Steel Tail Feathers

How the evil empire co-opted cool to destroy American Independence

This week America rejected the next generation of energy in favor of fossil fuels.

Despite the fact that this initiative was pushed by an institutional industrial class of billionaires, the presentation of the whole thing had a flair of contrarianism. Like rolling coal at a national level. Rejecting the next generation of energy was framed as if it were the victory of a great rebel alliance rather than what it actually is: embracing a fossil fuel empire focused on maintaining its wealth, power, and influence at the expense of our nation and everyone who lives here.

It was disappointing to see how, here in America, supporting the billionaire class somehow become contrarian cool, so I decided to do a little research into the concept of cool itself.

I remembered that Matthew McConaughey had rocked some over-the-top cool in Lincoln commercials a few years ago, so I loaded one up on YouTube and watched it to see what I could learn.

Matthew McConaughey, the epitome of cool careless confidence, slows to a stop at a railroad crossing, empty rows of seats piled up behind him in his Lincoln Navigator. The shot cuts to his eyes, peering through the windshield, as a train approaches. He joins the rhythm of the rails by drumming the steering wheel with his hands. The crescendo rises as the train arrives and thunders through the crossing. He continues to rock out as the train passes. Finally, the gates open, and Mr. McConaughey flips a switch and laughs to himself. The SUV glides swiftly down the rustic rural road into the great unknown, Mr. McConaughey proudly at the helm. The beautiful gleaming body and rows of dark windows stretched gracefully behind him. A modern American peacock, trailing his long sleek steel tailfeathers for all to see.

And then, I had an epiphany.

A biological theory from the 1970s, called the handicap principle, tries to explain why animals like peacocks, deer, mandrills, and others develop costly and handicapping physical characteristics. It goes something like this:

Animals seek the strongest mates. Therefore, animals have an incentive to cheat to look stronger than they actually are to attract a mate. Because of this, potential mates look for strength markers that cannot be cheated. Handicaps that are costly to develop and that have real consequences for the bearer, such as piles of cumbersome tail feathers, a massive rack of antlers, or bright colors. If an individual can survive and thrive despite squandering massive resources on a flashy encumbrance like those, so the theory goes, then that’s the type of strength and survivability a mate would want for its children.

In 1899, a gilded era with a celebrated mega-rich class quite like the one we currently have, and well before the handicapping theory was first proposed for animals, an American economist and sociologist named Thorstein Veblen studied similarly squanderous behavior in humans.

He observed that the wealthiest class of people, whom he called the leisure class, demonstrated their wealth and success by spending their money or time wastefully. He labelled the behaviors conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.

Veblen believed that this type of behavior, which he considered terribly inefficient and a failure of capitalism, was a negative and costly drag on societies. And he was worried about the impact on society when normal people tried to mimic the leisure class’s conspicuous consumption.

Of course, in Veblen’s time, there wasn’t much opportunity for normal people to expend massive resources, even in the aggregate, on conspicuous consumption, so the resource intensive acts were mostly isolated to a small group. However, as parts of our society have become more affluent, conspicuous consumption has expanded across the socio-economic spectrum and is now more widely practiced and recognizable.

On the individual level, and setting aside the desire to make moral judgments, a little conspicuous consumption doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. If a retired couple wants to spend their money on a six-bedroom seven bath retirement home to heat and cool and live alone in, or a single commuter enjoys spending some of their hard-earned money to drag seven extra seats and an extra ton of metal down the roadway, who are we to judge?

Shoot, as a father of three (soon to be four!) I have a three row Chevy Traverse in the driveway, and I drive it solo a significant amount of the time, just as coolly as Mr. McConaughey. (No, really, just like him, lol)

Not only that but, like my grandfather before me, I’ve always been a sucker for cool cars. When I was younger I had a Chevy 350 and 700R4 transmission (the same as the Corvette and Camaro) in a 1974 Jaguar sedan and thought it was SO fun to burn people off the line. To get even more power, I rebuilt a massive 4 barrel Holley carburetor I got off eBay and slapped it on top.

Considering how broke I was at the time, these probably weren’t the best financial decisions, but the whole point of tailfeathers is that the signal carries a cost! And I was able to carry them, just barely.

But the aggregate weight of the millions of tailfeathers we all carry, cultivate, and nurture is catching up to us. If not individually, then certainly at a national scale. And we need policies that incentivize our country overcoming or shedding that weight, not piling more on.

In the animal world, the highest cost to building, sustaining, and transporting an ostentatious handicap like ornamental feathers or massive antlers is the extra energy required to grow the feature and then haul it around everywhere the animal goes. The same input, energy, is the primary cost of conspicuous consumption in humans as well.

Since we have been talking cars, let’s take a closer look at some of the aggregate implications of our perfectly normal individual decisions around what we drive.

In 2023, the top three selling automobiles in America (sorry Mr. McConaughey and Lincoln!), were Ford F-Series, Chevrolet Silverado, and Dodge Ram pickup trucks— vehicles that have gotten so large that many don’t fit in garages or parking spots anymore.

Just like making a badass rack of antlers, making these modern driving goliaths takes a heavy investment of energy. Some back-of-the-napkin math:

Using the US auto sales numbers of 726,624 F Series trucks (F-150 Lightning excluded), 444,926 Rams, and 543,319 Silverados, and a rough average weight of 5,000 pounds per truck, the total weight of the top three vehicles sold in 2023 comes to about four million metric tons of material.

Uncool sedans like Toyota Corollas, in contrast, weigh about 3,000 pounds each. (Note: I’d use an American made example here, except that I can’t, because apparently US manufacturers weren’t making vehicles like that in 2023 and don’t like even giving consumers the choice anymore. The closest thing is a Malibu).

So if we swapped out just one year of the top selling trucks for the three thousand pound corolla, as a country we would save around 1.7 million metric tons of material. Using vehicle averages of 60% steel and 10% aluminum, that’s a savings of 1.02 million tons of steel and 170,000 metric tons of aluminum.

In energy terms, since it takes about 7,415 kWh to make a ton of hot rolled steel using a basic oxygen furnace and about 14,500 kWh to make a ton of aluminum, the energy used just to make the additional metal in those 2023 trucks came to 10,028 GWh. From a national perspective, the swap creates enough energy to power around a million households for that entire year.

But that’s just the tip of the extra energy iceberg. Let’s skip the manufacture, assembly, and shipping part, because that’s a lot to figure out on the back of a napkin, and move to the energy cost of moving those millions of tons of extra steel up and down the road every day.

I call it “extra steel” because for the vast majority of us, that’s all it is. Sure, in some cases a five seat crew cab, truck bed, and hauling power are needed for everyday work duties. In other cases, some of those things might be needed some of the time. But for most of us, they are largely irrelevant outside the occasional craigslist furniture purchase or backpacking trip.

That’s because most people drive to regular old jobs all by themselves. In 2023, the year we have been looking at, 69.2% of working Americans drove alone to work every day. The average number of workers per commuting vehicle was just 1.07, meaning that practically all the non-driver seats in any given commuter car, just like McConaughey’s Navigator in the Lincoln ad and my Chevy Traverse when I go to work, are empty basically all the time.

On an individual level, depending on your individual circumstances, the cost of buying and then dragging all that extra metal around all the time may not be that big of a deal.

The gas to drive a modern full-size pickup versus a Corolla costs about an extra thousand dollars a year, so $12k or so there on the life of a vehicle, and then there’s $25k or so in additional purchase price.

Most people seem to have decided that the individual convenience and feeling of cool and power that comes from looking down from a massive crew cab is worth that extra dollar cost. Just like I did as a young man with my overpowered Chevy 350 – or the powder blue Dodge Ram I had right before it.

Me and my best friend Benyam flashing my Dodge Ram tail feathers in 2006

For our country, however, as Veblen foresaw, the cost of this conspicuous consumption is game changing.

And I’m not just talking about the environment or health or any other so-called granola implications, although they are all at play. I’m talking about national security, American independence, war, and world power.

In 2023, Americans drove 3.263 trillion miles. With 16.6% of vehicles being pickup trucks, and assuming an equal distribution of miles driven, that’s 541.7 billion pickup miles consuming 27 billion gallons of gas. Converting just half of those truck miles into Corolla miles would save America 7.74 billion gallons of gas a year.

That same year, we imported 314 million barrels of petroleum from Persian Gulf countries, which comes to roughly 6 billion gallons of gasoline since you can refund about 20 gallons of gasoline per barrel.

In other words, converting half those trucks to Corollas would save more than enough gasoline to finally flip the middle finger to the Middle East forever, to stop bowing down to the whims of authoritarian states like Saudi Arabia, to stop protecting their supply lines with our Navy, to stop going to war there, to reject their grifting and everything else that goes along with the unbalanced relationship we have with the region.

And we could get rid of that dependence, and save trillions in overseas wars and supply chain policing, without even touching Matthew McConaughey’s Navigator or a single SUV (like my Traverse, whew!), which there are way more of on the road than pickups.

I suspect that everyone reading this agrees that our goal as a nation should be to enact policies that serve the national interest, not the billionaire class. Policies that put America at the lead or even in charge of the next generation of energy before another authoritarian state, like China, captures that lead and controls international security the way the Saudis and OPEC have over the last several decades.

But we often do the exact opposite. Obama-era emissions regulations actually encouraged the expansion of vehicle size by making it easier for larger vehicles to pass emission standards. Making the same branded vehicle longer and wider gave it a relatively larger break on emissions, so Detroit (who, of course, lobbied for the changes), made their vehicles bigger. Americans were simply given larger vehicles to purchase whether they wanted it or not.

And as I pointed out with the 2023 American-made car lineup when I couldn’t find a 2023 American made Corolla equivalent, Detroit largely stopped making smaller cars altogether, leaving us with few alternatives if we want to support our union brothers and sisters here in America.

The Detroit and oil tycoons also secured and protect a huge tax incentive for Americans to buy vehicles over 6,000 pounds. A subsidy for large vehicles so lucrative that dealers advertise and brag about it as it pushes thousands of Americans to buy one of those top 3 vehicles of 2023 that we have been talking about: the Ram, F-150, or the Silverado. Essentially, if you have a small business, even just a side hustle, you can write off the full cost of a vehicle that weights over 6,000 pounds— it has to weigh over 6,000 pounds— the first year you own it. For many thousands of people, that might actually make it cheaper up front to buy an F-150 vs Corolla.

And now, this week, at the behest of the industrial class, we have pulled back the only incentives and plans in place to put America first in the next generation of energy and transportation before China secures its place as the world leader and we spend future generations kowtowing to that authoritarian state just like we did the Saudis.

Combine all that with the fact that, as cars have gotten larger, it’s hard to feel safe on the road in anything too small anymore, and you have the perfect storm for the situation we are currently in.

Through policy and economics, our country is quite literally digging its own grave.

So, what can we do?

I believe it starts with messaging. Given the evil empire at work here, there has to be a way to tap into America’s contrarian streak so that the empire is the empire again and future transportation and energy technology is cool and maverick.

It actually used to be that way.

When I was a kid, the only people who had solar panels were the ones who wanted to stick it to the utility companies because billionaire industrialists were “the man” of that generation that everyone hated. And being contrarian meant getting off the grid.

For years, the only wind turbine that stood in mid-Missouri was outside the New Life Evangelical Center in New Bloomfield, owner of the local Christian TV station, Channel 25 KNLJ. The center was led by its contrarian director, Larry Rice, who did things like take a group of people into the City Hospital in St. Louis and sleep out front on cardboard with his ten year old kid to persuade the city to let him turn it into a shelter. Or put up crosses on the lawn of City Hall and the state Capitol to draw attention to unhoused people, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Now, though, solar panels and wind turbines are perceived as the domain of yuppies and activists, fueled in large part by propaganda campaigns led by the fossil fuel industry. Regardless of the reason, however, the narrative has been lost and the mission of anyone wanting to strengthen our country needs to be figuring out how to flip it back. Why shouldn’t grid independence be as cool as a pickup truck?

Interestingly, going back to the pickup vs Corolla discussion from earlier, the $37k in cost difference between the two would be more than enough for basically anyone who makes the switch to obtain utility independence through a solar system and battery storage.

Something that, for most of us here in Missouri, where storms frequently knock out power, would be a lot more useful than being able to haul the occasional Craigslist couch.

An anti-corporate power message rooted in American independence and contrarianism might be our best path to turn this ship around before it is too late.

I’d love to hear what you think and, as always, please share with anyone you think might be interested in what we are talking about here!

Lucas