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Elon Musk: 'We Need a Revolt Against the Fossil Fuel Industry' (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla's chief executive Elon Musk has accused politicians of bowing to the "unrelenting and enormous" lobbying power of the fossil fuel industry, warning that a global "revolt" may be needed to accelerate the transition to more sustainable energy and transport systems. Speaking at the World Energy Innovation Forum at the Tesla Factory in California, Musk claimed that traditional vehicles and energy sources will continue to hold a competitive edge against greener alternatives due to the vast amounts of subsidies they receive. The solution to this energy dilemma, Musk says, is to introduce a price on carbon by defining a tax rate on greenhouse gas emissions or the carbon content of fossil fuels. "The fundamental issue with fossil fuels is that every use comes with a subsidy," Musk said. "Every gasoline car on the road has a subsidy, and the right way to address that is with a carbon tax. Politicians take the easy path of providing subsidies to electric vehicles, which aren't equal to the applied subsidies of gasoline vehicles. It weakens the economic forcing function to transition to sustainable transport and energy."
all the massive subsidies that solar/wind get? How about we remove subsidies from ALL and then wait and see what and who can stand on their own?
Just to make sure I'm reading this right . . . did I get it that Elon Musk is complaining about subsidies that OTHER companies get? Has he read his own financials? His company wouldn't exist without subsidies.
The only thing unsustainable here is Tesla's GAAP negative cash flows
We need a revolt against Industry. Full stop.
It is impossible to have big government and NOT have a government which is controlled by special interests. The incentive to engage in corruption is simply too high.
I agree. We should kick the fossil fuel habit, and I'm cool with the electric movement. But hearing about the moral imperative of it from Musk is somewhat akin to late-century churches being exhorted to abstain from the evils of alcoholic communion wine by Thomas Welch. You know, the one selling the solution.
Let's do dis!!
Elon, that's how the free market works: the government gives a legal and monetary edge to giant multinational corporations. Taxing and regulating those same companies? That's evil Liberal gun-taking away reverse racism SJW talk and you need to smarten the F up, sir.
I generally like Musk, but this is bullshit. As someone said years before on Slashdot, "carbon credits" or any sort of carbon tax is nothing more than a scam by the ultra rich to make you and me live like bugs.
Why not just end the fossil fuel subsidies? Why must the answer *always* be to further tax the consumers?
How about we remove subsidies from ALL and then wait and see what and who can stand on their own?
Yes. That's what he's suggesting. Get rid of subsidies and implement a carbon tax. Let the market rather than the politicians decide which alternatives to support and which will fail. If you make the carbon tax revenue neutral then you can reduce income and sales tax - two things we ought to be encouraging rather than taxing.
Fuck off, you Big Government power grabbing, progressive hippie.
When will people realise that batteries deplete and become useless after just a few years?!
Of course Elon will want a revolt against fossil fuels, so people go out and buy his battery-powered cars instead.
He may not be wrong but he's selling electric cars and batteries, he's not exactly impartial.
How about a carbon tax on old-fashioned tech companies who require their staff to commute to work when telecommuting would suffice? Especially in areas underserved by public transportation.
While I agree with his position, the method is (IMHO) wrong. What Elon is requesting is that the government take away from fossil fuel subsidies by a post-facto tax on awarded monies. The inefficiencies of administrative churn will impose a longer time to balancing energy subsidies. A more straight forward solution would be to simply mandate that the sum of all non-renewable energy subsides on a per joule basis be strictly less than the aggregate renewable energy subsidies with a monotonically decreasing non-renewable to renewable subsidy ratio over time. Let the administration have control of the ratio co-factor in order to satisfy the pork belly constituencies.
Of course nothing like this will ever happen as governments do not like reasonable solutions and will always look to laws that only create an appearance of solving the problem so that future
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Methane cracking tech (carbon capture breakthrough):
http://www.chemicalprocessing.com/articles/2015/researchers-crack-methane-cracking/
http://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2015_139_crack-it-energy-from-a-fossil-fuel-without-carbon-di-oxide.php
Relative energy subsidies:
http://www.theenergycollective.com/alextrembath/2227161/fossil-fuel-subsidy-red-herring
Advanced high temperature nuclear for industrial processes and rapid carbon-free deployment (could get CAPEX below $1/watt):
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Martingale-reveals-its-ThorCon-liquid-fuel-reactor-design-07011501.html
Near affordable seawater extraction for uranium:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/04/nearing-affordable-extraction-of.html
Carbon-neutral fuel from seawater:
https://bravenewclimate.com/2013/01/16/zero-emission-synfuel-from-seawater/
Coming up later - short hair is the in thing, claims barber.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The only way your business can be a success is if you use the police power of the government to take out your competitors.
Rubbish.
Because the "fossil fuel subsidies" that you keep hearing about are the standard tax deductions on capital investments that every company has access to.
Nope, the "fossil fuel subsitdies" are the free military escorts that oil tankers get. They are the federal officials who guard oil pipelines and transfer facilities. We all pay for this military and police protection for valuable oil
How does he think he\ll colonize Mars? Electric rockets?
Carbon tax hurts _you_, the consumer, not companies who are passing their costs to you. It also tends to harm the poorer areas who have less income. People in the Ozarks who rely on coal plants don't have the extra income to tax and pay for replacement power plants.
Shaping society with a hammer does not work, it has never worked. Carbon tax is a huge hammer. The working alternative is public funding through merit based incremental updates. That method is how we achieved national coverage for railroads, automobiles, etc..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"Every gasoline car on the road has a subsidy, and the right way to address that is with a carbon tax. Politicians take the easy path of providing subsidies to electric vehicles, which aren't equal to the applied subsidies of gasoline vehicles. It weakens the economic forcing function to transition to sustainable transport and energy."
The "right way" is to eliminate all the subsidies, then only have taxes based on the known effect on the environment, based on current scientific understanding.
Note that all known energy sources come with some cost to the environment. Gasoline, Diesel, Coal, Solar (from panel manufacturing), Wind (manufacturing), Nuclear, Electric/Battery (Battery rare materials, energy source (Coal, Nuclear, Solar ?). Though I am not sure we would get the answer we think we want.
While we are on subsidies, what about the roads themselves? If we reduced the public money spent on roads, perhaps other forms of transportation could compete (trains, high speed trains, PRT, autonomous-only-roads, bicycles/bikeways, walking (walkable cities), none (telecommute)). The place where the taxes are focus is the world we are creating. Currently, the US seems to like roads a lot. Other countries like trains and high speed trains. Though there are more possibilities than just cars and trains.
Not self serving of Elon Musk or anything.
I say great, let us start with the 1% who can afford an extra vehicle. An electric car won't take me where I want to go at present. This makes them a very expensive toy to me. Make them equal in utility to my current vehicle and I will be first in line.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
COAL !!
Black Lung !!
Texas Tea !!
For city areas, it is easily possible to build systems of small transporters similar to ski slope gondola pods holding 2 -6 people which travel above sidewalks and parking places on overhead rails with linear motors.
"Pods + people" would use dramatically smaller amounts of power compared to cars or buses and they wouldn't require double decking or widening of roads. Pod rails could be supported by posts that also serve as street lights. With modern engineering including lightweight construction, sensors and computing devices for control and safety, the pod power needed to move them is minimal compared to any auto or bus.
Since "Smart Pods" would be communicating with other Smart Pods, there would be little "start-stop" activities and that dramatically reduces power use. Lots of pods arriving at a venue would cause the pods to alter to let passengers off at alternate locations or the pods could continue & stand in line for those with walking problems.
Most transport within a 20-50 mile radius of home could ultimately eliminate huge amounts of energy use as they would move only when called by a person's smartphone app. Pods would normally not move unless someone had called them, except to go to a storage position when not used.
We've been investing in solar and wind (to a lesser extent nuclear) for quite a while and it has PAID OFF.
Currently, wind and solar, in high useability areas, are cheaper than fossil fuels. That wasn't the case 50, or even 20 years ago.
Right now, the main thing holding us back is a combination of storage costs and the variability of the energy source.
Right now, the only thing holding back a purely electric car is the battery (storage) cost. And cellphone technology has caused us to invest in battery tech.
Give us another 20 years and natural gas will be used only as a secondary, back up fuel, for cloudy, windless days/areas. Gas engines will be built about as often as we build the proverbially buggy whip - and likely for the same market (racing and rich hobbyists.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It does not work that way. The 1% do not normally revolt. Except in the rare case to complain about the 99% revolting against them.
What you need is a less corrupt government. You're not going to get there by creating a few hurdles. The rich are the smartest people in the country with the most to lose and to gain, they will aways find a way around your hurdles. It's naive. What you need is to reduce the power of your government.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
And by subsidies, I mean specific transfer payments to the oil/gas industry or specific tax credits offered to the oil/gas industry. Things that make direct contributions to the oil and gas industry bottom line and allow them to sell the product at a higher margin.
I'm less interested in hearing about indirect costs of greenhouse gas emissions, etc. I believe these are real costs to society as a whole, so it's less clear whether the oil/gas industry should pay for these costs or whether they should be charged at the retail level to consumers of the product who actually do the emitting.
...you ignorant clod!
Seriously, in most of Europe more than half the price of fuel is tax money. What more does he want?
Just wants the politicians to bow to him.
I was going to write a lengthy response about how Musk's argument is bullshit in multiple ways. But there is a much simpler way to see that Musk's arguments are bogus. Due to the way electricity and gas are priced in the US, a Tesla already saves thousands of dollars a year in gas prices. Tesla itself actually aggressively advertises with that fact. So, from the point of view of a Tesla driver, gas is already taxed at 300-400%. If that isn't sufficient for people to switch, how high does Musk want taxes to go?
The real reason people put up with the price of gasoline relative to electric is simple: neither Musk nor any of the other car manufacturers make the kind of vehicles people want. I'd rather pay a few thousand dollars more for gasoline every year than drive around in a Tesla. You want to sell more Teslas? Make better cars, Mr. Musk. And while you're at it, do the decent thing and stop using such obscene amounts of government subsidies for your own products. FFS, Tesla drivers don't even pay for the roads they drive on; those are paid for by gas taxes.
I'm waiting for the announcement of Trump-Musk 2016.
We will definitely need more popcorn.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Every Tesla has a subsidy too- tax rebates from government + the entire electric infrastructure which is mostly based on fossil fuels. What's his point?
love is just extroverted narcissism
How convenient that he rails against the fossil fuel industry for getting subsidies. Isn't that exactly how he got Tesla (and Solar City for that matter) off the ground? And where does he think the electricity comes from to power his little hippy-mobiles? In the USA the majority of electricity is produced by burning coal. Yeah, the same fuel source that environmentalists are constantly telling us is too dirty and should outlawed. How about the batteries in all those cars that will some day be depleted? What about the environmental impact of dumping all those dead batteries and the toxic chemicals inside them?
Look - I'm all for a clean planet and I think we should be doing everything we can to make that happen. But this Musk guy is nothing more than a self serving, sanctimonious prick. If you want to do away with subsidies then fine but until you stop accepting money then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Of course, we need to get dumbasses to trash their cars and fill those landfills so they can buy our expensive shit that is not really that eco friendly if you compare the whole product life... genius!
He burns RP-1 (rocket grade KEROSENE) in each launch. Tell to me about ending fossil fuel when you switch for hydrogen.
His own electric cars get about 40mpg co2 wise where I live due to the coal powering the majority of electrical use. Is he asking to up the price people pay on his own products?
Computed by who?
Talking about "cost" only makes sense, when there is a free market with competing suppliers using different technologies...
"Environmental cost" is notoriously incalculable — as both "Greenpeace" and the oil companies will attest from their respective sides of this barricade.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Hi fooking larious
This guy rails against the fossil fuels industry - so he can reap the windfall by selling more electric cars.
Hi fooking larious
Taxes are not the solution to everything you dim-witted Dems.
All of those gas stations that operate on razor thin margins will shut down and put hundreds of thousands out of work.
How is he going to put tires on his electric car (oil)? Or use any plastics to build his car (oil)? People are just clueless and myopic if they think oil is just gasoline. The entire modern lifestyle is built on oil and oil related products.
I'm serious. I want to like Elon Musk, but seriously his entire business model is based on getting the government (at all levels) to help him. His cars are subsidized heavily by the government, meaning that poor people in California are helping to pay for rich people buying expensive cars. That's not right. Now he wants more governmental help to hurt his competition. He needs to simply do the right thing, and that means competing fair and square.
And don't bother telling me about the massive "subsidies" available to the fossil fuel industry. Those subsidies are tax breaks for industry in the US that are available to Tesla, also, and I guarantee that they take advantage of it all.
I don't even want to go into the fact that his cars are, for the most part, coal powered.
Do you have ESP?
Lets be real here. The carbon tax is another way to separate the rich from the poor. Richer places can deploy modern technology and infrastructure easily, then brag that they are "green", and not worry about paying a tax. The poorer countries and areas are not able to move from fossil fuels as easily, so they get punished, and have to spend more of their resources to pay this.
Sure, it is cool to say, "let them eat cake", but it doesn't fix the problem.
Which is why even oil companies are preparing for a post-oil world. Everyone is. The Saudis are creating the largest sovereign wealth fund in history precisely because they know the game is up, and oil has only decades left.
It was a Saudi minister of oil and mineral resources who said "The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil."
Everyone knows the reason for Gulfwar I and Gulfwar II was oil. We ignore every other tiny nation on earth that's doing horrific things to their citizens but we got involved in Iraq because oil.
And that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.
And that doesn't even begin to cover the ongoing trillions of dollars for ships and bases in places we wouldn't care about if not for oil.
Oil's subsidies are so deeply embedded into the u.s. military that we think of them as national security interests instead of as the subsidies they are.
We wouldn't even need them if we invested in solar, batteries, wind and a fleet of electric vehicles.
If 10% of the U.S. fleet were electric vehicles, the value and price of oil would collapse to under $30 and stay there. And as a "commodity" it would lose it's geopolitical value. And the u.s. would be able to greatly reduce the urge to be involved with large parts of the globe.
It would also cripple a factory for terrorists who want to kill us and put a severe crimp in Putin's military aspirations.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
...when you have a vested interest in a matter, your opinion on that matter becomes worthless.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
His company produces over priced cars only the affluent can afford, he gets a subsidy for making these rich bastard's toys, it takes environmentally damaging processes to make the batteries alone.....
test
Magnets are NOT required for a generator. Only magnet fields are required and they can be created by wire coils just as they are in motors; which also do not require any magnets. The magnets save you the copper coils and energy to create the field but they are not necessary. Furthermore, you can create a stronger field with coils than magnets can create. There is a loss for coils but at a certain point the coils break even with the magnets; depending on the application and design.
All this is moot because most other forms of energy are NO BETTER. Keep in mind that large generators are required by NEARLY ALL POWER SOURCES since we've been steam powered from the beginning and have merely been changing heat sources for a over a century. Wind power is an exception to the norm. The smaller size means that magnets may be the most cost effective design until we get larger towers - but even then, we can take a bit of a performance hit and still use them. Energy is not free, so it costs more than the unsustainable energy we have today; so be it... plus demand is going to rise with population etc and that will rise prices regardless .
captcha: harming
Hey, I'm all for getting rid of government subsidies, so let's get rid of fossil fuel subsidies AND the corporate welfare his company receives from the taxpayer to build cars only the rich can afford.
Extry, extry, read all about it!
Tim Cook says that Macs are the best computers available to buy at any price - hands down!
Bill Gates says that Microsoft is still the best, most relevant software company, and Windows 10 is better than anything!
Linus Torvalds says that the only safe computer is a computer running Linux!
Some guy who stands to profit massively from people moving away from fossil fuel energy sources declares that it's time for a revolt against fossil fuels!
But of course, it's ELON MUSK so you simps will eat this shit up like it's candy.
The short version then is that Elon Musk wants to lower the average standard of living then.
Because that would be the effect of his plan, even if he doesn't say it out loud.
Elon's solution, to raise a carbon tax on gasoline-powered cars, isn't about equalizing a subsidy advantage, isn't about fairness.
It''s about artificially raising the price of gasoline powered cars,
So that alternatives are suddenly no more expensive to buy.
How about we carbon tax the production of vehicles also? Oh, wait. Tesla would pay dearly, since manufacturing a Tesla is a huge carbon cost. And operating a Tesla of course relies not on batteries, but primarily coal, oil, and nuclear for electricity. Big carbon tax to operate.
So, in the end, there are few carbon-neutral solutions to individual transport. Playing these games is, yes, gamesmanship, and Elon wants to sell more vehicles. Using taxation to his benefit is sharp practice. Do we want to do this? President Trump might do this in a moment. President Clinton II would instantly.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
All we need to do is give them more money.
Funny how that seems to be their fix for everything.
"Every gasoline car on the road has a subsidy, and the right way to address that is with a carbon tax."
No Elon, not at all.
The RIGHT way to address it would be to ACTUALLY REMOVE the subsidy, in all forms.
Tax credits.
Free or reduced-price land use.
Exoneration of cleanup costs/brownfield mitigation.
All that stuff needs to go away.
I'm an ardent "right winger" by the standards of /., but I wouldn't for a moment think of removing social welfare spending before we FIRST take away all forms of corporate welfare.
Let's first start by stopping the largesse, before we get into the complicated subtleties of taxing the commons.
-Styopa
Our nation, from nearly its origination, has been the guarantor of naval commerce worldwide, and primarily for our own interests. Say out loud the words of the Marine Corps Hymn. Not much has changed. Back then it was cotton. Recently it was oil. Just as important is manufactured goods.
Go ahead, retreat from the world. Watch it devolve. No, I'm not yet ready to do that unless some coalition rises to take this on, and nothing has changed in that realm since 1801.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Of course the guy who builds and sells electric vehicles wants a tax on fossil fueled vehicles. A little self-serving but he's a businessman so I'd expect that.
It is very difficult for a new way of doing things to compete with a mature way of doing things. The subsidies are needed until the new way is mature. Then it can compete with the more mature on its own.
I'm revolting against your cars.
I'm going to drive my 10MPG (on the highway) car (original Abarth car) all weekend long, just to suck up as much cheap gas as I can.
Don't get me wrong, I think what you are doing for electric cars is great, but let the public come to you if your product is superiour, otherwise, confine yourself to the dustbin of history and quit being so smug.
And while we're at it, your cars commit the worst of all sins, they are boring to look at. Hire some Italian stylists once in a while, okay?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
But carbon tax is wrong way to go. Boosting CAFE standards up to 120 mpg would be faster.
If it was just about the price of gasoline, we would expect countries like France, where gasoline costs as much as $5/gallon to have a high adoption rate of electric vehicles.Yet, they represented only 1% of the new vehicles sold in 2015.
The country with the highest EV adoption rate is Norway, which had a very high government incentive program which costed the state around US$13,000 per EV on the road, just for 2015.
Even if there was a political will, there are not many countries rich enough to afford those kind of incentives.
The fossil fuel industry will die... as soon the current fossil fuel companies like exxon mobil find a way to control and profit off electric cars, cashing in on the whole "switching every car on the planet by an electric" in the process.
The US military expenditures around the world that support oil production both directly (US company presence) and indirectly (to prop up supportive regimes) is effectively an additional subsidy that US tax money funds, above and beyond the actual subsidies paid or exempted by the government. I suspect that all of these together are significantly higher than current alternative energy subsidies.
All true. All true.
However not everyone is a "green wizard". I am ok-good with computers
so sometimes people ask me for help. These people might not be good
with computer basics but they are good with what they do with the computer:
It might be architecture, it might be sales of some kind it might be "just"
excel and powerpoint.
I think this can be compared to the problem with fossil fuels. People or businesses
want to switch but they don't know how to go about it. They might be really good
at their business but they don't know much about "energy" 'cept that it comes
out of that wall plug, or that pump station or that nat-gas canister and they need it to WORK.
Also/furthermore sooo much of the infrastructure is geared and build around
a economy that uses fossil fuels. Much of it would become useless but did cost
to build and use.
It is amazing, for example, how much food is wasted during transport and how much ... 50 years.
fossil fuel is destroyed in keeping food from spoiling via refrigeration.
Food is something we need to do over and over and over. It's not like a dam: Build once and
with minimal cost/maintenance use it for
In china, a ton of oil/gas could be saved by hooking up solar panels to refrigeration
units. It will not make the food fresher, but if refrigeration becomes much cheaper
and independent of fossil fuel imports, maybe the government doesn't have to
work so hard at keeping the "outside imperial treat" specter in recent memory of the
population so much: "You want to eat (fresh) food? Be ready to defend your right to use oil! WAR!"
Sometimes I wonder if "green energy", especially solar PV (which everyone has access to, because
the sun shines on everyone) would be more rapidly implemented if we had a real(!) energy crisis and not
just a farcical threat of "global warming" conjured up by rich states (with no growth) because they don't
want to let go of super convenient fossil fuels? I seriously doubt a 3rd world farmer (equivalent oil-energy usage per day
10 liters) cares as much about global warming in comparison to well air-conditioned,
starbucks (brazilian beans shipped in?) sipping secretary in the 50 floor of some fancy concrete and steel
tower (maybe in the scorching desert somewhere) (equivalent oil-energy usage per day 100 liters)?
How much more could the farmer do if he "were allowed to use more oil" and how much "less" could the secretary
do if she had less oil to use?
The EPA'S clean power plan goes together with EV adoption.
The "massive" subsidies for solar/wind turn out to be small compared to the subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel industry.
What really matters is the subsidy per unit of energy. Currently solar, wind and hydro are a far smaller industries than coal, oil and gas so I would expect the subsidy to be far smaller in overall terms.
"Elon Musk: 'We Need a Revolt Against the Fossil Fuel Industry'"
Said the man whose built a car company that depends on government subsidies and is insufficiently capitalized.
What about the effectively indirect subsidies imposed by the cost of US military presence in oil producing areas around the world?
The short version then is that FlyHelicopters wants to drastically lower the average standard of living over the long term, by allowing the planet to be trashed by the costs of fossil fuel borne by the public.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Elon Musk: 'We Need a Revolt Against the Fossil Fuel Industry'
Then what exactly is going to charge your cars?
Almost 3/4 of the energy provided to us these days is from the Fossil Fuel industry.
I'm not disagreeing with Elon, as we need to invest more into alternative fuel sources, but he's basically trying to decapitate himself with this argument.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Most logical people can look at the progression of things over time. Take for example the pie in the sky dream of the electric car.
Over a period of 5 years lets say Elontard gets his wish and people start dumping fossil fuel powered vehicles. Suddenly there's an increase in demand on the power grid requiring the power companies to upgrade their infrastructure. They pass that cost onto the consumer. Then of course the power companies realize that they are the only game in town and increase the costs again. Of course it does little for pollution as you have just moved that from vehicles to power plants. And of course you are still dependent on fuel sources where your wind and solar "hippie power" is not available.
The whole problem to his retarded argument is the idea that electricity is free. It may be very cheap but put more of a load on the power grid and it can become much more expensive. Essentially all you have really done is moved the costs and moved the pollution somewhere else. They still exist as well as the new found limitations of the new technology. On top of that the 90 year old woman down the block with the 20 year old A/C system is now subsidizing you with her increased power costs so you can drive around in a fabulous yuppie accessory and feel smug about yourself.
Don't get me wrong. We should be thinking about the environment and thinking about ways to be less dependent on fossil fuels. Selling pie in the sky vehicles to self absorbed yuppie assholes is not the solution. If anything with the toxic chemicals found in those batteries we are polluting even more. More pollution from the older cars that will have to be disposed of as well. The people screaming about how we are killing the environment are often killing it more themselves and being too stupid to realize it. Most of them could care less about the environment and just use it as a talking point to get attention and adoration for themselves.
The problem these claims about "subsidies" is that they are not. An untaxed negative externality is not a subsidy, no matter how much the green lobby tries to spin it as such. This bogus calculation is never applied in other areas, no one counts the cost of car accidents as subsidies, or the health impact of a big mac. People have come to associate subsidies with something bad, and now people like Musk are trying to expand the definition to suit their own ends. It's bullshit and people need to start calling them on it.
"Elon Musk: 'We Need a Revolt Against the Fossil Fuel Industry'"
Yeah. Not. Everybody can guess there's much lobbying from the oil industry, no surprises there. However, nobody, and I mean nobody should come up to me and demand a revolution until they can actually create a suitable replacment.
Yes, I know how many people juuust looove Teslas - especially those who've spent pretty amounts for them no sh*t - but not everyone has a fast chargr at home, not everyone has a garage with a private always available charging source, not everyone uses their cars to only go short distances, not everyone has so long a life to spend hours on end for charging on a roadtrip, and I could on with this for hours.
Oh, and mind you, I actually like electric cars and support the direction these companies are trying to go towards.
I just don't like when they seem to be dilusional.
One more thing, which is actually beside the point, but I've just remembered I've read some people actually call the interior of the P90D luxurious. Now, come on people, we know love is blind, but there's only one thing there that's luxurious, and that's the price (yes, I know the'll release the cheaper, shorter range, less "luxurious" new model in like, a few years or so...).
My point is, if you want a revolution, you create it, then, we'll buy it. NOT the other way around.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Green on the outside, Red on the inside.
The short version then is that Elon Musk wants to lower the average standard of living then.
Because that would be the effect of his plan, even if he doesn't say it out loud.
And we can look to any of the places that have put in carbon taxes or polution taxes or cap-and-trade systems to put prices on externalites and see exactly this!
Oh wait, that is not what we see: http://www.carbontax.org/where...
Unforunately, we don't magically see all the other potential benifits - carbon emission does seem to decrease, but not hugely for example. In any case, as long as it is revenue neutral - any carbon pricing scheme seem unlikely to have a big effect on standard of living.
As someone said years before on Slashdot, "carbon credits" or any sort of carbon tax is nothing more than a scam by the ultra rich to make you and me live like bugs.
A carbon tax is not some big plot by rich people. It's a way to put an economic value on the cost of dealing with the pollution created by fossil fuels. It's no different in principle from forcing a manufacturer to pay for the cost of cleaning up a byproduct of their production process. Right now the fossil fuel industry is basically allowed to dump certain of their pollutants into the air without further financial consequence. The goal of incentivizing companies and individuals to pollute less is a good one in principle but difficult to pull off in practice.
Carbon credits are a silly political compromise and so far are largely ineffective (for several reasons but mostly because they issue too many of them) but it isn't a scam either. Carbon credits aren't as effective as a straight tax but unlike a tax they are politically palatable even though the net effect is substantially the same. Call something a tax and people freak out but give them something that has the same effect but isn't a direct tax and they calm down because nobody is saying the magical bad word "tax'.
Why not just end the fossil fuel subsidies?
That would be a nice start but it still doesn't cover the cost of the pollution that fossil fuels generate. Right now we not only don't make the oil and gas companies pay for the full cost of their pollution but we actually pay them (subsidies) to generate it! That's bonkers.
I'm not sure a carbon tax to replace income or sales tax is a good long term strategy. It definitely has an attraction, but if we do actually *succeed* and cut down carbon emissions, you're just going to have to restore the income and sales taxes. Only good luck with trying to raise a tax that no one is used to paying.
We need to be taxing productive output or your tax policy is based on a source of revenue that you're actively trying to get rid of, which means it isn't growing with the GDP. That can cause all sorts of problems, not just running out of things to tax. The most likely result will be further complicated tax codes to try and balance things out, but which by their very nature, will introduce inefficiencies and loopholes into the tax code.
Fossil fuels are green and natural and renewable. There is a natural cycle at work here involving the atmosphere and oceans and land and plant life. If you want to tax something then tax the toxic man made materials and chemicals.
prsdntl
Folks often say fossil fuels get a lot of subsidies. Not that I've noticed given the separation taxes paid in various jurisdictions. Mr. Musk, however, is clearly a crony capitalist.
If we ned government subsidies for gasoline and diesel we are looking at $10. per gallon gasoline. A smarter society would hand Tesla a few billion dollars as a gift to increase production quickly.
Him saying to get rid of the subsidies, shows that he doesn't understand what
I'm not sure a carbon tax to replace income or sales tax is a good long term strategy. It definitely has an attraction, but if we do actually *succeed* and cut down carbon emissions, you're just going to have to restore the income and sales taxes. Only good luck with trying to raise a tax that no one is used to paying.
I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, but another option is dividends. Just return the carbon tax equally to all citizens at the end of each year. This would minimize political interference.
The "subsidies" that the looney left yell about all the time are standard tax breaks available to manufacturers in the US.
Speaking as both an accountant and someone who runs a manufacturing company, that is not even close to correct. There are a lot of tax breaks the fossil fuel industry gets that are quite specific to their particular industry and not applicable to other commodity manufacturers.
Fossil fuel subsidies were over $500 Billion globally in 2011 and that doesn't account for the cost of mitigating the full cost of the pollution they cause.
The fossil fuel industry will happily watch life on earth vanish so long as they can make a few dollars along the way. It may already be too late. Nothing short of a violent revolution involving the deaths of most oil industry CEO's will likely stop them and save the planet.
Admin Wayne Smith
The Elon Musk facebook group.
http://www.facebook.com/groups/ElonMusk
The government will use the tax to increase its own incomes so it is not impacted by the tax. Corporations will increase prices and profits so they are not impacted by the tax. Unions will strike for increases in pay so they are not impacted by the tax. All currencies will inflate equally so there is no inflation relative to other currencies, so governments will claim there is no inflation, so pensions etc. will not rise, so only the poor will be impacted by the tax.
Well, the U.S. already claims that its actions are to promote freedom and democracy. Maybe it could become true (or true-er), without the need for so much oil.
Ask them if they counted the external benefits as well, and they fall silent.
Given that there are negative externalities associated with burning fossil fuels, if we assume that the cost of those externalities is estimated correctly and a tax is imposed no greater than that cost the effect the tax would have on the price of burning fuels would send a more accurate market signal about their true cost. Acting on more accurate information people's market behavior would naturally result in a more efficient/economical result. Standard of living should go up, not down, according to basic economic theory given the simple premise and assumptions. However, for government to accurately estimate the cost of anything in absence of a market price is basically impossible, and you get hand waving arguments between zero and infinity. Taxation also incurs inefficiencies. In general it is good economic policy to subsidize fuel because it makes manufacturing and transportation cheaper and leads to higher growth rates capable of paying for the subsidy in increased tax base, the benefits of higher economic growth may even offset externalities, which are equivalent to a subsidy. The question is, are the externalities associated with fossil fuels large enough that it would be worthwhile to create a tax to offset them and would the long term negative effect on economic growth due to the tax be greater than the cost of the externalities? The answer to that depends in large part on whether you believe in global warming and its negative effects. That is to say, it depends upon whether you believe the people who are waving their hands and saying infinity or if you believe the people who are waving their hands and saying zero. Immediately after answering that question is when the hand waving stops and the finger pointing starts.
I'm sure Elon is calling for an end to the "subsidies" of oil out of pure altruisim and not because EVs are not nearly as economically viable when oil is $35/barrel /sarcasm.
The reality is consumers look at immediate costs and near term costs and ignore long term costs; it's human nature. EVs are invariably higher priced than other cars in their class, but theorhetically you make that back through savings on electricity charging vs. oil over the lifespan of the car. However consumers notice the initial price point of cars and don't perceive nearly as easily the long term savings.
And now that gas costs about $2/gallon, gas cars look pretty darn attractive with their lower price point, so much that even a big tax credit doesn't seem all that great.
Seriously that Elon thinks he's the messiah and promotes violent thoughts and one dimensional thinking...
Our government works for the cronies, not us.
The Falcon 9 launcher built and flown by SpaceX burns over 200 tonnes of fossil fuel kerosene in every flight.
The problem, is while oil subsidies sound like a great platform to use for the environmental crowd, they aren't really subsidies in the true sense.
What people count as oil subsidies are two things. First the ability to write off capital expenditures like every other business. The second being a program to subsidize heating oil to low income families.
Somehow I doubt you will find any politician willing to go after that, especially the democrats. It's also something you can't just easily replace with solar or wind.
Also since oil companies currently pay the lions share of corporate taxes collected by the US it's really hard to say they are getting subsidies from the government compared to renewable sources.
Or the need for gadgets, or food not grown here, or whatever...
If it were only just oil.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Indeed! Evil Musk! And all the new poor will buy his expensive millions of electric cars.
Sounds like a plan!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Mr. Musk,
Just produce your millions of electric cars and sell them at a price that average families can afford to buy as many as needed. (That's why the internal combustion powered cars sell so many.)
Just set up a nation-wide service program in the USA like GM, Japan Inc., Europe Inc., India Inc. have done. Your millions of cars are worthless if they cannot be serviced and repaired competently and professionally. (There is one dealer in my state but no repair centers. A supercharger is a 20 minute drive. Destination chargers require regular trips to be modified greatly. Home charging presents the problem as before--it does eliminate the pollution from a car but it now at the generation station.)
Just produce your millions of battery/energy units and sell them at a price that average families can afford to buy several.
Most important, Mr. Musk, get out of my wallet, my bank account and my governments. Stand on your own 2 feet. (The Federal Government subsidy is funded with taxpayer money & I'm a taxpayer.)
Unfortunately, the very next elected government got rid of it.
If 10% of the U.S. fleet were electric vehicles, the value and price of oil would collapse to under $30 and stay there. And as a "commodity" it would lose it's geopolitical value. And the u.s. would be able to greatly reduce the urge to be involved with large parts of the globe.
It would also cripple a factory for terrorists who want to kill us and put a severe crimp in Putin's military aspirations.
I like the way you think.
A revolt? Who do I have to revolt against? If I would want to revolt it is not against a faceless company in favor of another faceless company whose leader seems to be seen as the new messiah by western media. If I would want to revolt it is against this post democratic, post modern world where people are kept stupid by a media that is owned by just a handful of people who not only control the people but also the politicians and international relations.
I'm not going to revolt to demand that Tesla finally becomes profitable... idiotic left wing slogans that make rich peoples with Chez Guevara T-shirts made by child slaves in Bangladesh heart melt. "Viva la révolution!"
Maybe Elon Musk isn't the guy to be leading the charge against the fossil fuel industry.
He could be right as rain but since he has an economic incentive to push for electric power, he's biased. And he will be seen as biased. This isn't Elon Musk's fight in PR terms.
What a great revolutionary you become when you burn all investor money and need to raise more :/
A lower standard of living in a clean world vs a higher standard of living while we slowly pollute it?
By the way how do you define standard of living? The ability to throw away your iPhone 6S when the iPhone 7 comes out? The ability to afford yet more petrol to put in yet a bigger car engine?
If you can't afford the most efficient technologies, or even an energy efficient home, or you rent and there is no incentive for your landlord to improve the building, you will be far worse off if there is a price on carbon. It is a evil idea in practice, so unless the "tax" is parametric and proportional to your after tax income it should not be implemented. Why don't you go and kick a few poor people in the face Elon because that is as bad as what you are suggesting if you don't guarantee that they are economically protected from the fallout of your schemes.
Take this into consideration: the U.S. national housing trend right now is moving quickly away from home ownership, and more toward apartment ownership. How would you charge your electric vehicle living in an apartment complex? Do we really expect the myriad of already-strapped apartment complexes to install charging stations for every parking space? I think the electric vehicle idea will remain dependent on hybrid engines for a long time. That means the fossil fuel industry will be here to stay...albeit perhaps in a smaller form.
And we can look to any of the places that have put in carbon taxes or polution taxes or cap-and-trade systems to put prices on externalites and see exactly this!
Cute, but you're ignoring the obvious... the places that have done this are already taxed to death and socialist places to begin with.
Do it in the US and you'd have riots on your hands. If the price of gas ended up at $5/gal you'd quickly have 50 million people unable to afford gas.
The reality is that you can't tax carbon enough to matter without stomping on the lower class and what you can tax it won't change anything worthwhile.
Unforunately, we don't magically see all the other potential benifits - carbon emission does seem to decrease, but not hugely for example. In any case, as long as it is revenue neutral - any carbon pricing scheme seem unlikely to have a big effect on standard of living.
A carbon tax large enough to do what Musk wants would crush standards of living. No one has actually done that yet.
A lower standard of living in a clean world vs a higher standard of living while we slowly pollute it?
There are other ways of making this work, but you wouldn't like them...
By the way how do you define standard of living?
The ability to have a nice house that is heated and air conditioned. The ability to drive your own car, to have space to live, and nice food to eat.
All of those are heavy carbon events. Making them NOT carbon events for everyone would be way too expensive.
If you tax carbon enough to actually make a difference to climate change, then you'll crush the economy and destroy the lower 1/3 of people's lives.
If you tax it lightly enough to NOT do that, then you won't make enough of a difference to matter.
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It is a grave error to think that there MUST be a solution, simply because we want one.
There doesn't have to be, we waited too long to address this problem.
Cute, but no...
The reality is that we can't tax carbon enough to drive it out of the economy without crushing the bottom 1/3 of society, which would just result in riots, violence, and in the end, war.
If you tax it lightly enough to avoid that, then you won't make enough of a difference to change the outcome.
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The reality is that we are way, way past the point of no return. Anyone who objectively looks at the numbers, the raw numbers, can see this.
There doesn't have to be a solution, just because we want one. We aren't owed one by the universe. We did this to ourselves and will have to live with the consequences.
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Side note: The only real solution would be to reduce the population of the planet by 3/4. If we could get the world back down below 2 billion, then we'd have a chance at stopping this. But it would take WWIII to do it and no one is going to sign up for that choice. So we're screwed either way. :(
Given that there are negative externalities associated with burning fossil fuels, if we assume that the cost of those externalities is estimated correctly and a tax is imposed no greater than that cost the effect the tax would have on the price of burning fuels would send a more accurate market signal about their true cost. Acting on more accurate information people's market behavior would naturally result in a more efficient/economical result. Standard of living should go up, not down, according to basic economic theory given the simple premise and assumptions.
^ That is the answer someone thinking in theory would come up with. It sounds great, I'm sure a smart person somewhere thought of it in a nice air conditioned room with a whiteboard.
But it ignores reality. The real world where people are making $10/hr and driving to work and have 3 kids to feed and are just scraping by. If you triple their energy costs (and the price of everything that has to rise to pay for it), they'll end up hungry or homeless.
A billion freshly hungry people does not help your case.
The question is, are the externalities associated with fossil fuels large enough that it would be worthwhile to create a tax to offset them and would the long term negative effect on economic growth due to the tax be greater than the cost of the externalities? The answer to that depends in large part on whether you believe in global warming and its negative effects.
None of that matters...
Yes, I do believe in global warming, and yes, I do believe it will cause us huge problems.
However, I think all of your ideas and theories mean nothing, because they can't be implemented practically or politically.
The reality is that we passed the point of no-return decades ago. We are moving the deck chairs around the Titanic because we see the bow slip under the water, but what most fail to realize is that the ship only has 20 minutes to live.
So we're down to mass effect mitigation which is expensive. The solution to that is raise taxes. How's that help your standard of living?
And we can look to any of the places that have put in carbon taxes or polution taxes or cap-and-trade systems to put prices on externalites and see exactly this!
Cute, but you're ignoring the obvious... the places that have done this are already taxed to death and socialist places to begin with.
Do it in the US and you'd have riots on your hands. If the price of gas ended up at $5/gal you'd quickly have 50 million people unable to afford gas.
The reality is that you can't tax carbon enough to matter without stomping on the lower class and what you can tax it won't change anything worthwhile.
Unforunately, we don't magically see all the other potential benifits - carbon emission does seem to decrease, but not hugely for example. In any case, as long as it is revenue neutral - any carbon pricing scheme seem unlikely to have a big effect on standard of living.
A carbon tax large enough to do what Musk wants would crush standards of living. No one has actually done that yet.
One could easily set the tax rate and various rebates and the like to make it tax neutral for virtually everyone. Yes the cost of items would rise to cover the now embeded carbon fees, but the sales tax and/or income tax could be reduced by equivalent amounts. This would have the effect of reducing the prices of products and services that have lower carbon impact, while those with higher carbon impact would have a comparitively higher price. In BC there are also direct rebates to people who's earnings/taxes are so low that they do not benifit from the reduction in taxes compared to the increase of prices. Oh, and while BC might be a "socialist placs to begin with", the total tax rate of a BC resident is lower than the tax rate for residents of a numer of US states.
The social difficulties of convincing people to not riot when the tax system gets changed, are as you allude, a challenge, even if those changes do not have a large impact. People do get upset when one of their costs increase, even if one of their other costs decrease by the same amount.
Is anyone else tired of these new age captains of industry spewing unrealistic garbage? Jesus, Musk bitching about someone else receiving what he perceives to be subsidies? Tiresome.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
I, too, am looking towards a future without fossil fuels and the problems and associated healthcare costs. But realize that when we do, and oil companies lose their economies of scale - that lubricant in the wind turbine and the one in the machine that makes PVs is going to be exponentially more expensive. As is your parent's IV tubing when they need medical care. The non-zero sum game cuts both ways. And that is OK, just don't overlook that.
Conclusion: FlyHelicopters is a nihilist, living for a short while in pleasure and comfort, unwilling to take any action whatsoever, and excusing it under the pretense of hopelessness.
That way, FlyHelicopters does not have to feel any guilt from refusing to do anything.
No need for FlyHelicopters to experience the shame of being selfish, or the pangs of hard work, because nothing can be done.
What a way to live. FlyHelicopters has got it made. No sins matter, because all is naught.
You do that, Elon.
In the meantime I'll just keep driving my Trailblazer.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Thought I might toss my two penny's worth in here.
I am 100% off-grid, have been for coming up on 5 years. I have 8.8kw/hr of solar panels installed (that's 36 of them) and have never had a problem with the panels themselves. The one annoyance (which Al Gore never seems to mention) is the royal Pain in the Ass it is to clean snow off of them. Mine are a ground mount so it's not terribly difficult, but one is quite exhausted by the time one is done with it.
My biggest problems with the system have been two other components -- energy storage (batteries) and energy usage (the house). A lesser problem has been backup energy generation (a generator) for when snow/clouds prevent the system from harvesting much from the sun.
On the usage side I've been on a crusade to replace all of my many incandescent and CFL lights with LEDs and am now on the downhill side of that struggle. There's a lot more work than I thought there would be to swap out some types of bulbs (such as tube CFLs) but it's doable with a bit of electrical knowledge. Certainly my mother wouldn't be able to manage it, but I'm relatively handy with such things so other than being annoying working over one's head it hasn't been too bad. I expect to have all 225 bulbs in the house (big house) replaced by year's end.
Backup generators have been a bit of a mixed bag for me. My first generator got sold out from under me (I didn't own it....long story) and my second worked great for about a year before its stupid oil filter fell off its holder and it seized up. Grrrr. My third worked for about 6 months and then began throwing bizarre errors; the techs had to nearly completely disassemble it to discover that the rotor was in slightly crooked and had damaged the stator windings. I'm now on my FOURTH generator in five years and genuinely hoping I won't have to deal with any more for a long, long time. I can't blame this on the system overall, though it is indicative of the fragile nature of the hardware.
The truly big problem has been the batteries. They 100% absolutely have been nothing but a massive PITA since about 6 months in. The first problem was I didn't really have enough amp-hour capacity (675AH) -- a mistake my solar guy made -- so I quickly bought another set to up my capacity to 1350 AH. The problem then was that these were Gel batteries, and Gel batteries are both charging sensitive and don't like being drawn down to 50% or so every night as I was doing. As a result they quickly began to degrade, and despite some efforts to rejuvenate them, rotate them around, etc. they got so bad that by last October I literally only had three actually holding power into the night. I temporarily replaced them all with 8 L-16 lead acids which are honestly doing a very fine job and got me through the winter, but I decided the only way to solve this problem was to go for gross overkill -- and so I've ordered a 2300AH battery stack. It arrives in a couple of weeks, and I anticipate that once it's operational that 4th generator won't get a lot of use. Fingers crossed!
Honestly if I wasn't a tech guy and willing to work at it my wife and mother would have been hosed about a year after we moved in. I've finally gotten tired of spending all my spare time up there which is why I bought the big-ass battery stack, and at expected usage levels that should be good for 25-30 years.
Solar is a great technology but if you're doing anything at all besides just putting them on your roof to feed power into the grid during the day and pull power from the grid during the night it'll be a lot more work than you probably think. My older neighbors down below me are already complaining about how much their generator has been running and there are a couple of obvious reasons for that -- their panels are on their roof (so they can't get the snow off) and their batteries are lead acid (which means they need to be inspected and refilled with distilled water so often, which I'm wondering how much they are doing). Joe Sixpack would have similar problems -- it would work great for a year or so and then Stuff Would Happen.
So there ya go. My experience anyway.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The solution to that is raise taxes. How's that help your standard of living?
Why are you under the impression that raising taxes is the only solution?
Like I said, there are other solutions, but you won't like any of them.
One could easily set the tax rate and various rebates and the like to make it tax neutral for virtually everyone.
There is no such thing as "easily" when it comes to taxes.
First, what you can do in theory and what you can do in reality (or what politicians can do in reality) aren't the same thing.
Second, you actually are wrong anyway, since the whole point of "carbon taxes" are to try and move people off a cheap solution (carbon) and on to an expensive solution (not carbon). If not-carbon were cheap, people would do this naturally and there would be no need for a solution.
Trying to move everyone to something else that costs more can't be done at no cost, that violates how money works.
Yes the cost of items would rise to cover the now embeded carbon fees, but the sales tax and/or income tax could be reduced by equivalent amounts.
No, it doesn't work that way. If you honest believe it, then you have failed at critical thinking...
First, for the carbon fees to be offset by lower taxes, people must pay them, so people must keep using carbon. This defeats the point completely.
Second, if people leave carbon stuff for non-carbon stuff, then the government loses the income from the carbon fees, creating a tax shortfall. This can already be seen in places that are taxing EVs instead of giving them tax credits (Georgia for example) to make up for the loss of gax tax dollars.
At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. What you want is for everyone to pay more money to have the same stuff they already have today. There is no way that won't cost us all in the form of our standard of living.
Anything else is a lie.
Raising taxes, or making cuts in other areas. Someone will bitch either way.
No, you still don't understand... those aren't the only two options...
Elon runs an E-car company, so it's no surprise that he talks-up getting off of gasoline. As long as he makes piles of cash from taxpayer subsidised sales of e-cars to rich people, you can expect him to say stuff like this.
When he's not flakkng for his electric cars, he does what any sensible engineer does: he chooses fossil fuels for their performance, cost, availability, ease of handling, and particularly to obey the laws of physics when performance really matters.
Do his SpaceX rockets fly on electric power???? NOPE, they burn Liquid Oxygen with highly-refined KEROSENE (RP-1) which require big oil refineries. He does not even try to fly using eco-friendly renewable fuels like the Space Shuttle and the Boeing Delta IV (Liquid Hydrogen combined with Liquid Oxygen)
Elon designed the Falcon 9 rocket as a "clean sheet" design (i.e. it was not an upgrade of a previous product that was tied to old tech and infrastructure). When he designed it, he had total choice about whether to "go green" or burn dead dinosuars all the way to orbit.
He chose to burn dead dinosaurs.
In fact, the Falcon 9 is even burning Kerosene on the second stage, where the Saturn rockets of 50 years ago were cleaner, using LH and LOX instead and the giant SLS rocket NASA is building which so many Musk fanboys hate is burning Hydrogen (cleaner than a Falcon 9) while also gaining from the economics of scale. NASA considered returning to the old V-2/Saturn V/Soyuz idea of burning Kerosene in the SLS first stage, but NASA stuck with Hydrogen, surrendering some thrust in first stage flight (Saturn V used Kerosene in 1st stage for the thrust, and Hydrogen in the upper stages for ISP (efficiency), shuttles used Hydrogen for ISP in very complex re-useable engines from Earth's surface all the way to orbit and thus needed solid boosters for thrust for the 1st two minutes).
I'm a big fan of burning dead dinosaurs; they're not doing any good in the ground, they provide lots of energy, and they're naturally-occurring. I just think it's silly to get all excited that an electric car guy pushes electric cars and ignore that he burns dinosaurs whenever he chooses to, and that's pretty often and in HUGE quantities with ZERO emissions controls --- rockets just swirl-together fuel and oxidizer and IGNITE! There's not a palladium-loaded catalytic convertor in sight.
But you are not the one to lead it. What an ego.
Oh, yes, I was glib when I said it was "easy". We are talking about real people trying to make acceptable group decisions. I agree totally that none of these sorts of regulatory/fee/tax issues is "easy" from an "actually get systems in place" point of view!
Trying to move everyone to something else that costs more can't be done at no cost, that violates how money works.
At some level what you are saying is correct - moving to non-carbon sources will be more "expensive" at the simplest level of accounting. But at another level it is completely wrong, since the "cheaper" sources have all sorts of externalities that are REAL costs, they are just shifted to other people or other accounting lines. In this particular case, one of the reason the "something" costs less is that the purcase price does not reflect all the costs that are being paid for that thing. What we can hopefully someday do it to make the prices paid by the purchaser more in line with the actual total costs we all pay for the items.
If Bob's House of Chips sells lots of bags of chips, but doesn't provide enough trash cans and/or people who take the bags away toss them on the ground a few blocks away - someone besides Bob is paying to clean up the mess. The whole community is paying those costs, while Bob and his customers are the ones who should be shouldering the majority of them. Imposing a cleanup-fee on companies like Bob can be a way to make the price of Bob's bags-o-chips properly reflect the actual total cost of the product, and can make Mary's House of Brownies comparitively less expensive, even though Bob's material and production costs might be lower than Mary's, since her product gets eaten completely and doesn't generate any littering issues.
Getting the numbers right may be hard, but getting them "more right" than the current numbers (Bob's product reflect NONE of the cleanup costs) is not that difficult, and any imporvements to the correct price should send at least some signal to the "magical market free hand" to change behaviour, shifting more towards products that have lower total "real" cost. Having a system where Bob is incentivized to develop litter-free-bags (lower cleaup-fee for Bob), or using a refundable deposit to incentivize customer behaviour (also lower cleaup-fee for Bob), could in fact make the whole enterprise more efficient from the overall societal point of view, thus improving the total standard of living for everyone!
At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. What you want is for everyone to pay more money to have the same stuff they already have today. There is no way that won't cost us all in the form of our standard of living.
I would say: "At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. What I want is for everyone to pay more money to have the same stuff they already have today, and also to not have all that other stuff like the shared enviornment and natural resourses being depleted at unsustainable levels. Leaving all these externalities at zero cost to the companies and consumers makes us all pay more than we should, as some of the seemingly "more expensive" options are in fact cheaper when all factors are considered. There is no way that having society paying more than they could be by using the alternatives, won't cost us all in the form of our standard of living."
Making Bob's customers pay the true price of the product is a good idea.
Actually managing to implement such a thing is left to the reader as an exercise.... :-)
Maybe this is the wrong discussion.
Why do we need so many "millions" of vehicles saturating the streets around the world every day?
When we reduce the quantity of polluting sources but completely, not by replacing them by non so polluting sources, then we have a real change.
We are in the information age, so it is really important that EVERY person that can work from home be working from home in EVERY country. This reduces trips, save time, save fuel (or electricity of whatever), reduces accidents (less vehicles on the streets automatically reduces them by simple statistics), improves family relationships because parents are near their children more hours each day, improves health when reducing the stress of driving every day, etc.
And when this happens, the suburbs receive more local services that also reduce the need of physical displacing people to have the goods they need every day.
I thing that this is the real change we need to promote. And of course, if we also can use electrical cars ... although small ones because our mobilisation needs will be smaller, the world will be very different that what we have now.
Telsa is in big trouble. Elon built a great car for a small market. Now, he needs to scale and make his boasts reality.
He cannot do it and he knows it.
What to do?
Blame big oil.
Solyndra, SunEdison.
Telsa next in line.
First, thanks for the rational reply. :)
Second:
At some level what you are saying is correct - moving to non-carbon sources will be more "expensive" at the simplest level of accounting. But at another level it is completely wrong, since the "cheaper" sources have all sorts of externalities that are REAL costs, they are just shifted to other people or other accounting lines. In this particular case, one of the reason the "something" costs less is that the purcase price does not reflect all the costs that are being paid for that thing. What we can hopefully someday do it to make the prices paid by the purchaser more in line with the actual total costs we all pay for the items.
You are correct, assuming that everyone agrees on the external costs and that everyone sees the same costs on the same line of the balance sheet. I don't know if you have noticed (sarcasm intended) or not, but a whole lot of people don't agree on those external costs.
Also worth keeping in mind that is to a lot of people, those external costs are invisible, they aren't paid today, so you're adding them in. They may have always existed, but as far as John and Jane Q. Public are concerned, they are new costs. They will not be happy if someone else tells them they must now pay them. Unhappy people demand their politicians make the problem go away.
If Bob's House of Chips sells lots of bags of chips, but doesn't provide enough trash cans and/or people who take the bags away toss them on the ground a few blocks away - someone besides Bob is paying to clean up the mess. The whole community is paying those costs, while Bob and his customers are the ones who should be shouldering the majority of them. Imposing a cleanup-fee on companies like Bob can be a way to make the price of Bob's bags-o-chips properly reflect the actual total cost of the product, and can make Mary's House of Brownies comparitively less expensive, even though Bob's material and production costs might be lower than Mary's, since her product gets eaten completely and doesn't generate any littering issues.
You of course sum up the problem perfectly... but that problem is easy to understand and most reasonable people would go along with that. But Bob's House of Chips isn't polluting Whereeverstan (random nation that isn't near Bob) on the other side of the planet, and that is where the idea falls apart.
More to the point, if Whereeverstan wants to keep polluting, what does Bob's community do about it? There is this funny little thing called Sovereignty. You can ask nicely, you can apply various types of pressure, but at the end of the day, the only way to MAKE Whereverstand stop polluting is to go to war and use violence.
I fully understand that a handful of nations are serious about doing something about the problem. The issue is that it doesn't actually take THAT many nations to NOT do something to make all those other efforts pointless. If Europe stops burning coal, natural gas, and oil completely, it will just reduce demand, and thus price, for those items. That means a few other nations will have a financial incentive to continue burning them. Like the United States.
Even if the US and China were to cut our CO2 output by half (not at all likely to happen any time soon, but lets pretend), it still wouldn't be enough. But it WOULD be enough to crush our economy and harm the standard of living of a billion people.
Thus we come to the problem of the cure being worse than the disease, while not really fixing the disease. Some people would rather die from cancer than go through cancer treatment. Some people would rather accept climate change rather than pay the price of change. Telling them they are wrong won't change their mind. And that is the real problem you face in trying to solve this.
I've become convinced that Climate Change is the biggest challenge that mankind has yet faced in our history, after the threat of nuclear annihil
How wonderfully self serving and arrogant for Elon Musk to call for the "little people" and the workers of the world to sweat and suffer in order advance his glutenous pursuit of hoarding even more wealth. If he actually gave a shit about the state of the world and the corruption problem of the political oil-igarchy, he'd be pouring all his personal money into the Bernie Sanders campaign.
CO2 is NOT pollution. CO2 is a perfectly normal and natural gas that is vital to all life on Earth. Without it, all the plants would rapidly die followed shortly thereafter by all the starving animals and people. Reduce CO2 too much and the world dies by a death nearly identical to the nightmare scenario of "nuclear winter". CO2 is no more a pollutant than helium or nitrogen - any of which will help a person suffocate if present in large enough quantities to displace required oxygen, but none of which is actually a toxic substance.
Animals inhale oxygen and eat plants (or other animals that have eaten plants) which contain carbon. Animals bind some of the carbon they have ingested to oxygen they have inhaled and they exhale CO2. Plants take in CO2, and separate the carbon to use as building blocks and expel oxygen. The process is circular and continuous. It's called "the carbon cycle". Learn it, and love it.
A "carbon tax" is moronic. There should be a subsidy for emitting CO2. These emissions provide more of what all the plants on Earth need, increasing global vegetation and thus helping to "offset" the losses of greenery created by things like the clearing off the jungles of Brazil. Carbon taxes are just another form of "sin tax" like a tax on cigarettes or alcohol; they are designed to manipulate the behavior of members of the public and create another stream of revenue into big government while actually being atypically popular, be means of being supported by stupid people propagandized to support taxing "somebody else".
Well, if we could get everyone to agree that "yeah this is a real problem and these are good ways of addressing them, but we will never get everyone to agree to do anything", then it becomes much less difficult to actually do it. I'm pessimistic, but I don't want to completely rule out the possibility of actual action.
Side note: Yes, I agree with you... I'm looking at it from a practical point of view, not theory. Lots of stuff works in theory, but not in reality.
I like the meta nature of this: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there ususally is.
In this case, Bob's customers are harming people on the other side of the planet. Bob's customers want cheap chips. It will take war to try and change their mind.
Well, we managed to be fairly effective on ozone and acid rain - so there are at least a few counter examples of this type of thing working without threat of war. I suspect that the same sorts of trade and ecconomic sticks and carrots we used for that might also be workable - but finding the will to do anything in any one spot is a challenge.
Well, we managed to be fairly effective on ozone and acid rain - so there are at least a few counter examples of this type of thing working without threat of war. I suspect that the same sorts of trade and ecconomic sticks and carrots we used for that might also be workable - but finding the will to do anything in any one spot is a challenge.
While you are correct, those are different things...
The Ozone problem was easily solved because a ready replacement was at hand.
If it had not been, what would we have done? Turned off all the air conditioners? Not likely. :)
The problem is that we have to stop burning coal, oil, and natural gas, and we need to stop burning 80% of it within 35 years. That doesn't strike me as possible.
While you are correct, those are different things...
The Ozone problem was easily solved because a ready replacement was at hand.
If it had not been, what would we have done? Turned off all the air conditioners? Not likely. :)
Actually, that WAS a lot of the counter-protest at the time. And still is. In fact, I can still find people who will deny that the Montreal Protocol had ANY SCIENCE WHATSOEVER BEHIND IT. They will probably find it hard to argue that it beggared civilization as we know it, but I wouldn't put it past them. They still believe in the water-powered car being covered by patents, which they claim somebody sold the rights in the 1980s, to which I informed them that patents only lasted for so long, and if they were worried about a confidentiality agreement, all they had to do was move their assets somewhere that it wouldn't be enforced.
Or fucking live off the proceeds of selling your story of having been a shill to the industry.
This was also the person who went on and on to me about how you could get cold air from a air compressor, as if that meant anything. He didn't quite understand that the Gas Law is well known, but common atmospheric air isn't as good a choice as say ammonia from a physical load standpoint, and that CO2 was better from a toxicity one than ammonia, not economic.
Didn't even grasp how inconsequential CO2 as a refrigerant would be, or that the same stuff was dispensed EVERY DAY in a soda fountain.
Bloody stupids. The only thing they convince me about is that they're BLOODY FUCKING STUPID.
Won't that put a big hole in SpaceX's launch capability, given that Dragon's engines are kerosene based? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_rocket_engine_family )?
"And that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives."
Often people in the U.S. count only the lives of U.S. citizens lost in the violence of the U.S. government. Actually, more than 500,000 have been killed. However, other estimates seem more accurate: 1,455,590 have died violent deaths.
Also, the destruction is far greater than the number of Iraqis killed. Iraq is no longer a stable country.
peow say stop using fossil fuels, well I guess you then need to stop buying goods and services and go live in a cave. It's not just your vehicle, everything you buy gets transported by some form of fossil fuel burning transportation and fossil fuels are used to create a lot of electricity as well which is also used to manufacture everything you buy and eat.
I see this a lot, in fact I've passed protestors on a logging road in AB holding signs made from trees saying stop the logging.
Yes we need better means of energy use but don't cry unless your only means of transportation is a bike made of grass.
2000 miles in 30 hours is ~66.6 miles an hour, ~200 mile range on a 4 gallon tank of gas is a ~3 hour stretch, with about ~1-2 minute for fill ups...match that mid Oct. going North to South with an Electric. And that's a Vehicle I bought 18 years ago, for $300.00 that was manufactured 51 years ago. Renewed top end once for about 200.00, rebuilt once for around 500.00. Explain to me again how great electric vehicles are???
The Security arm of the United States of Oil will invade to put down the Rebellion.