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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.
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.
He may not be wrong but he's selling electric cars and batteries, he's not exactly impartial.
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.
Coming up later - short hair is the in thing, claims barber.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We need a revolt against stupid people like you. Full stop.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
Nah. We just need their hearts to. . . . Full Stop.
(evil grin)
"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.
Throw everything out of your house that was made by industry.
Including the computer you're typing on.
And food, and power, and most of the parts of the house you live in.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
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
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.
We all use valuable oil.
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.
Another perspective --- why is he still building Individual Cars. I read an article where the author pointed out ---- it costs about the same to build A Car. That car still uses the roads/bridges and clogs roadways requiring larger roads to be built. And those batteries. They will become the next pollutant of some kind.
The author argued that the real way to the future is via Mass Transit. Fewer individual cars should be built. More sharing. That is the big step forward.
Some have even painted the picture of self-driving vehicles that act as taxis - on demand and shared. Possibly better than the bus in rural areas with more personal schedule choice.
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!
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.
No, that's actually a big step backward. Believe it or not, being able to get from anywhere to anywhere any time you want in your own space is actually a good thing, just like bigger houses, more books, more movies, and all the other things civilization brings.
Why is that any different than personal automobiles? The number of vehicles on the road is the same, and the amount of waste generated is also roughly the same, assuming vehicles turn to waste through use.
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?
Sharing should reduce the total number of vehicles in existence (anytime you have a pool - the total needed goes down). Mercedes issues a statement last year opening "worrying" about this and highlighted how the market may change with the combination of autonomous vehicles. And if carpooling were used it would also reduce the number of vehicles on the road at any given time - kind of a mini bus line.
Mass Transit couple with autonomous cars that fill in that last mile still allow people to go anywhere.
They did an experiment here in my city. There was a large heavily traveled 4 lane road (2 + 2). Traffic was always an issue - cars blocked the lane to turn Left - crashes as people pulled in from side streets etc. One side argued for a 5th lane. Others argued for fewer lanes. The experiment put in place a 3 lane highway.... 1+1 and a single center turn lane. Traffic congestion has all but gone away and accidents on the road have decreased significantly.
So we can still all go where we want - sometimes Less is More.
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."
Um, how do you think hydrogen is made?
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
who judges "when telecommuting would suffice?" maybe I mostly ssh into servers but sometimes have to pull cable, or attach to serial port (yes kiddies, big computers unlike your wintel crap still have them for initial startup and special firmware operations as do many network appliances), or hotplug components, etc.
don't confuse the idiots who think hydrogen is a fuel source or that batteries are fuel. Don't confuse idiots who don't know where the enegy to make a tesla comes from or where the energy to recharge them comes from (fossil and nuclear, in the USA)
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
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.
It would, but so what? Having more vehicles in existence doesn't hurt anything by itself. The capital investment in the vehicle and the space to park it are usually made by the people who want the convenience of having a vehicle 24/7.
That kind of combination means that people are still tied to schedules and that they have to change transportation modes. It also only works if all you want to transport yourself and a small backpack, and during regular hours. For large loads, traveling with animals, and/or traveling at odd times it becomes next to impossible.
Maybe mass transit serves your needs, it doesn't serve mine or those of a lot of other people. It's also quite slow and expensive in practice, even though it is heavily subsidized. And I speak from first hand experience here.
"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.
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.
Clearly he thinks the cost hit he'll take at SpaceX will be dwarfed by his sales gains at SolarCity and Tesla. Sure, he can execute the ass off of bot the auto industry and the launch industry, but he knows that his bottom line is what will enable him to settle Mars, and he's not about to walk away from that goal.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
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.
Actually that's more conceivable than with a small government - in which case the special interests simply fill the resulting powergap THEMSELVES and there are no oppostion politicians or elections to constrain their abuses.
Make government small enough and the special interests morph into a bunch of warlords. That's what you find everywhere on earth where government is small. Small government = being kidnapped from your home into forced labour (i.e. slavery) by mad warlords who will hapilly burn everybody you love along the way just to show you who is boss.
There are lots of big government countries with very low corruption rates. There isn't a single small government country NOT overrun by brutal, lawless, murderous warlords committing most of the worst atrocities in the world today. The only thing stopping the richest guy in town from buying himself and army and enslaving you and burning every other town to establish his fiefdom is having a government big enough to scare him.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
If you're right, you'll be controlled by special interests any way you slice it, so you may as well give up.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
Yeah! The competitors got there first, so they get the protection!
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?
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.
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.
Why? Are people going to stop buying gas just because the price went up? Did they all shut down when gas prices were significantly higher? Oil prices have been as low as $16.44/barrel to has high as $151.72/barrel in the last two decades. Significant change in usage has not followed. Oil and food are fairly "inelastic" - the consumption thereof is not hugely effected by the price becuase they are mostly "necessities".
What does change is the TYPE of thing that is consumed. If the price of chicken increases, people will eat less of it and more of some other type of food. If we decided that we should put fees on chicken production to reflect the cost that is not born by the chicken producers (like charging for noisy clucking outside the chicken factory), then people would switch to the cheaper pork products and any chicken farmer could reduce their costs by installing sound proofing and pay less "cluck-bucks". Similarly, if we imposed a fee on carbon emmission, people might be able to switch to other forms of energy with lower emmissions.
As things now stand, there is little incentive to reducing the loud clucking - the producers have lots of unpaid externalized costs.
"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.
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.
They do? Then the automakers who guarantee their batteries for 8 years are surely screwed.
And/or all the 2011 Leaf/Volt/etc. sold 5 years ago must be dead on the side of the road by now.
Seriously, when are the /.-ers here going to stop spewing nonsense as if it were facts?
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.
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.
You're aware of course that Tesla can't produce enough cars to keep up with demand, right? Hell they announced a new model just a few weeks back, and sold spots in line to buy one for $1k each, and raked in more than $100m in the first few days. He doesn't need to be concerned about finding more customers to buy his cars. The big reason most people aren't driving a Tesla or similar car today is the high cost of new automobiles and the very limited supply. As time goes on and electric cars make their way into the used market ICE cars will be phased out, especially seeing as how electric cars will last a lot longer likely only needing a battery replacement after 10+ years.
So far as subsidies go the only big one I'm aware of is the low interest loan they had and already paid off. The subsidy for buying an electric vehicle from the fed is paid to customers, not Tesla. Even if that boosts sales a bit it isn't large enough to account for the waiting list to purchase a new Tesla. While Tesla and all other electric car drivers don't currently pay any direct road taxes, they will eventually once they become a large enough share of the road traffic. We don't bother taxing bicyclists for their use of the roadways because it would be an insignificant amount, and the same is still probably true for electric vehicles. That said everyone that participates in modern society is paying road taxes through their purchases of goods shipped via semi-truck, which produce the lions share of wear and tear on our roadways.
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.
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.
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.
That "cycle" is on the order of many tens of thousands, if not actually millions of years... for all intents and purposes, it is non-renewable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You realize he's all for that right? $8+ a gallon for fuel will make electric cars skyrocket in popularity.
What powers the solar Tesla charging station?
Wow you better go tell Nissan. And Toyota. And BMW. And Chevy. And every other car maker, because you sure know something all of them don't.
Seriously that Elon thinks he's the messiah and promotes violent thoughts and one dimensional thinking...
The Falcon 9 launcher built and flown by SpaceX burns over 200 tonnes of fossil fuel kerosene in every flight.
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.)
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!"
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?
I live in a grass hut, you insensitive clod!
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
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.
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.
---
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.
---
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.
---
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.
In different words, you're saying that the effect of raising the gas tax further wouldn't be to sell more electric vehicles (since they can't be produced fast enough anyway), it would simply be to increase profits for Elon Musk. Thanks for clearing that up.
In fact, Tesla's waiting list is more like Ferrari's: they make a specialty product for a niche market, and they just want even more subsidies (an increase in the gas tax is effectively an additional subsidy for Tesla).
That makes no difference in the end; Tesla still profits from it the same way.
And until they do, they are still subsidized by fossil fuels.
They don't pay the lion share, however. Furthermore, they are weighted, measured, and taxed according to the wear and tear created by themselves; you can't say that that also pays for the usage by electric vehicles. Finally, that argument only applies to major highways anyway; for other roads, it's construction and weathering that are the primary costs, and electric vehicles aren't paying their share.
Really, you're grasping at straws. Elon Musk wants more subsidies to increase his profits; it's typical, simple crony capitalism, and you're promoting it.
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.
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
What a stupid thing to say.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
But as I said, the renewal cycle for fossil fuels is impractically long, and the *only* thing that would actually prevent if from getting depleted before it runs out, if alternatives are not sought, is not that it eventually renews itself, as is the case with energy sources that *are* perceived as renewable, but the simple impracticality of paying for the increasing difficulty that will be encountered in obtaining an ever-depleting resource that would otherwise be completely exhausted long before any more useful amounts would be created.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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...
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.... :-)
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
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.
"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.
No, there really is no prestige or respect to be conferred from using "affluent", the origin of the word is freely flowing great quantities of water, and it merely means having a great deal of money. Maybe your subconscious adds meaning?
"In different words, you're saying that the effect of raising the gas tax further wouldn't be to sell more electric vehicles (since they can't be produced fast enough anyway), it would simply be to increase profits for Elon Musk. Thanks for clearing that up."
Are we both speaking English here? Raising taxes on gas can't currently result in more profits for Tesla because they are already producing and selling their cars as fast as possible. Maybe ten years from now they might have production ramped up enough to have extra cars to sell and need more of a competitive edge, but that is certainly not true currently. Remember Tesla's goal though has never been to dominate the electric car market, the aim has been "to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible." Whether or not Tesla reigns supreme when all is said and done isn't critical to that mission.
"In fact, Tesla's waiting list is more like Ferrari's: they make a specialty product for a niche market, and they just want even more subsidies (an increase in the gas tax is effectively an additional subsidy for Tesla)."
Even when gas prices were more than double what they are today people weren't switching to electric vehicles in droves because the savings in gas isn't worth the price premium for an electric vehicle. You had people buying more efficient cars and the prices for old efficient models went up a good bit though. And again if they are already selling all the cars they can it wouldn't represent an increase in profits at all for Tesla. It might result in more sales for Chevy and Nissan electric vehicles, which out sell the Tesla models currently. And that would still be inline with Tesla's mission statement.
"That makes no difference in the end; Tesla still profits from it the same way."
And you may as well argue that WIC and SNAP benefits are a subsidy for Walmart.
"And until they do, they are still subsidized by fossil fuels."
Yup, and it's likely worth the cost for the time being because they are polluting less and represent an incredibly small portion of miles driven on our roadways. If this is such a near and dear concern for you let me know when you plan to protest marathons and other uses of public roads without paying gas taxes.
In 2015 we had 260 million vehicles registered for use on public roads in the USA, at the end of 2015 there were only about 410 thousand electric vehicles registered. That means we have a truly horrifying 0.16% of vehicles freeloading when it comes to road taxes. Shit, I'll bet that abuse of farm diesel amounts to more lost road taxes.
"Really, you're grasping at straws. Elon Musk wants more subsidies to increase his profits; it's typical, simple crony capitalism, and you're promoting it."
I'm sorry but you are the one continually grasping at the same straw. Musk is pushing for the antiquating of the ICE powdered vehicle. His company is already selling every single vehicle it can produce, increasing demand won't help him produce more vehicles. Apparently as of last month he has actually promised to sell another 325k more vehicles that he can't currently produce. The only avenue for extra profits here is that he could possibly raise the prices on his cars but that is opposite his mission of making mass market vehicles.
We aren't talking about whether it's "worth it". Musk's contention is that electric vehicle adoption is hindered by unfair subsidies to fossil fuel producers. The fact is the exact opposite: it's his vehicles that are massively subsidized.
Last year, Tesla was losing $4000 on every car, although that oscillates wildly quarter to quarter. That can't go on like that, they need to raise prices in order to increase profits to something that is reliably positive. Tesla is also selling to a niche market, which is why he can't ramp up production much or risk having prices fall even further and losing even more money.
And you're right that raising prices is "opposite his mission", and that matters a great deal. Since Musk's company is built on massive political favors and subsidies, if politicians and the public perceive Tesla for what it is, an overpriced toy for high income earners, he risks losing those favors. He can't ask for even more subsidies, so instead he is trying to raise the costs of his competitors. It's the only way left to him to make his cars mainstream.
In any case, my main point is: Musk's arguments are bogus. It's electric vehicles that are massively subsidized, while fossil fuel is taxed at around what even climate change activists generally say externalities from carbon emissions are. Musk is right that massively increasing the tax on fossil fuels would make his cars more attractive, but he is wrong in his assertions that such taxes are economically justified or beneficial. In fact, taxing fossil fuels enough to make his vehicles competitive would be a massively regressive tax that hurts low income people the most.
Fossil fuel powered cars are going to disappear on their own, once the technology is ready. But saddling the economy with billions of taxes and even more billions of crony capitalist earnings for Musk isn't going to help anyone, and it isn't going to speed up the breakthroughs in material science and other areas needed to make that happen.
The $4,000 loss per car is honestly very laughable. The apparent loss is because the financials for the company represent the entirety of their expenses and income. Yes, investors would like Tesla to be profitable as quickly as possible. Tesla's mission statement however is not to be profitable, and so their balance sheets show a lot of money still being spent in research and development. For instance Tesla is building their own battery plant because without it the world isn't producing enough batteries to meet their production goals, meanwhile the cost of that plant is part of the cost of each car they build. The actual profit margins on a Model S is around 25% which is enough to make just about any company except maybe Apple a bit envious.
A niche market that has at least 325,000 people willing to spend $1000 for a pre-order spot is something most companies would do well to own. Such a massive pre-order queue is indicative of a much larger market for EV's. Tesla is actively working to ramp up production so they can fill those existing orders. And as the investment in production facilities matures I wouldn't be surprised to see the cost of Tesla cars actually come down a bit, which will attract even more buyers.
"while fossil fuel is taxed at around what even climate change activists generally say externalities from carbon emissions are"
I couldn't find any sources that looked even slightly impartial on this. Many sites I would expect to be pro-climate were saying gas would be $12 - $15 a gallon if we counted in all the subsidies through tax breaks, leases, and wars fought on the oil industries behalf. The most moderate I could find was in the WSJ which typically leans the other way and seemed to say that taxes should perhaps be double what they are now, which is about $0.49 a gallon.
I think you are an excellent example of how delusions about progress and economic illiteracy combine to produce massive crony capitalism. Thanks for the demonstration.
The Security arm of the United States of Oil will invade to put down the Rebellion.