How about lithium batteries? Do you known whence the cobalt in them comes?
I do.
I certainly and definitely do not connect a damned thing about Elon Musk with the principles of liberalism that I have held for all of my adult life.
Liberalism for me isn't about glib "aren't I wonderful because I bought..." consumerism, and pretending the car I drive is a sustainable "green," car.
The car CULTure is not sustainable, nor will it ever be so.
My liberalism is Eleanor Roosevelt liberalism. I care not a whit about people's cars, but care far more about people, including kids digging cobalt in the DRC for electric cars so rich people can report, smugly, how "green" they are.
Musk is, in my view, a disgusting ass, selling snake oil, and his willful destruction of orbital space for a cartoon version of consumerism is a crime against all future generations.
I have no idea what you paid for your "model 3," but it seems very likely to me that it is almost certainly equal to the annual income of hundreds of citizens of the "Democratic" "Republic" of the Congo.
Forty five percent of young people, globally, live on less than two dollars a day.
You may think of Musk as the anti-Republican, but as an Eleanor Roosevelt Democrat, I see him very differently. I care more about those kids living on less than two dollars a day than I do about your "green" car.
How many kids could live on the cost of your car? Some of them provided the stuff that went into manufacturing it; and others will suffer the health consequences of "recycling" it when it becomes landfill. Did Elon Musk see that they got a fair share for living under the wrong end of rifle barrels while digging " target="_blank">coltan?
I own a car. It follows that I am rich. It's not an electric car, but it's a car. Again, it follows that I'm rich.
Now, a $50,000 car implies a five figure salary, and a five figure salary implies a million dollars a decade. That's how I do math. You may do it differently, but that's how I do it.
Despite what you might have heard, the oil companies love electric cars. After all, they are fracking like hell to get to natural gas, and increasingly, that's what the majority of power plants in this country burn, increasingly.
There is not enough cobalt and lithium on this planet to make one billion Musk type cars, and if there were, owing to the laws of thermodynamics, it would accelerate climate change, not slow it.
By the way, do you know how aluminum is made? I do. Steel? How about polymers? I've studied all these things. Many of the posts in my journal here touch on these things.
Congratulations, though, for being so "green."
If I'm unimpressed, it's only because I have spent a great deal of time understanding the sources of energy, including electricity (which is a degenerate form of energy and not, as people seem so willing to pretend, primary energy).
I also think a great deal about the physical science of thermodynamics.
Batteries waste energy. That's a function of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which is inviolable. The idea that batteries are a force for good and will save the world is so absurd as to border on pure faith based dogma and similar to a claim that the cure for cancer is buying amulets in a magic shop or reading books in the Christian Science Reading room.
We have a cancer on this planet, and cars are an example of metastasis. More cars, even different cars, are not a cure for this cancer.
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