In March 2014, a volunteer for Deep Green Resistance created a photo collage titled “Greenwashing & False Solutions.” The image showed an array of solar panels, a landscape dotted with wind turbines, and a Nissan Leaf electric car on a showroom floor, and was made using photographs found on the internet.

The collage was superimposed with text reading “A ‘greener’ industrialism (if such a thing is even possible) will not save the world. Green capitalism is an illusion.” The collage was made for printing as a poster and sharing online, and meant to convey the Deep Green perspective that so-called “green technology” is not effective at stopping the destruction of the planet.

In recent weeks, Deep Green Resistance received a copyright notification from PicRights, asking us to pay hundreds of dollars and to take down this image from our websites.

That Nissan’s corporate schill has the gall to send such a letter—especially given well-established “fair-use” doctrine in copyright law, that allows for and encourages the use of copyrighted work for the purpose of critique, is a sign that they are afraid of these critiques. Nissan is a $176 billion global corporation and needs to suppress legitimate critique of its slavery and ecocide-based vehicles in order to maintain “green” illusions.

That we are forced to comply with this letter and take down the image (we are NOT paying them) is the result of our poverty and lack of affordable legal representation in the colonial court system, not our capitulation to courtroom bullies. It is a strategic move to preserve what finances we do have for coming fights, rather than to focus on one unimportant image. We will never stop speaking out against greenwashing and for total liberation from the extractive industrial civilization that dominates our planet.

Electric cars are not good for the planet. They contribute to car culture and both require and drive future demand for more roads, more parking lots, and more sprawl. It’s expected that 800 million more cars will be added to the current global fleet of more than 1.2 billion by 2035.

Currently, not many more than 3 million of those are electric cars. However, as this is expected to explode over the coming decades, materials impacts of all these new cars will be a major issue. A recent article, for example, looks at “the spiraling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction.” The article tells stories of exponential demand increases for electric car batteries causing the poisoning of rivers in Tibet, massive water use for mining in the Chilean desert, “inevitable” soil contamination, and more.

Cobalt, another key ingredient in electric car batteries, is “uniquely terrible,” extracted almost universally in The Congo—often by children and others working in slave-like conditions under a corrupt neo-colonial corporate state serving global corporations.

We are against gas cars, electric cars, all cars. We are against Nissan and all global corporations. We are against the capitalist economic system and all the imperialistic countries that promote it — even those that name themselves “communist” or “socialist.” We are opposed to toxic economic globalization and consumerism. In order to be on the side of the planet, the side of the poor, the side of continued existence on this planet, we reject all these things and call for a revolutionary environmental movement that dismantles these systems using any means necessary.