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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

A dirty secret about ICE cars: they benefit from huge subsidies and the public paying its externalities too.

We'll ride a lot more public transit and bicycles when cars of all types pay their true costs.

Another dirty little secret about Tesla and Musk: they aren't helping the environment. Helping the environment means fewer cars and of those we can't get rid of, make them electric. Their strategy is more cars. That is, the tactic of electric is useful within a strategy of de-growth, but they have a strategy of growth. In fairness, they are a car company. A meaningful strategy to shrink the market would require changing the playing field, which would likely have to come from outside the field -- government or leadership at the level of Mandela or Dr. King.

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Each time we help the environment by 5%, leaders let the population grow by 5% (often by immigration saying « We need it »).

Population and footprint are increasing just like it always has, and our efforts are just being used to squeeze a few more of us here.

Except countries don't share the same footprint per capital, at all. Simply compare the carbon footprint of a US inhabitant vs a Vietnamese.

We could be a handful of billions more on Earth and reduce the global footprint, so the size of the population not the issue but how we live (big house, big SUV, lots of meat, etc).

And of course, if the world's power continue to promote the American Way of Life as the way to go, all countries will look like the US and we'll destroy our habitat. But that's not a population problem but one of culture.

They also work to raise the lower countries’ population consumption levels, so ecology is just economy in the West, more spending in the East, but still exponential growth of our footprint.

people want new cars.

there are two issues here:

1) they need cars: how to make cars less needed?

2) they buy cars: if they buy cars anyway, isn't it better if they buy electric?

first point is going to be very hard to solve, so might as well start with the second.

The fetishism of biological locomotion is just a form of Luddism. Our backs are poorly designed. The amount of human suffering caused by damage to our backs is immeasurable. Promoting more of that is just cruel.

Pushing the environment to the detriment of human happiness and progress should never be a goal. There is a balance we can seek to not destroy our cradle while not hobbling ourselves.

The idea that we must abandon progress when we have basically endless untapped power is just a death cult.

If we're talking about backs, then (given the very limited amount of literal back-breaking work carrying loads that are far too heavy for us, at least in the developed world) the main damage to our backs is caused by excessive sitting (for which our backs are poorly designed) - so if you're really going to use "damage to our backs" as an argumant with respect to cars vs "biological locomotion", this is an argument for more "biological locomotion" not less.

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