An electric car is still a car, and cars are bad

This is hard for people to understand, but electric cars are not good for the environment. They’re merely less bad. Self-driving, electric, it doesn’t matter. No matter how efficient you make a car, it’s still a car. It’s still far less efficient than this centuries old technology called a train.

Any private vehicle still uses a shit-ton of resources to produce and is dramatically less efficient than public transport. Just look:

Buses can easily move 10x more people per hour than private cars. A metro (rail) can move 100x. These vehicles are also used almost 24/7, unlike a car which is idle 90% of the time. Musk’s Boring Company idea — putting Teslas in an underground tunnel — is just an incredibly shitty metro. Like, what if we made a train… but put cars IN it?

Something like the Tesla Cybertruck is just monstrous and highly inefficient way to move human beings around, especially since they usually move one person. The real innovation is actually light electric rickshaws in India and China, not giant American fuck-off trucks, which you plug in to natural gas power plants at night.

Just look at the difference on the road:

And just look at the weight:

Yes these Teslas have electric engines, but what about the fact that you’re moving 50X more machine than human being? What about the power plant that’s charging the battery? What about the lithium and resources the battery is made of? What about the roads, the parking spaces, all the negative externalities that you get with private vehicles in general? This is all resource consumption.

An electric car is still a car, and cars are the problem. This is like Americans wanting credit for putting trans people in the military, while still killing people with their military. Just stop killing us, don’t kill us in a more woke way. A Tesla is is still a giant, highly inefficient private vehicle which still hurts the environment. This is not good. It is merely less bad.

Tesla is the American fantasy idea of environmentalism, ‘saving the Earth’ without giving anything up. Americans want to sit on leather seats, listening to their infotainment system, cruise down paved roads, and park wherever they want. They don’t want to sit on a train next to anyone, they want to put their fucking cars on a train. It’s madness.

Americans are treating environmentalism like some luxury good they show off in public. It’s not. It’s public transit.

Tesla is trying to have our climate and eat it too.

I’ll say it again, Elon Musk manufacturing 2,500 KG hunks of steel and lithium is not good for the environment and we should not be cheering Tesla’s market cap. We should be bemoaning the lack of public transport.

Elon Musk Is A Climate Villain

The whole mythology of Elon Musk as climate savior is nonsense. Musk produces SpaceX rockets that literally burn jets worth of fossil fuels, and his goal is to make this more frequent, and give billionaires joyrides above a burning Earth, and eventually off of it. He produces StarLink satellites that are making ground-based astronomy impossible. Now he’s investing in Bitcoin which produces only server heat and climate change.

The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. Capitalism is the cause of climate change, not the cure. Bill Gates has said we need 100 Elon Musks, which is a joke. The top 1% of the world produces DOUBLE the emissions of the bottom 50%. If 100 billionaires just fucking stopped we’d be much better off.

The fact is that ‘green growth’ is an illusion. We actually need degrowth in the decadent west — a fundamental shift in what we value as human beings. Do we want to move metal or do we want to move people? Do we want to have luxuries or needs? Do we trust our fate to billionaires, or take power as billions of human beings? So stop cheering on Elon Musk, as he greenwashes the Earth’s destruction, and profits from it. Fuck all these billionaires. We billions need to wake up.