The usual hypocrites blowing huge amounts of carbon and hot air around

[Bomb#20]

The facts speak for themselves. No one in the history of our planet has done more towards improvement of the environment than Musk.

Leo Szilard.

 

[Swammerdami]

Thank goodness we also have rich and honest influencers like Elon Musk who are NOT hypocrites offering something real to the cause. Because people such as John Kerry will do nothing but remind us how fake they are about the future of the earth.

The world is grateful to enjoy or have enjoyed people like the Buddha, the Baby Jesus, Elon Musk and Ayn Rand whose farts are so fragrant that people come from miles around just to smell and enjoy them. It's a welcome change from Hillary, Rachel Maddow, Karl Marx, Alexandria the Barmaid, and yes John Kerry, whose farts are so rancid and loathsome that these people should be required to wear butt plugs inside city limits.

@RVonse -- Don't forget to also thank goodness for progressive politicians like Gavin Newsom whose rules and subsidies mean that the U.S.A. is the biggest market by far for Elon's wonderful cars.

 

[ideologyhunter]

The world is grateful to enjoy or have enjoyed people like the Buddha, the Baby Jesus, Elon Musk and Ayn Rand whose farts are so fragrant that people come from miles around just to smell and enjoy them.

My vanity has a good selection of the Elon essences, right next to my spray bottle of Jared. I suggest Savage Musk, with hints of Chipotle, or the Planetary series. Musk Uranus is a good, strong, manly spray. Musk Asteroid will really open up your sinuses. Musk Venus Envy will make her turn her head as you go by. Make a statement. Wear Elon.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The only good thing I can say about Musk is that he lacks Trump's ability to stir up the rubes. I don't think we'll see him run for office. (Although my career as a prognosticator went in the dumper long ago. With my record, Donald will announce a Trump/Musk ticket tomorrow.)

Not true. Musk has a cult following.

The facts speak for themselves. No one in the history of our planet has done more towards improvement of the environment than Musk.

*BSOD*

*REBOOT*

Are you fucking kidding me? Without a web browser search, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Fucking Nixon. With the first two about the preservation and the third regarding the restoration. Al Gore has done more for the environment by talking than Musk has ever done.

Before the age of Musk, the big 3 specifically shunned electric vehicles and would not even try to market them for profit. And even after Musk proves it can be done, the big 3 even now have trouble competing with him to deliver the product. No need to pander him, you can even hate the guy if you want but you can not argue what he has accomplished to remove carbon from the planet. We are all very fortunate to benefit from his work, there would have been one hell of a lot more carbon in the air if he had not been born.

I already noted that EVs are carts before the horse. We are what, no closer than 20 years for electricity production sources making a difference, allowing EVs to be better than ICE? And I've got to assume you have supported the opposition candidate to the guy who wanted to raise CAFE and mileage standards. It is very likely Honda and Toyota made much larger differences in emission pollution with their hybrids than Musk has with Tesla.

 

[ZiprHead]

The only good thing I can say about Musk is that he lacks Trump's ability to stir up the rubes. I don't think we'll see him run for office. (Although my career as a prognosticator went in the dumper long ago. With my record, Donald will announce a Trump/Musk ticket tomorrow.)

Not true. Musk has a cult following.

The facts speak for themselves. No one in the history of our planet has done more towards improvement of the environment than Musk.

Before the age of Musk, the big 3 specifically shunned electric vehicles and would not even try to market them for profit. And even after Musk proves it can be done, the big 3 even now have trouble competing with him to deliver the product. No need to pander him, you can even hate the guy if you want but you can not argue what he has accomplished to remove carbon from the planet. We are all very fortunate to benefit from his work, there would have been one hell of a lot more carbon in the air if he had not been born.

Tesla's designers used the General Motors EV1 as their inspiration.

Musk was just an investor and spokesperson at Tesla. Nothing more. He is not responsible for the creation of Tesla.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The only good thing I can say about Musk is that he lacks Trump's ability to stir up the rubes. I don't think we'll see him run for office. (Although my career as a prognosticator went in the dumper long ago. With my record, Donald will announce a Trump/Musk ticket tomorrow.)

Not true. Musk has a cult following.

The facts speak for themselves. No one in the history of our planet has done more towards improvement of the environment than Musk.

Before the age of Musk, the big 3 specifically shunned electric vehicles and would not even try to market them for profit. And even after Musk proves it can be done, the big 3 even now have trouble competing with him to deliver the product. No need to pander him, you can even hate the guy if you want but you can not argue what he has accomplished to remove carbon from the planet. We are all very fortunate to benefit from his work, there would have been one hell of a lot more carbon in the air if he had not been born.

Tesla's designers used the General Motors EV1 as their inspiration.

Musk was just an investor and spokesperson at Tesla. Nothing more. He is not responsible for the creation of Tesla.

Musk is most certainly responsible for the hardest part of creating a car company, cash flow. Musk is hardly this engineering genius some mistake him to be, but he was able to help Tesla deal with the absurd cash loss that is needed to start a car company from scratch.

 

[RVonse]

RVonse, did you read the rebuttals to your point, though?

What ON EARTH made you think that Musk was the non-hypocfrite in this scenario?
Do you know how much rocket fuel (divided by the headcount!) he has put into the atmosphere?

But you can't count rocket fuel. Because there is no other way to reach orbit without a rocket. We don't have space elevators yet and probably won't in the near future. You could say no rockets at all..... but then that means no communication satelites and no other space exploration. The goal is to remove carbon without going back into the stone age.

That falls totally into a different category than the Davos attendees who want everyone to get off carbon except themselves. If Kerry had no other way to get to Davis than to ride a private jet I wouldn't be calling him and other's like him the hypocrites they all are.

 

[Shadowy Man]

But you can't count rocket fuel. Because there is no other way to reach orbit without a rocket. We don't have space elevators yet and probably won't in the near future. You could say no rockets at all..... but then that means no communication satelites and no other space exploration. The goal is to remove carbon without going back into the stone age.

It is arguable that we need as many communication satellites as Musk is putting up.

At some point we will have to choose between quality of life and sustainability of the environment.

We are getting to the point where it is getting expensive to repair cities after environmental disasters, money that could be put toward attempting to prevent these disasters in the first place.

We already see insurance companies changing patterns making it infeasible to live in certain areas (like coastal flood zones).

 

[RVonse]

Electric vehicles don't "remove carbon from the planet".

They don't by themselves add carbon to the planet. And the source of electricity has nothing to do with this. Tesla cars by themselves simply do not put carbon into the atmosphere because they do not burn carbon into tail pipes.

If the generation of electricity is wrong for the environment today you can not put that on Musk. It simply has not caught up to Musk and it will take other leaders and entrepreneurs to realize the final goal of sourcing green electricity. Maybe the John Kerry's should talk about the generation of electricity at their Davos meeting instead of how everyone besides them is ruining the environment by not eating bug protein.

 

[RVonse]

Musk is most certainly responsible for the hardest part of creating a car company, cash flow. Musk is hardly this engineering genius some mistake him to be, but he was able to help Tesla deal with the absurd cash loss that is needed to start a car company from scratch.

That is much more than anyone else in the world (myself included) actually did before Musk.

 

[RVonse]

It is very likely Honda and Toyota made much larger differences in emission pollution with their hybrids than Musk has with Tesla.

It should be noted, it is very likely Toyota would NOT have developed an ammonia engine if not for Tesla's market competition.

Our carbon free future will involve BOTH electric vehicles but hydrogen based ones as well. And I'm pretty sure it won't need to based on losing freedom and tyranny under a Davos world order.

 

[Patooka]

I have literally never seen so much copium and mental gymnastics used in a rush to defend Saint Elon before. The definition of "hypocrite towards the environment" that is being used by the OP is so narrow as to be utterly meaningless.

 

[ZiprHead]

Elon Musk has two private jets. They are his standard means of traveling between Texas and California.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

It is very likely Honda and Toyota made much larger differences in emission pollution with their hybrids than Musk has with Tesla.

It should be noted, it is very likely Toyota would NOT have developed an ammonia engine if not for Tesla's market competition.

The Prius and Insight came out in 2000 or so. Between 2001 and 2018, I used 1/3 to 1/2 the gasoline of the average car and emitted many fewer emissions. Currently Teslas farm out their pollution to the power plant which result in varying amounts of pollution. Musk hasn't solved anything yet... and this is ignoring the battery problem.

Our carbon free future will involve BOTH electric vehicles but hydrogen based ones as well.

Hydrogen?! Do you even know what you are talking about? Hydrogen isn't a thing yet for cars. There are a number of limitations in current tech.

 

[Swammerdami]

The facts speak for themselves. No one in the history of our planet has done more towards improvement of the environment than Musk.

Leo Szilard.

I assume this refers to Szilard's alleged 1934 invention of a power-generating nuclear reactor.

[Leo Szilard] conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea in 1936, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.

But I write "alleged" since the U.S. Patent Office issues patents even without full implementation details. Szilard had no real idea how to build such a reactor. The neutron wasn't discovered until 1932 by Rutherford's student James Chadwick, and Szilard filed his patent application as backlash to Rutherford's opinion that no chain reaction was possible. U-235 was unknown until 1935, and a key understanding needed for chain-reaction was made by Bohr in 1939. And it was Enrico Fermi who led the project that achieved critical density in a U-235 pile on December 2, 1942.

Nuclear fission itself was unknown until 1939:

Nuclear fission was discovered on 19 December 1938 in Berlin by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. Physicists Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch explained it theoretically in January 1939.

But if scientific credit for instigating the Manhattan Project is to be given to a single man, perhaps it should go to Leo Szilard. He was an eccentric hard-driving man very alert to the possibility that Germany would develop an atomic bomb. He did early experiments at his own expense.

Although Szilard had been first to push for secrecy about the principles of fission -- why give away information to the Germans? -- he pushed for openness within the Manhattan Project. This along with Szilard's brashness, disrespect for authority, and, perhaps, his Jewish religion, irritated General Leslie Groves (military head of the Manhattan Project) who almost had Szilard incarcerated as an "enemy alien" for the war's duration.

 

[Shadowy Man]

But if scientific credit for instigating the Manhattan Project is to be given to a single man, perhaps it should go to Leo Szilard.

Having read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, I would agree to this statement enthusiastically.

Perhaps the reference then means that had the bomb not been invented neither would atomic power plants? But that's likely not the case, and it is arguable that the focus on the enrichment of weapons grade fissile material may have been a bit of a setback to nuclear power, had that latter been invented on its own for purely energy generation purposes.

 

[TSwizzle]

But you know who doesn't employ environmentally friendly travel methods to climate change conferences to discuss the future of the world?

The executives at the fossil fuel companies. Not because they don't have eco-friendly private jets, but because they don't fucking go to those conferences.

At least 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the Cop28 climate negotiations, according to an analysis. The scale of oil and gas influence in Dubai is unprecedented, with almost four times as many industry-affiliated lobbyists than the number registered for Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh – which itself was a record year. Lobbyists vying to push the interests of oil and gas companies such as Shell, Total and ExxonMobil outnumber every country delegation apart from Brazil (3,081), which is expected to run Cop30 in 2025, and the host country, which registered 4,409 attenders. Fossil fuel lobbyists also outnumber official Indigenous representatives (316) by seven to one – another sign, say campaigners, that oil and gas industry profits are being prioritised over a sustainable planet and frontline communities.

Teh Gruaniad

It doesn't say whether executives attended but it seems their representatives were there in large numbers. Much to the chagrin of Teh Gruaniad.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Musk is most certainly responsible for the hardest part of creating a car company, cash flow. Musk is hardly this engineering genius some mistake him to be, but he was able to help Tesla deal with the absurd cash loss that is needed to start a car company from scratch.

That is much more than anyone else in the world (myself included) actually did before Musk.

I can't put my finger on exactly why, but I kinda get the feeling that Musk actually likes the WEF.

 

[Emily Lake]

All I have to contribute to this discussion is two words:

China
India

 

[TomC]

All I have to contribute to this discussion is two words:

China
India

What is it, exactly, that makes you think that two countries are the problem?

They've huge populations that were desperately poor for most of history. They contributed very little to the current environmental mess that the Human Race is dealing with. Their per capita environmental footprint is a fraction of the U.S. , even now.
Why is their names all you can think of to contribute?
Maybe because you consider yourself entitled to complain about poor people trying to better their circumstances, the same way we did throughout the last century plus?
Tom