We will also blow through any chance of stopping climate change.
This is such a bullshit way of thinking. No one snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche. "But China…", "But India…" is not an excuse for not giving a shit. I hear the same arguments over here in Germany, and they're usually coming from the "I don't want to change" crowd.
Also the state that has more renewables than any other state voted for Trump.
I think that this is one of the most incorrect, and, what’s more, plainly and obviously incorrect things I’ve ever read. I am almost at a loss for words when I read it.
Are we going to pretend that people would have adopted EVs anyway in the west without Tesla? Did you think we would just abandon the entire western auto manufacturing infrastructure and start driving BYDs? Did you forget what the auto industry looked like before (and during, in the early years) Tesla?
This is like saying that he doesn’t have a good sense for building orbital rockets. The guy has basically only done two big and meaningful things with his life and attacking the #1 carbon emission source is the bigger of the two.
Attacking cars as a carbon emission source would not mean killing an HSR project on purpose. It would mean building public transit.
Anyway EVs aren't special. Every major car manufacturer has them now, and the PRC makes shitloads too. Elon Musk probably beat the market, but it's not like his designs were genius - they lacked critical, simple safety features for example. Need I truck out the stories of people slicing their hands open on the cybertruck frame?
As for orbital rockets, that doesn't really have anything to do with climate change.
Also, I think your idea that cars themselves are the problem is probably incorrect. Decarbonization isn’t primarily about reducing overall energy use per person, although you can possibly deflect with the argument that it requires both that and also clean energy.
In any case, American culture and cities are car culture and cities, and even if you could do the impossible and magically deploy tons of HSR between every metro in the US it wouldn’t make people stop driving. Any solution that requires first rebuilding the whole country and replacing its whole population with people who don’t want to drive a large vehicle to the grocery store is obviously a nonstarter.
Tesla accelerated the electric car market several years, that's for sure. But nothing more than that.
The most important development for the feasibility of electric cars has not been automotive innovation (not the powertrain, the motor, the wheels, the interior or whatever), but battery innovation.
And battery innovation (i.e. cheaper, lighter, more capacity, better heat management, better durability) has been ongoing regardless of automotive even existing as an industry.
This has been the driving factor for the electrification of cars, not any one car company but the battery industry. Tesla simply was the best first mover.
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Battery-cost-dec...
EVs are growing, and will continue to grow, for reasons unrelated to climate.
They are the superior product in nearly every way. Regenerative braking is a huge objective improvement. The acceleration and torque control is a huge improvement. The lack of maintenance is a huge improvement.
The only downside of EVs is range and charge time, and both of those are being actively improved.
Elon deserves some credit for joining on to Tesla in 2004, long before these benefits were clear, and for being at the first company to really demonstrate these benefits in reality with the Roadster in 2008. But I do not think the existence of Tesla accelerated the adoption of EVs by more than a couple years.
The Model S was released in 2012. The Nissan Leaf was released in 2010.
China is 30% of global emissions in 2023. India is 7%.
You can't get one country to stop all, so you have to get everyone to cut as much as they can.
But the point being made isn't to emphasize the importance of everyone collaborating on cutting emissions. The point being made is that we may as well not cut back because someone else might not. It's especially disingenuous to bring up India when they emit less than the US does (and especially on a per-capita basis).
> You can't get one country to stop all, so you have to get everyone to cut as much as they can.
Exactly, but the US accounts for 11% of emissions for 4% of the population. Maybe they have more fat to cut than others.
KH was also pro nuclear.
In other words, it seems to indicate pretty strongly that no matter how you vote, climate change is going to destroy us.
It's difficult for many people in America to accept that the "climate change" narrative is primarily a propaganda tool and wedge issue to rally votes, and that the DNC doesn't actually care about "solving" it. Just like abortion.
Two things are true: climate change and reproductive rights are genuine issues, and they are also weaponized for political nonsense. People need to be away more skeptical around these debates and stop getting so angry/depressed about them (which is the goal of those groups trying to manipulate you through powerful emotions).
It's clear that Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords and famously wants to start up a massive amount of drilling for oil.
Whereas recent democratic cabinets banned certain oil drilling, dedicated the US to the climate accords, installed large subsidy programs including one that prevented Tesla (fully kickstarted the electrification of the entire automotive industry indefinitely) from going bankrupt, and just recently launched the IRA which is the biggest climate change prevention investment ($3 trillion) in the history of the world, prompting the EU to follow with a similar program to compete to attract green investments and innovations.
There is simply a massive policy difference between the two parties here. And showing a graph of world emisions that have kept going up in the decades prior to mainstream climate change awareness, is grossly misleading. For one because it says nothing about US policy. Two because it happened prior significant climate change policy and a divergence between republicans and democrats on this issue. And third because without frontrunner countries there is no way that you can ever overcome the tragedy of the commons issue with climate, because India/China are certainly not going to make investments if the US doesn't and fucks the climate anyway. We can't all use that excuse, certainly not if you're the richest and most innovative country.
Anyway, our descendants will hate current generations for what we have 'achieved' with the only place we can realistically live en masse for next 1000 years at least, almost all in in past 20 years, I'd say rightfully.
But as long as their stocks are up many folks here properly don't give a fuck. Tells you something too, don't put automatic morality into folks just because they have above-average intelligence, selfishness is a very powerful emotion from which none of us is completely immune from.
Under a continued Biden regime or a renovated Harris regime the climatic trajectory was similarly in overshoot. Like if you pay attention to what scientists, or even just general NGO representatives are saying... You should know that we are far off the rails.
Id encourage you to read the world meteorological organization's report from just last week; we are no where near what is manageable for a stable and prosperous future for our descendants. The climate has absolutely destabilized and we now have left a dismal future laced with intermittent catastrophe. Our generations greed and myopia means we have also left a momentous task to our descendants who might seek to try and restore the planet to equilibrium. Trump or Harris at the helm --it makes no difference-- the ship is going down.
Future generations will inherit a ruined biosphere, food insecurity, resource wars, etc. Humand can obviously mitigate tha somewhat but there's not a single political entity in the US or perhaps even the West as a whole that is currently engaged in doing so.
Environment aint just directly co2 or temperature raises, its everything. And everything is connected.
Just because the ship has sort of sailed it doesnt mean giving up and ignorance is the right course, especially when vuewed on really long term scale
The very first step here is to phase out extraction of fossil fuels. Kamala Harris was not going to even stop fracking, which is by far the most environmentally damaging extraction, let alone phase out drilling.
Basically no state/country nor any politician is going to save us. Currently it's up to regular people to work on building a better world, restoring the biosphere, coming up with ways to adjust our manner of living towards a sustainable course and one that will be resilient to catastrophic climate events and even social upheaval.
Instead it seems a lot of people want to just cast a ballot and then forget about it, but this will be a fundamental lifestyle change, and it's going to involve sacrifice.
Perhaps that was the problem with the messaging from the start, it didn’t appeal to people’s selfish nature enough.
No, no it has not. It has been about a multitude of subjects like the oceans and forests and preserving habitats from human interference. Humanity mishandling those has consequences for humans, but that has historically not been the crux of the message.
It has never been about “floating rocks” either, but the life in it, nature as a whole.
Both the candidates were in favor of a continuation of the petroleum based industrial society that will inevitably collapse in on itself.
In fact an argument can be made that this election and it's result are a symptom of that.
Climate change absolutely is a technical problem and not a political one. It's about the cause and effect patterns of actual weather phenomena, and has nothing to do with conflict resolution within human societies, or anthropocentric psychosocial rituals.
We don't really have the technology to purposefully engineer macro-scale climate patterns, and we absolutely do not have the technology to secure wide-scale cooperation among vast numbers of people with different value systems and incentive structures. We've never had that.
Where do you get the idea that politics has, or has ever had, the ability to do anything of the sort?
> There was a last chance to do it right around these years
You're not getting it. There was never any chance to do it. You might as well be arguing for sacrificing goats or reciting ritual incantations. There is no political solution to climate change, and there never was.