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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.
The "massive" subsidies for solar/wind turn out to be small compared to the subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry subsidies are simply invisible because they've been in place so long.
http://www.ibtimes.com/us-foss...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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. . .
-1 Stupid.
Wind energy doesn't use rare-earth minerals, it's just a big fan with a motor.
And at least with solar, you only have to dig it up once and make the panel once, and then it produces power for decades. And you can then recycle it afterwards.
With fossil fuel, once you burn it, it's gone, into the atmosphere, and you have to keep digging more out of the ground and burning it.
The common applications for rare earth magnets seems to list wind turbines.
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!”
Right. Plus, if it's a revenue neutral tax like they've implemented in British Columbia then other taxes are reduced and no net income is generated for the state.
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?
This suggests otherwise: http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/s...
Do you have a source?
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.
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.
I agree with Musk that we need to move away from fossil fuels, but gasoline vehicles have a net tax, not a subsidy. Going through the first page of Google hits, the biggest figure for oil industry subsidies in the U.S. I can find is $37.5 billion/yr. (Note that the dollar amount of a tax exemption or a deduction is not equal to the subsidy dollar amount.)
The U.S. uses about 140 billion gallons of gasoline each year. So even if you assumed the entirety of that subsidy were on gasoline (less than half of a barrel of oil becomes gasoline), that works out to a subsidy of just 26.8 cents per gallon.
The average fuel tax on gasoline in the U.S. is 48.7 cents/gallon. So gasoline has a net tax on it - it is taxed more than the subsidy it receives.
The difference is even starker in other OECD countries, where gasoline is taxed to the tune of several dollars a gallon. We are addicted to gasoline and fossil fuels because the easy access to energy acts as a multiplier for our productivity, allowing us to increase our standard of living relatively cheaply (in terms of financial cost). Even with the net tax, we are still addicted to it. So even if all the complaining about oil subsidies works and they're completely rescinded, it won't make a dent in our oil consumption. The price of gasoline has fluctuated more this year due to market forces, than the above calculated subsidy amount.
Problem with cost per megawatt is that it ignores all the externalised costs. Healthcare to deal with the effects of pollution is expensive and very long term. How do you value all the energy saved having to vacuum homes or replace filters less often?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I think the answer is yes. You frame that as a bad thing and got modded up. I'm not sure why. Not everything that people advocate for has to be in their own self-interest. Of course in this case, pumping up the price of his product may be to his benefit. People love to talk about electric cars really being coal cars but if CO2 were priced accurately, electricity wouldn't be generated by coal and burning fossil fuels in a vehicle would be cost prohibitive.
300,000 US birds killed by wind turbines annually, compared to the 3 billion birds killed by cats every year.
Learn to check statistics before opening your damn mouth, you fossil-fuel shilling waste-of-space intellectually dishonest cunt.
Maybe we should be trying to run over more cats?
You make an assertion with no proof whatsoever
There are many studies of bird deaths from windmills, including this meta-study. Windmills kill a few hundred thousand birds a year. Very few of those are from endangered species. By comparison, several BILLION are killed by domestic cats, and many millions die from collisions with buildings.
Objecting to windmills because they "kill birds" is idiotic, and even the people that raise that issue don't really believe it is valid. They just aren't bright enough to think of a more rational objection.
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.
These are all subsidies that have been around for a long, long time. I don't think anyone is saying they were a bad idea at the time - there is a public good aspect here - but if the same service (personal transportation) can be delivered differently, do we really need to keep subsidizing oil and gas?
It should at least be discussed. I know having an adult conversation is hard for someone who uses phrases like "looney left" but try. Or , just be quiet and let the grown ups handle this one.
By "subsidies", you apparently mean normal business expense deductions that ALL businesses get.
No. Do a quick internet search for "oil tax credit" and learn something new. If you're too lazy for that, try this article: http://www.investopedia.com/ar... If you're too lazy for that, understand that you're incorrect, and there are specific tax benefits that are given to oil investments.
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.
No, he's trying to make incentives to have people replace coal or natural gas power plants with solar, wind, and maybe even nuclear. People say switching to renewable is too expensive. One of the reasons for that is the fossil fuel industry's freedom to pollute. IF the cost of that pollution were included in the sale price of the electricity or gasoline, people would have more accurate data when making the decision of renewable vs. fossil fuel. As an example, if we switched entirely to renewables, we'd save $300-800 billion a year on reduced health costs:
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_en...
And that doesn't include property damage from harsher storms or rising sea levels.
you can make generators which do not have permanent magnets.
The reason rare earth permanent magnets are popular in wind generators, especially small ones, is that electromagnets continuously burn power to make the field, and this comes out of the power you generate.
Further: The slower the machine turns, the less energy you get from it (by a CUBE function!) and the more field you need (by a linear function in strength and a SQUARE function in consumed energy) to get it to generate a given output voltage. Small machines generally have to generate a higher voltage than an associated battery pack to achieve "cut in" - or use a voltage converter (which is more to fail, has losses, and has losses that are a higher percentage when the input voltage is lower). So when wind is slow, and you're already hard up for power, electromagnets are at their worst. This raises the cut in wind speed and greatly reduces the utility of small machines.
With permanent magnets you pay the magnetizing power once, for nanoseconds, as you manufacture them. No ongoing power cost, so you can use every bit of your generated power for your load.
Rare earth magnets are preferred to other types because they're stronger - strong enough to easily saturate flux-guide silicon-steel winding cores, strong enough to keep the machine small, which means the coils are small and have less resistive losses than a larger arrangement. Again, more power at low speed - which translates to a smaller, lighter, less expensive machine.
A big industrial machine is big enough to have a gearbox and spin fast enough that it can get away with using electromagnets. Nevertheless, permanent magnets, or a mix, also gives energy efficiency advantages to the big mills.
The REAL measure of efficiency for a wind machine, though, is power generated / cost of equipment, maintenance, and site. When your fuel is free the economics doesn't work the way most people are used to thinking.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way