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In my opinion for Elon/Tesla to get more credit for climate change they should be lowering prices and cutting into margins to win market share. They would be crushing it if they had more of a mass market car, no silly frills, just a good commuter car with 200-300mi range that wasn’t priced as a luxury car. I don’t know if they have manufacturing capacity to do that yet.
I don’t see Tesla actions that line up with having non-luxury segment products. The luxury segment in the US is 5% of automobile sales, putting a dent in climate change means sellable products in other car segments in mass volume. Nobody is doing that yet.
Everybody loves a story about either a superhero or supervillain who also happens to be the richest person in the world. Any story. And he is arguably both. The verge now even has a weekly summary of elons shenanigans…
Positive stories on the companies he's associated with do reach the front page of HN on a semi-regular basis.
Musk combating climate change is not new.
If Musk does not want news stories that accurately report the things he does, he should… stop doing those things.
I don't think the press should fawn over him. Maybe you're fine with the publishing bias because that helps keep him in check. I can understand that, but in that case you must be aware of the publishing bias, otherwise you'll be being deceived and will have a distorted view of reality.
Is he? - Sure, Tesla pushed the EV market forward but EVs aren't really a solution. We need efficient transport with less infrastructure than roads, but in Musks view public transport is bad as there "might be a killer" next to you. SolarCity also lost relevance in the space since integration with Tesla. With SpaceX his goal also doesn't seem to be to enable scientific advance in researching climate from space or building technologies which can help here but to abandon the planet and building a colony on Mars, where he and his friends can build a new world, just for them.
How are you defining impact? I think it's reasonable to conclude that Tesla caused the global move away from IC cars to EVs. According to the EPA, 27% of carbon emissions are from transportation [1]. I realize that there's other types of transportation than cars included in that number, that we still need to generate the electricity in a carbon neutral way (Tesla is contributing here as well), and that we also need to address the other 73%.
The only way I can see your comment to be true is if you narrowly look at the number of Tesla cars that are exclusively powered by solar today. But that's a very narrow view that misses the broader picture entirely.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I agree—but that's "caused", past tense. The shift has begun and is continuing, and Tesla no longer has much influence on it. If every one of Musk's companies went belly-up tomorrow, the fight against climate change would not be harmed.
No it's not. EU regulations are arguably more responsible.
They forced all car manufacturers to transition to EVs.
That happened after Tesla had proven the model though, primarily that you can build an EV that has sufficient range and that people find desirable.
Agree, but before Tesla electric cars were quite niche, now they're mainstream. One could probably argue that this is unrelated but there seems to be some correlation at least,
That the cars themselves are negligible is a bit unfair, Electric cars allow you to use renewable energies instead of fossil fuels- its a huge amount of energy consumed by transportation. Demand for EV car infrastructure is higher now and once built benefits everyone.
Is public transport better- undoubtedly, but Americans have infrastructured their way into a corner- they seem to fundamentally require cars for day-to-day operations and continue to make choices that force car dependence.
Space travel (in a similar way) is still needed, not just to get off this planet when we kill it (which I don't agree is a goal based in reality) but because there's absurd amounts of resources in the universe and some of it wizzes by us constantly.
> The president is restoring and strengthening tailpipe emissions regulations from the Obama era and has set a target that half of all vehicles sold in the United States be electric by 2030.
So you would think the press has a favorable opinion of him, at least when it comes to climate change.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/climate/biden-tailpipe-em...
Minimizing how significant Tesla's contribution to reducing CO2 emissions has been relative to other carmakers', and in fact, relative to any other single company, is not an honest way of evaluating its impact on the world, and suggests to me a motivation unrelated to environmentalism behind it.
- the entire media is in a conspiracy against the world's richest man.
- he really is a jerk and when he initiated the Twitter deal it got the public focus on him and so when stories started churning out they couldn't help but be about what a jerk he is.
I think which of these cases you find most likely will say a lot about your personality and state of mind.
I also think that, while it's possible he genuinely set out to combat climate change, with what we know about him and his projects today, I think his efforts in that department have been ineffective, or even counterproductive.
First of all, SpaceX is making climate change worse. Their rockets spend a great deal of energy, much of it in the form of fossil fuels, polluting parts of the atmosphere that airplanes can't reach. Airplanes are very bad for the environment and we need to drastically reduce their use to avoid climate disaster. Rockets are worse. Their only advantage over airplanes is that there are far fewer of them launching less often, but SpaceX is working to change that. Counterproductive. (For an alternative that could theoretically use renewable energy, I'm optimistic about Spinlaunch.)
In retrospect, it's clear that the Hyperloop is an impractical boondoggle intended to sabotage real world high speed rail projects that might reduce the need for Teslas. Increasing the use of public transit and reducing airplanes and cars is crucial to addressing the climate crisis. Counterproductive.
The Boring Company could be developing cool tech, but it's being used to move Teslas through tunnels instead of trains, which is ludicrously inefficient. Counterproductive.
Tesla itself sounded like a good idea at first, and certainly cars need to be electrified to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, simply replacing every fossil fuel car on the road with an electric car would be woefully insufficient to address the climate crisis. They just use too much energy, require too many batteries, and encourage sprawl at a time when we need density to create walkable neighborhoods friendly to transit. (An alternative I love is velomobiles, but most Americans have never even seen one. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobil... ) Like many incremental solutions at this late date where we need radical change, this could end up being counterproductive, especially if the world's richest man applies pressure to maintain our society's car dependency, which as I've suggested above, I believe he has.
I could go on about Elon's swing towards the right wing (which in the USA means supporting climate change deniers), etc., but this comment is already too long.
TL;DR: I think history may view Elon as sabotaging climate action more than he's helped it.
Even if EV are not scalable, would you say replacing a single oil vehicle with an EV moves the needle in the right direction, however short sighted the strategy, and regardless of whether a more radical strategy will be needed in the future? Simply because that EV will pollute less than it's oil counterpart.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/10/scoop-dem...
This entire thing strikes me more as the media being fearful of losing the ability to put their thumbs on the scale of one of the best tools for the manipulation of the public, Twitter.
It also wasn't rational when doing work covered by ITAR and other requirements to smoke something your most profitable client, the US Government, says you should not.
I don't know, but what climate change related action of him is worth discussing?