Hacker News Reader

Comment by mamon | Hacker News Reader

We are definitely living in different universes. ICEs do not get any subsidies, quite the opposite: in many countries, e.g. the whole EU gas is so heavily taxed that more than half of the retail price is tax.

Also, Tesla is an easy target to make fun of, because of its narcistic, arrogant CEO that seems to think that he can outsmart everyone, when in fact his business is a total mess.

View on HN

Of course ICEs get subsidies. The subsidy is in the form of a carbon tax that we do not collect, even though we should. Every ICE produces emissions which will soon make most of our planet uninhabitable. There should be a carbon tax, so that we can offset this destruction: by building nuclear plants, or figuring out how to re-capture the carbon emitted into the atmosphere.

And yet we do not collect that tax, hence heavily subsidizing ICEs. This is credited by our children and grandchildren, who will end up with a massively changed (for the worse) planet.

You have a point about the negative externalities, but insisting on using the word "subsidy" for that concept is just going to confuse people. That isn't the accepted meaning of "subsidy", in casual conversation at least.

Hmm — how else would you call it? As I understand it, future generations are subsidizing the price of our fossil fuels and internal combustion engines, making ICEs artificially cheap by not considering their environmental impact.

Subsidies do not have to be in the form of cash: many come in the form of tax breaks and I would consider this to be one such case.

It is just confusing to use the same word to suggest explicit assistance (cash, tax breaks, etc) and "failure to penalize". I guess mathematically they both represent a reduction in cost when compared to an alternative scenario (no subsidy and some sort of tax/fee for the externality) but they are different mechanisms and so it makes sense for them to have different words to describe them if you want to communicate clearly.

It gets far worse when you consider the total cost of wars to protect the flow of oil.

There were still wars before oil was a thing.

EVs don't pay carbon taxes either (which they should).

You’re arguing for carbon taxes on electrical generation. Entirely agree. This would push coal and natural gas out of the electrical grid generation mix even faster, making EVs even cleaner.

The oil industry, at least in the US, receives huge tax breaks. This indirectly subsidized the ICEs that burn them.

Gas is about $3/gallon in the US. Ford is moving towards only making SUVs, pickup trucks, and the Mustang. Different countries, not different universes.

I like that Musk is narcissistic and arrogant in public. He doesn’t hide it like the execs at every automaker who was part of Dieselgate. Be an asshole, by all means, just deliver faster. (Credit to BYD and their electric bus fleet efforts, and China’s renewables push in general; I would be remiss if I made it sound like Musk alone was working towards these goals).

Do you also love it when Musk calls people pedos? What about when he lies about taking the company private on Twitter? This is the narcissism you enjoy?

I don’t love it, but I don’t care about it either. It’s noise. I’ve seen far better people take far worse actions. No one’s perfect. Stress is unpleasant and will cause you to lash out.

I do love someone who doesn’t cultivate an image. I think this is 100% who Musk has become, for better and worse, and I respect someone who is genuine about who they are, warts and all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com