“Three blasts for woke walkers!”
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… ironically, I can’t imagine finding a place in downtown Cheyenne would be that hard 
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Speaking for myself, I’d offer your co-worker an alternative conspiracy theory regarding 15-minute cities… one that makes more sense: The climate lockdown theory was created and “deployed” by the car and gas industries which would suffer financially if such cities came to be. Help this theory get some traction by telling your co-worker that you’ve been hearing a lot of chatter everywhere about it and that she/he should spread the word. Two directly competing conspiracy theories. Let them fight. 
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unfortunately they’d probably agree with you, and go on about how the (((cabal))) has the secret to clean energy and refuses to share because they want to destroy the planet
individual actions never accumulate into consequences ( ie. driving isn’t the problem, racial bias doesn’t become systemic, etc ) it’s always some evil group of masterminds to blame
a wonderfully comforting worldview i think for people who can’t face the complexity of the good and the bad aspects of human life
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The best part is, Oxford (being based on a medieval street plan), already has areas that have everything you need within 15 mins. As do most cities in the UK.
(Well, until the tories fucked up the the NHS so bad, that while my local GPs office is less than five minutes walk, I can’t actually get an appointment there any sooner than one month away).
There seems to be this weird trend of British nutjobs importing conspiracy theories from the US wholesale, without bothering to check if they’re actually relevant here.
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This is one of those moments I really need to add a disclaimer, because I’m going to be talking about things much closer to work. So yes, all of my opinions on this are strictly my own and I don’t speak for my employer. I’ve occasionally mentioned I work in community development and my degree is in planning, well our city adopted a 15 minute framework. We’ve also started to make some incredibly modest changes. This caught the eye of a few hard right media figures and as a result we’ve had death threats against a few members of the planning staff, including from D list Hollywood actors. Security has been stepped up at work (this could be unrelated). This is the continuation of a lot of earlier agenda 21 scares, that lead the same people to break onto campus when I was in school and make threats.
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I don’t think they need to explicitly. Those interests already fund so very, very much. Just as an example all the midafternoon/early evening radio shows are called some variation of “drivetime” here, even on the classical music channel whose audience… well lets just say it’s not a commuting demographic. This is where the agenda and political discourse is set. It’s framed around cars, and ignores bus commuters for example. We have regular traffic reports provided as a service by the AA - who are in the car industry, and regular updates from their spokesperson, a full-time car industry lobbyist. So when we have a vox pop on the Sunday morning politics show 9 out of 10 say solely, or most of what they say as the big problem “diesel”. Now not everyone drinks diesel. Everyone needs to cook and heat, everyone needs to eat, they are up c.40% in my experience (with a government subsidy which offsets the electricity and gas - a subsidy to fossil fuel profits) but not one for food, the most essential one of all.
They have already won the debate because it never happened and it never does. This is hegemony. And car culture, I have long said, is a real weapon for hard right hegemony.
Once they have control of the discourse, presenting urban planning which prioritises people over cars is an assault on liberty. A lot of people in Ireland, and I guess more in the US, live in isolated houses. They are cheap to buy whereas you pay a premium to live in a connected community. The problem is that they want to externalise the costs of their one off, unplanned, housing by making us pay for their diesel, their broadband and expensive connections to services. As such they are in perfect alignment with the car/fossil fuel industries which also seek to externalise their costs onto the citizens/taxpayers/people of the world.
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Unsurprised face here after their shenanigans during Covid:
Anti-mask, anti-lockdown, and anti-vax - even after the idiot was hospitalised when he caught it… 
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Insert gif of Lewis Black shaking his head going “Blurdleblurdle, What?!”
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