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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."
Just as long as taxes are levied against all energy producers that are based on the environmental cost of generating the power (including construction, fabrication impacts), I'm with you.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
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?
Those who can stand on their own would be the ones with the most money in the bank.
So it would be the older established companies, vs. the newer companies who are spending a lot of money in R&D.
The subsidies allow such companies to be competitive with the big names who have money to sell at a loss until their competition is dead.
If you think subsidies are unfair, realize the big companies have the ability to change the rules.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
By "subsidies", you apparently mean normal business expense deductions that ALL businesses get.
I propose a simple metric: cost per megawatt-hour delivered to the grid, with no non-standard deductions and no outright subsidies.
Until we get a picture free of EVERYONE'S politics, and have some purely objective data to work with, we're talking apples and oranges here. . .
The big motor in a turbine uses rare-earth magnets.
But the pollution issue with rare-earths is due to the extraction techniques. It's much easier to fix a mining operation than it is to retrofit scrubbers on to every fossil fuel plant out there.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Yes - lets squabble about this little blue marble, when there are quadrillions of tons of rare earths to be found in the asteroid belt.
Let's get off our collective butts, slap ourselves out of our collective malaise, and get the space elevator/ private sector affordable space launch vehicles/ Mars mission technology working NOW - so we can solve these problems without further destroying the earth.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Carbon tax hurts _you_, the consumer, not companies who are passing their costs to you
It's not intended to hurt the companies. It's intended to alter the market by making a particular product more expensive, and thus less enticing. Other products can then compete better on price and thus become more enticing.
A subsidy or tax break can have a similar type of effect but in the opposite direction.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
...merit based incremental updates. That method is how we achieved national coverage for railroads...
Oh, man! That's so funny!
Carbon tax is just a fee for garbage collection. It is a perfectly valid way to pay for the necessary clean up. But since the voters elect tycoons and won't oversee their government, it will just turn into another scandal. One way or another, passively or actively, together we set policy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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?
By subsidies, many of us mean that everyone else gets to pay for the damage done by the use of fossil fuels, while the companies reap profits.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The magnets in wind turbines use neodymium, which is a "rare earth", but is not actually very rare, nor particularly expensive (about 30 cents per gram). Most production is in China, but America and Canada are also producers. Mining rare earths is not a major environmental problem. Comparing it to the environmental cost of fossil fuels is absurd.
Rare earths do not fuel wars. Tantalum mining was used to fund rebels during the Congo civil war, but tantalum is not a rare earth metal.
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.
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.