption isn't really possible in today's world, unfortunately. Nearly anything you touch is the result of slave labor or human rights abuses somewhere.
> Buying as ethically as you are reasonably able to do is better than not trying to buy ethically at all.
I'm not suggesting at all to do the latter - merely pointing out that the GP comment seemed to be under the impression that purchasing an EV vehicle was avoiding saudi oil. Many people are under similar impressions about their consumption choices. Being aware of the consequences of your choices is just as important.
Its avoiding a lot of Saudi oil. A 25mpg car over 150,000mi will go through 6,000gal of gasoline. That's ~308 barrels of oil just for the energy of moving the car.
A car will have ~400lbs of plastic parts. You'd need like 3.9 barrels of oil to make that plastic. Both a gas car and an EV will need this plastic.
You're going to use almost 100x as much oil driving the car around than the plastics in the car. A 100x reduction in oil use is significant. Quit pushing lies about how EVs still use a significant amount of oil, as if they're pretty much the same. Either you should be aware of the falsehoods you're suggesting or you need to be informed.
And no, the energy generation for an EV isn't anywhere near as significant as the oil use for burning in an ICE. In most modern grids a lot of that energy is going to come from locally produced natural gas, maybe still coal, some nuclear, and a decent chunk of renewables. Burning oil isn't that massive of an overall electricity source.
It's still significantly reducing the amount of Saudi oil and support of global oil prices to drive an EV. The inability to make a perfect choice shouldn't mean you can't make any choice at all; if you're needing to pick either product A or B but product A is knowingly worse than B despite B still having some bad externalities you should probably pick B!
You'd have to really look deep to find oil for the electricity generated in my area. Practically have to talk about the insulation on the wires in my home or the lubricants on the turbines. It's practically all natural gas, wind, and solar powering my EV.
> Think about it next time you buy any product from there
Avoid buying would be to avoid making new debt obligations. But there are already a ton of debt obligations. When the US pays interest on the debt owed, would you consider that buying? Do you think the US should default on the debt owed?
> That place has absolutely nothing in common with western morals and mindset
That's why we support them militarily and send them F-16s /s.
There are no "western morals" there is only power and money. The actions of our politicians and corporate overlords show that they support everything Saudi Arabia does.
That place has absolutely nothing in common with western morals and mindset, rather being few centuries behind. Think about it next time you buy any product from there (and good luck with oil obviously, so this crap falls on most of us in tiny pieces).
But I guess military bases there trump some pesky human rights, as long as they are not westerners.