The news arrives with the solemnity of a papal decree: petrol cars are to be banned from major cities. The proponents cheer, the green lobby applauds, and the rest of us are left to wonder if we have lost our collective mind. This is not progress.
This is the intellectual decadence of an era that mistakes gesture for substance. The ban on internal combustion engines is the latest in a long line of performative policies that treat complex systems as morality plays. We are, it seems, living in the twilight of reason, where the fall of Rome is re-enacted not with barbarians at the gates but with charging stations and government subsidies.
The electric vehicle, hailed as a saviour, is in fact a symptom of our decline: a reliance on technology to absolve us of our sins, while ignoring the inconvenient truths of battery production, grid strain, and geopolitical reliance on lithium. The Victorians built an empire on steam and iron. We build a monument to guilt on lithium and cobalt.
If this is the future, I want no part of it. The ban is a symbol, but symbols do not charge cars. They do not power factories.
They merely satisfy the conscience of a society that has lost faith in its own ingenuity. So let us pause and consider: is this a pivot to a better world, or a final, desperate lurch toward a cliff? History suggests the latter.
