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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.
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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 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!
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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.
If you believe that polluters should pay for the damage they cause, and if you believe that CO2 emissions impose a nonzero cost on the environment, then ending the fossil fuel subsidies is just not sufficient reparation.
And if the carbon tax were revenue-neutral as many advocate, then if the tax were $50 per ton of CO2 and the average person creates 20 tons per year, then everyone would receive back $1,000 no matter how much CO2 they created. The average person who makes no change to their lifestyle would be no better or worse off, the poor who use less energy would get a windfall, and the wealthy who do more flying and have bigger homes to heat and cool would pay more in taxes than they receive back. So a revenue-neutral carbon tax would transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, not the other way around.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
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