Saudis have oil, but they have also bought significant share of US economy. They are minority owners in Twitter and many other businesses.

Employee* Jamal Kashoggi.

There is a good movie called Dissident on it.

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.

Or something about forest and trees, your pick.

Perfect is the enemy of good, etc.

Using less is better than using more. 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.

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.

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?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-16/saudi-ara...

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.