[mrcwinn]

By his own words, Elon is not an environmentalist and doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate. His concern is with the futility of relying on a non-renewable resource. He believes there is significantly more lithium than there is oil, I guess.

In the end, incentives are all that matter. Do hotels care deeply about the environment, or are they interested in saving in energy and labor costs as your towel is cleaned? Does it matter? Does moralizing really get us anywhere if our ends are the same?

[IrishTechie]

I know it’s in vogue to dump on Elon these days, and with good reason, but do I not recall him on a number of occasions quite emotionally describing our continued CO2 emissions as the dumbest experiment in human history?

[qingcharles]

Yeah, but he flip-flops on the daily. He used to post about how LGBT positive Tesla was and post pride flags on his feed and now he's trying to burn the planet to the ground every time he hears about anyone that isn't a straight white man.

[Havoc]

>doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate

Is it that or a belief that we can outrun the problem? i.e. mix of accelerationism and making humanity multi planetary

[tw04]

You do, and then at some point, likely during a late night ketamine binge, he went full redpill on twitter and decided the only thing that matters is “owning the libs”.

If that means embracing fossil fuels, so be it. Destroy the “woke mind virus at any cost”. That being said, I think he is delusional enough that he thought allowing nazi propaganda on twitter would convince conservatives to start buying teslas and is completely lost at this point.

[behnamoh]

oh the irony... EV company CEO doesn't care about env...

[recursive]

That's just one facet of EVs that is severely overplayed in my book. They have plenty of other benefits, but for some of us the environmental aspect is a "nice-to-have".

[teachrdan]

> They have plenty of other benefits

I'm inclined to say the exact opposite about EVs. They take up as much space as internal combustion engine vehicles (in terms of streets, highways and parking lots), are just as fatal to pedestrians, make cities and neighborhoods less livable, cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, create traffic jams... the primary benefit is reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and generating less CO2. That's the number one differentiator. Faster acceleration, etc. is a nice-to-have.

[recursive]

No oil changes and no gas stations. Those are the key features to me.

Agree that the rocket-ship acceleration is just nice to have also.

[behnamoh]

> the primary benefit is reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and generating less CO2

for many, it's not even that. I like EVs primarily because I'm a tech-savvy person and like computers on wheels. but I'm also aware of their numerous downsides.

[panopticon]

Agreed. Convenience, maintenance, and operating costs were all top of mind when we bought an EV. Environmentalism was hardly a consideration.

[cameronh90]

I care enormously about protecting the environment and stopping climate change, but I'm not an environmentalist.

Environmentalists usually care about the environment for its own sake, but my concern is our own survival. Similarly, I don't intrinsically care about plastic in the ocean, but our history of harming ourselves with waste we think is harmless would justify applying the precautionary principle there too.

As far as Musk goes, it's hard to track what he actually believes versus what he has said to troll, kowtow to Trump or "own the libs", but he definitely believes in anthropogenic climate change and he has been consistent on that. He seems to sometimes doubt the predictions of how quick it will occur and, most of all, how quickly it will impact us.

I think there probably is a popular tendency to overstate the predictive value of certain forecasts by simply grouping all climate science together. In reality, the forecasts have tended to be extremely accurate for the first order high level effects (i.e. X added carbon leads to Y temperature increase), but downstream of that the picture becomes more mixed. Particularly poor have been predictions of tipping points, or anything that depends on how humans will be affected by, or react to, changes in the environment.

[hkt]

Not everyone is a nihilist.