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Comment by valvar | Hacker News Reader

Not that I disagree (in fact I strongly agree), but is Musk really the person we should be taking this from? It's a bit like taking investment advice from your bank, meseems. Not necessarily a bad idea, but you might want to hear with people who don't have an active interest in the placement of your money first.

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Obviously a carbon tax would benefit Musk, but the fact that he chose to start Tesla in the first place, when he already had more money than he could ever need, strongly suggests that he actually does care about climate change.

Elon Musk's interests are 100% out in the open, so there is no conflict of interest in him giving advice. Compare that with the cloak and dagger approach of the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch, trying to influence people secretively for their own gain to the peril of the planet.

>>Not necessarily a bad idea, but you might want to hear with people who don't have an active interest in the placement of your money first.

Those people do in fact agree with Musk. Here's James Henson, one of the world's foremost climate scientists:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/prominent-climate-sci...

"The only way to meaningfully address carbon emissions is to put a tax on carbon-based fuels, and to refund the entire amount as a dividend to consumers."

That's what I mean. That article, for example, would have been a much more meaningful submission. Musk's vested interests make it harder to take his statements at face value (even if they are entirely correct).

But even if he does it for his own profit, it will help humanity. Also car industry is huge so other mades after introducing this tax would introduce electric cars so Tesla would have same amount of competition.

It would help Tesla and SolarCity, but hurt SpaceX.

A Falcon 9 rocket launch costs $61,200,000. Propellant costs $200,000.

The impact to SpaceX probably wouldn't be that big.

The amount of fuel required to get to the space station is within an order of magnitude of that required to cross the Atlantic in an aeroplane.

The Falcon 9 uses about 112000 litres of fuel [1] which costs about $200000.

A 10 hour flight on a trans-atlantic jet might burn 150000 litres [2].

Even if the launch cadence increases to much more than what they have been planning (they were on track to launch about one a month this year until the CRS-7 incident), the cost to offset the carbon used in launches is almost insignificant.

There will be other aspects of the business that release carbon as well, of course, but those would be impacted in a similar fashion across the other businesses (manufacturing and logistical costs etc).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Launch_prices

[2] http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/que...

Well, your barber is an expert on hair.

Well, if you really want to drill down on this example: the barber doesn't have substantial interests in which type of haircut you get. Tesla has substantial interest in which kind of carbon tax you get -- high carbon tax would be a boon. Doesn't materially effect how good an idea carbon taxes are, though.

Also, do people ask their barber what haircut they should get? I have only ever done a buzz cut or given a description / picture.

A proper analogy would be a barber asking for a tax on long hair.

Yeah, he would have to find someone to cut his own hair too.

There's a joke/aphorism, "that's like asking your barber if you should get a haircut."

Apparently it's not as well-known as I thought.

I haven't seen anything to suggest he is an expert in macro-economic forecast modelling.

Just because I know how to use a command line doesn't equate to me being an expert in running an IT company. It's not the best analogy but Musk is pretty far removed from what most economists actually do.

Yes, though on this particular matter he's just agreeing with what has been the consensus amongst economists for a long time.

Agreed. Musk is probably right about the carbon tax, but unfortunately a conflict of interests this severe should cause most folks to put his energy essays into the "worth thinking about" pile.

I feel the same way every time he talks about colonizing Mars. Oh, the guy with the rocket company thinks we ought to dump 100 trillion dollars into settling another planet? You don't say...

Aren't there significant carbon emissions released during the production of a Tesla car and its components?

It only needs to release less than an equivalent ICE vehicle. Comparing it to "zero" is unfair.

After accounting for emissions during manufacturing, even if you powered an electric car with coal power only, carbon emissions of an electric car are roughly a 25-30 MPG car equivalent.

However, those numbers get much better as the electric power generation mix improves (at both the car factory and your garage). In California, now, an electric car is about equivalent to a 70 MPG car.

Note that significant efforts are underway to reduce the carbon-intensiveness of our electricity generation, so these numbers will get better over time.

http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green

I think it's a bootstrapping issue. What does one do first when they want an entirely new power ecosystem? I would argue it's wiser to start with the sexy public facing segment on the demand side (awesome looking electric sports cars) and have the public start this exact conversation and demand the infrastructure changes. Because it seems like a pretty steep climb for one to try to make this huge change simply by supply side first.

It's hard to imagine any process that doesn't have some interaction with carbon-based fuel. So while he is willing to pay the cost along with everyone else, the conflict of interest is still there -- his company will benefit _at the margin_ with a much higher carbon tax, so there's an extent to which he might be talking his book.

That all being said, as a matter of simple fact I think he's correct with only relatively straight-forward caveats (like, "within the lifespan of currently alive humans"). So the issue isn't him talking his book per se as it is him attempting to set the public agenda in a way favorable to him. This isn't something I typically worry about, although given how totally non-surprising the headline is to anyone who has paid attention to energy policy in the last couple decades, it might be worth bringing up.

It is theoretically possible to develop technology that makes electric cars greatly more co2 efficient over the lifetime than internal combustion engines ever could be. That puts Tesla at an advantage in the long run.

That's not a theory -- given the trends in the electricity markets, that's expected.

The benefit of a carbon tax is that no one has to calculate whether the lifetime vs production CO2 cost is greater; it shows up in the prices of either.

The downside of carbon tax is that it harms developing nations and the poor the most.

The impact on the poor is easy to fix: prebate everyone an amount of money equal to the poverty level energy consumption. It cancels the income effect while preserving the incentive to cut back on any marginal unit of CO2.

You're getting cause and effect back to front - Musk started Tesla because he wanted to play a real part in reducing emissions. He is on record as saying so. So arguing for a carbon tax is just another effort in that direction, not an attempt to bolster his business.

"CEO says he has your best interests at heart" is a fairly common line though.

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