[ed]

Additional context

> Musk’s SpaceX aims to use a site in South Texas to launch rockets to carry people and cargo to the moon and Mars. To do that, the company intends to drill gas wells to make its own fuel and electricity, according a Federal Aviation Administration document seen by Bloomberg.

> The SpaceX site in Texas will be supplied by at least five nearby gas wells, along with two gas-fired power plants, according to the FAA document. Purified gas from the wells will be pumped into refrigeration equipment that turns it into liquid methane, the document shows. The methane can be combined with liquid oxygen and other compounds to make rocket fuel.

https://www.rigzone.com/news/wire/spacex_texas_plans_face_pu...

[zionic]

Seems like stargaze would be a good candidate for Tesla solar + mega pack installation. 10 mega packs should do the trick.

[brabel]

If anyone had any doubt about whether Elon really had the environment in mind when he founded Tesla, I think now you've got your answer. In fact, most people driving electric cars likely wouldn't think twice about building a fracked well if they knew they could make millions from that... if they really cared about the environment, they wouldn't even drive around.

[schiffern]

>If anyone had any doubt about whether Elon really had the environment in mind when he founded Tesla, I think now you've got your answer.

This sort of "tribal purity" logic is silly: "if you've ever done anything negative, it means you never intended to do anything positive."

This is nothing but the environmentalism equivalent of the old "you're either with us or against us, we're at war!" fallacy.

Rockets have always used fossil fuels. This is not news. The fact that SpaceX is vertically integrating changes nothing about that. On the contrary it likely reduces leaks (which is a good thing) by shortening the processing chain.

[antattack]

SpaceX will pay hefty taxes if carbon tax is implemented, yet Musk is still strong proponent of carbon tax.

[Denvercoder9]

Relative to revenue, carbon tax won't be that significant for SpaceX.

There aren't any exact numbers yet, but Starship will burn about 5000 metric tons of propellant in a single launch. Assuming a stoichiometric ratio of CH4 to O2, that'll emit about 2600 metric tons of CO2 (the rest is water). According to the ICAO emissions calculator, a roundtrip by plane between LA and London emits about 0.9 metric tons of CO2 per passenger. Thus, a Starship launch generates the same emissions as 2900 passengers making that trip.

At the $400 price I get for that trip on Google Flights, those 2900 passengers generate about $1.2 million in revenue for the airline. A single Starship launch will generate $100 million in revenue for SpaceX.

[tenpies]

> Relative to revenue, carbon tax won't be that significant for SpaceX.

Are there any public statements on SpaceX's financials? The rumor from their last round is that it's a classic Elon money-burning enterprise - and profitability is always one quarter away. Revenue is of course pointless, since it's quite easy to have revenue when you're not profitable.

[brabel]

> This sort of "tribal purity" logic is silly...

If Greta Thunberg flew on a commercial airplane somewhere far away, she'd be accused of being a hyprocate, so she uses a sailboat to cross a freaking ocean when she wants to.

This may be tribalism purity from the part of conservatives, but that's always going to be the reaction from the "opposite" side in this kind of situations because that's the obvious human response. This is not silly logic, this is how humans behave and if you refuse to believe your eyes when you see this again and again, you're the one being silly.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Yah, meanwhile the support team for her, operating the sailboat and whatnot else flew on commercial planes, to be there at the destination, having it to ferry around, and so on. Whiler her message may be right, her PA is a shitshow.

[nathanvanfleet]

Wait, your argument is that everyone would build a fracking gas plant if they could? What an odd thing to say.

[brabel]

The argument is that most people would do bad things (build a fracked well in the case of Elon, something smaller for the rest of us, like buying cheaper electronics from places where environmentalism doesn't even exist) to make money or save a penny, even when they do some "good" things when it's convenient to do so (driving electric cars in 2021). I keep forgetting people here on HN seem to need things to be written in a very obvious, literal manner otherwise they do what you're trying to do and interpret things too literally, without any kind of abilitiy to interpret when something is a metaphore, analogy or hyperbole. Sorry.

[gameswithgo]

This sort of ridiculous cynicism doesn’t help that cause.

[DisjointedHunt]

How much carbon does one year of fires in California produce? For all the regulations on reducing usage, the wise politicians enabled conditions through neglect of forest care and trimming to allow fires so large, the plume could be seen from space and darkened skies as far north as Seattle.

The point here is, what is good for the climate isn’t the purview of these simplistic views of climate science.

Drilling a well doesn’t automatically kill everything Mother Nature created or anything. . . The economic shift that Tesla single handful brought about to get all of traditional auto to move to electric cannot be overstated.

So stop using “The Environment” as a battering ram that only your point of view protects. It is wrong.

[idiotsecant]

>the wise politicians enabled conditions through neglect of forest care and trimming

It baffles me that this is so often repeated when it is quite clearly inaccurate if you just think about it for a second.

First of all, you don't "trim" a forest the size of many small countries. This isn't a city park. It would take every man, woman, and child's sum efforts to 'landscape' even a fraction of the forests in the PNW. That's like saying that the reason the sea is rising is that nobody is running an ice cube maker to refreeze the ice caps.

But to speak to the real origination of this point - resource extraction for the benefit of those who control the cable news narrative: You don't prevent forest fires by logging. That is an old meme from the resource extraction industry - not only does it not prevent wildfires, it also destroys biodiversity of the ecosystems where old, diverse growth is replaced with pine stands.

Forest fires are required for the natural lifecycle of a forest - there are species that cannot reproduce without a forest fire. Not only small brush type plants that thrive in the absence of overgrowth but also the largest organisms in the forest- the trees themselves! Vast areas of the PNW are dominated by so-called 'serotinous cone' deciduous trees whose cones will lay dormant for years, coated in a thick plastic-like resin layer that only allows the cone to release seeds after the resin is melted away by forest fire (when the chances of successfully growing are highest)

Forests require fires to be healthy. A big part of why wildfires are so bad now is that we haven't let them happen for so long because there are more and more people moving into the areas that previously experienced healthy burns. This lead practices to try to prevent fires from happening. Meanwhile, brush built up year after year after year and eventually the fires that do happen are orders of magnitude worse. Climate change and the resulting temperatures and changes in the 'moisture battery' throughout the year are also massive contributors, but that is a whole other post.

[wolverine876]

Thanks. Do you have any good sources on the topic that I can read? I would love to cut through all the politicized BS.

[jeffbee]

Carbon from forest fires is part of the short-term carbon cycle because it came out of the atmosphere quite recently. It is fundamentally different from carbon found underground that was deposited before humans existed.

[ahmedalsudani]

Filed under non sequitur.