I'm the author of the Forbes piece. I'm sorry that many on the Tesla forum did not like it, and I want to take the opportunity to elaborate on its argument.
The fundamental question being argued on both sides is, as I see it, whether the government should severely restrict fossil fuel use--and, as part of that policy, promote electric cars as an alternative.
In my view, because cheap, plentiful, reliable energy is so important to technological and human progress, and because fossil fuel technology is essential to providing that caliber of energy for a long time to come, governments should absolutely not be restricting fossil fuel use. (For those interested in seeing how this case stacks up in an open debate, see my recent Stanford debate with Sierra Club Senior Director Bruce Nilles.) Making this case requires addressing concerns about climate head-on, which I did.
"Perhaps the most neglected benefit of fossil fuel energy is in making us safer from the climate. Our cultural discussion on 'climate change' fixates on whether or not fossil fuels impact the climate. Of course they do—everything does—but the question that matters is whether it is becoming safer or more dangerous. Here, the data is unambiguous—in the last 80 years, as fossil fuels have increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere from .03% to all of .04%, we have become
50 times less likely to die because of climate-related causes. Give thanks to the proliferation of climate-protection technology (climate control, sturdy homes, weather satellites, drought-relief convoys, modern agriculture), which are made possible by fossil fuels."
Most of the posts on this forum assume that climate change is a basis for government action, but none even attempted to address my case about the actual effects of CO2 emissions on climate safety. The underlying data here place an enormous burden of proof on anyone claiming future catastrophe. And that burden cannot be met as the catastrophic climate models are demonstrable failures at predicting climate. (As I will argue later, even if there was a big problem, advocating solar as the solution would not be logical.)
Other posts on the forum assume that the finite nature of fossil fuels implies some sort of necessary government support of electric cars. But basic economics tells us that the price of the finite commodities involved in every mode of transport will signal if and when a change is necessary. (Note: price is more important than "energy efficiency." Energy efficiency is just one form of resource efficiency, and often not the most important. If you're admirer of solar, note that an excellent solar panel is "20% efficient"--should that disqualify it?)
Given that electric cars are currently a tiny, luxury, resource-intensive niche of the transportation market, it is odd to assume that all the resources involved will smoothly and economically scale globally. We have no idea, just as we have no idea whether there will be a revolution in coal-to-liquids or gas-to-liquids will mean superior hydrocarbon fuels for hundreds of years to come. Or even whether synthesizing methanol from biomass and burning it using standard internal combustion engines will be more efficient than powering cars with energy-intensive batteries. If we're free to choose along the way, we don't have to know in advance.
Although I do not believe that CO2 emissions are a problem, even if it was the public approach of Elon Musk, Tesla, and much of Tesla's following would be counterproductive--because any constructive approach requires taking on the leading opponents of cheap, plentiful, reliable, non-carbon energy: the environmentalist movement.
I am an adamant supporter of nuclear power and hydroelectric power, as are some of you; the environmentalist movement is the leading opponent of both forms of power--the Sierra Club being a particularly egregious example. These organizations are the ones who made nuclear power uneconomic; without them, there is a strong case nuclear would have won out worldwide on the free market. (For more on this issue, see my pro-nuclear Facebook page, I Love Nuclear," as well as Petr Beckmann's classic "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear."
Elon Musk should use his public position to every anti-nuclear group. Instead, he endorses their empty promise that solar can power our civilization. That's why in my article I focused on solar--that's what Tesla assures us will replace the fossil fuels it opposes (but uses).
To be solution-oriented means to advocate the best options--and that could also include geo-engineering, also opposed by environmentalists--not just the politically correct ones.
To be solution-oriented in this context also means to look for *global* solutions that would actually work. In my article I cited the fact that globally solar and wind produce less than 1% of the world's electricity--and that must be backed up by a reliable source, usually fossil fuels. Several posts on this forum took me to task because their Teslas run on a higher percentage of solar and wind. No one addressed the point about requiring backup--usually "100% solar means a reliable source of energy is providing 100% backup (which doesn't scale). And more broadly, no one acknowledged that solar/wind is a luxury good. It's very expensive and it scales very, very poorly. If we're talking 80% global CO2 reductions, the fact that your particular Tesla uses X% solar is completely irrelevant because few can afford it and the "solution" wouldn't scale if more could.
If you believe that catastrophic global warming is the problem of our age, then the solution is to take a hard line against the environmentalist movement and look for global solutions on the scale of the problem. It is not to, forgive me, be self-righteous about your Tesla.
I bring up the self-righteous point because I very much admire the Tesla, and I think it deserves to be supported in a spirit of pure enthusiasm for technology and humanity--not defensiveness and partisanship.
When I write an article trying to convey that the Tesla S is testament to the unacknowledged virtues of fossil fuel energy, and the response I get in the Tesla forum is to be labeled a "hater," that is partisan.
It is also partisan to dismiss me because I support fossil fuels. A few people wrote me off for wearing an "I Love Fossil Fuels" shirt to a Tesla store, or period. Well, I do love fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry and I came to that love honestly, for reasons that I hope are clear. (For more reasons, read my book.) I believe it was an incredibly appropriate shirt to wear to the Tesla store. Incidentally, it was not premeditated--I just happened to be wearing it at the Fashion Island mall, but I'm glad I did.
I hope that clarifies where I'm coming from. If you're interested in learning more about how to think about environmental issues from a consistently humanist, technological perspective, I hope you'll take a look at my book and my essay "The Industrial Manifesto."
General Rebuttal to Alex Epstein:
Alex.
You are smart and articulate. You are clearly smarter than David Nilles of the Sierra Club. It is both selfish on your part an a loss to society to have you arguing for self evident wrong.
Nobody, not David Nilles nor Musk is arguing for an energy deficient future. Your arguments focus on the evident benefits of cheap abundant energy, that point is not only accepted but promoted by all but the likes of Dr Ozzie Zehner (author of Green Illusions) and the author of an IEEE article Unclean at Any Speed - IEEE Spectrum .
Nilles made an interesting point and sadly failed to stick it to you, not because he was wrong, but because the more sophisticated party was on the wrong side of the debate. The example given was the banning of lead in paint. Naturally the result of that was not an end to painting, it was the innovation of increasingly excellent paint without lead. The likes of Nilles are useful not because they have all the answers or even a rounded viewpoint. When the Sierra Club succeeds in forcing a rethink about technologies with undesirable trade-offs, the market and technology will invariably innovate to maintain supply to meet demand and in the best case scenario that will lead to a general improvement of economics, living standards and the elimination of an unpleasant compromise only.
You and Zehner commit the same error, blaming a clean technology for speculative assumption of additional reliance on a dirty technology. You both commit the "temporal anomaly" error of projecting future EV populations onto the current grid mix. You cannot do that in all honesty. You must project the grid mix forwards to the same point on the time line to make an honest impact assessment of EVs on the grid. The current impact of EVs on the grid is negligible, and the current grid mix is predominantly fossil fuel driven. The future impact of EVs on the grid may well be considerable, but that will be impacting on a grid that is more than likely predominantly clean. One of the likely reasons for a boom in economic productivity surrounding the Solar and Wind industries is that it will be driven by the advent of compelling EVs and the combined political and economic demand of EV owners to be supplied with clean power and to silence the likes of you. No doubt the real reason why you have targeted Tesla with your Forbes piece. Panasonic et al are far more likely to install a local solar array if they have not done so already in order to crush embedded energy criticism than to cease battery production. There is no environmental debate about Tesla. This is the answer the world has been waiting for: An end to compromise between the interests of the personal and the natural environment. There is only the vain hope of pro-pollution extremists to create the illusion of one.
Tesla for example is already fully offset by private PV installations (estimates run to 85% of all Tesla Model S owners), and even more significantly by sister company Solar City, a company that installs more MWh and at a faster rate than the entire lifecycle energy consumption past present and future of the entire Tesla fleet. There is no reason to think that this trend is not scalable when it is scaling exponentially right now. There is no argument that fossil fuels made the seed investment with regards to energy for all of this, but there is also no justification to promote fossil fuels as the end of the line of advancement. There are obvious economic advantages and nothing to prevent a solar cell manufacturer building out an array to power its own operations. It is entirely specious to suggest such operations can only derive energy from fossil fuels to compound their own scaling.
Even if you were to reduce the concept of the environment from natural/planetary, to societal, right down to personal how could one possibly criticize a machine that you can refuel for somewhere between $0.00 and $9 of electricity and drive 265 miles on the equivalent of 2.5 gallons of gas with a combination of performance and safety to out class anything on the road at any price. You talk of fossil fuels generating a high standard of living and life expectancy. That was then baby, this is now.
To suggest Tesla is Coal Powered is simply and completely wrong when set correctly in its proper context. We are soon approaching an inflection of cost per KWh in favor of solar vs mining and burning. It is therefore absolutely disingenuous to promote fossil fuels as a source of cheap and abundant energy, when it is heading to becoming a source of relatively expensive and abundant energy before becoming a source of expensive energy in diminishing supply. Already investors in Solar (Such as Total Oil) have far greater rewards from investment in Solar (SPWR) than they are able to obtain from investing in either drilling or hydraulic fracturing. In other words, fossil fuels have passed their sell by date. Not only are they socially and environmentally unwanted in the context of alternatives, there is simply a load of BS separating fossil fuels from becoming economically unwanted also. Conversely new investment in fossil fuel infrastructure is at total risk of obsolescence before break even. Nobody is suggesting that it is possible to build an ICE vehicle to take market share from Tesla. The purchase of a new Merc S Class right now is at huge risk with respect to residual value because it simply does not have a modern drive train. The same is true of drilling and fracking beyond the cost per KWh inflection in favor of solar.
Zehner is clearly an idiot, you unfortunately are not, you actually smear Tesla with Coal reliance and then go on to claim coal is beneficial. That is positively sociopathic.
I watched one of your lectures to members of the coal industry teaching them how to lie in retaliation to legitimate concerns about their industry. You offer two clever but fundamentally dishonest approaches:
1. A play on words with the use of the term Environment and a stack of cards built on top of it laden with emotional cues. This is a foul abuse of the power of an educated mind over those less fortunately endowed in that capacity. The Environment of concern with respect to CO2 is the natural environment, the one that supports life on Earth of any quality or level of prosperity. Not to be confused by diversions pertaining to the personal environment modified by clothing, HCVAC systems and so on. Cheap abundant energy of any source will supply the latter, fossil fuel consumption most decidedly puts a question mark over the former.
2. The disingenuous deployment of a time machine to make a case. You take an hypothetical example of a man from 300 years ago and show him the personal environment made available by advances in technology fueled by hydrocarbons. Your audience is of course impressed. You fail to take the same man 300 years into the future. On the current exponential trajectory of atmospheric CO2 concentration (the path that you shamefully promote), you would need to impress him with the advances in personal breathing equipment irrespective of any changes in the natural environment beyond that. Most likely if you landed in Manhattan 300 years into the future, your tour of modern amenity would commence with several hundred mile swim to dry land. Joking aside I would find it much more credible that 300 years into the future on the current trajectory, human populations will have been devastated, more than likely as a result of resource wars for living space that is safe from the sea, agricultural land that remains productive and fresh air that is breathable without assistance. On the current trajectory fresh mountain air (as measured at Mouna Loa) will have reached well in excess of 2000ppm, plus another 600ppm indoors without a scrubber designed to tackle it. 1000ppm is unpleasant indoors. No escape from 1000ppm concentration is on the cards in a time span of less that 100 years unless we change course of the energy economy drastically and urgently.
The status-quo of an outdated energy economy based upon fossil fuels is not an outcome to promote under any circumstances and your contribution to indifference and inaction when it comes to dealing with it is most unwelcome, sir. Truthfully there is nothing status-quo about fossil fuels. They are a relatively recent occurrence in the history of mankind, and they are a change agent with respect to the status-quo of what appears to be a key control lever of the planetary life support system. There is no proof that this is not the case, and the burden of proof regards the safety of changing the atmosphere must rest with those who wish to profit from changing it.
I will highlight a third dishonestly based upon another play on words. Climate. The climate of concern is the overall energy content of the natural environment. Not to be twisted into the concept of the weather or the temperature inside a car or a home. The thermal energy content of the natural environment has steadily increased across the industrial age and the sensible thing to expect is an increase in entropy (chaos in layman's terms). It is entirely true that the specific weather in a specific time is unpredictable at the best of times. It is an increase in unpredictability that is the entire problem, for agriculture in particular. When farmers increasingly lose the ability to predict what food crop is likely to survive in any given location and face ever increasing risks of any crop being parched or washed away, the abundance of diesel fuel makes only a marginal difference to the ability to sustain a healthy population.
Your oft used phrase "climate models that cannot predict climate" is self-defeating on both counts mentioned above. Thirdly, the dishonesty of stating that temperatures have not risen is to fail the test of your other much flaunted phrase "taking into consideration the whole context". Air temperatures are not the whole context, far from it when the oceans are a comparatively enormous heat sink. The majority of the energy accrued to the climate has been absorbed by the oceans and in in melting the world's ice. That energy is very much present, not absent as a cause for concern.
To round off the time machine debate. In fact just to dispose of the time machine and run a single normal linear time line of consecutive events against a simple and agreeable goal. Zehner aside (who would prefer for us all to use bicycles and birth control) most folk would agree that the ideal goal is to live as well as possible now and not have to fear the future. Fossil fuels can assist with one but not both of those objectives (and only if you are a long way away from a high density of exhaust fumes). To achieve both objectives of that goal, we need cheap abundant and clean energy. We also need desirable, efficient and fun devices (Tesla Model S is a prime example). You attempt yet another diversion by declaring that cheap abundant energy provides localized technology to fend off the worst of climate-related deaths. I assume you are referring to the ability to build dams, early warning systems and emergency rescue services by land sea and air. This is a ridiculous paradigm to promote, equally ridiculous as taxing or otherwise taking profits from the sale of cigarettes to pay for lung cancer treatment centers and claiming therefore that cigarettes are a boon to societal health.
The simultaneous advancement of mankind's private environment and natural environment in the direction of betterment, without accepting the compromise of a future disaster in the making some time between now and when fresh air is no longer breathable, has to be a common goal for all intelligent and capable men and women. It is absolutely sickening to see a capable man such as yourself working against that outcome. There does however lie a great deal of hope that you and those like you who ardently defend the indefensible are but clever fools. In other worlds, action to silence you may well in fact accelerate the pace of positive change that could never have been achieved by environmentalists alone.
Finally its is disingenuous to suggest that climate change concern rests on computer models of climate change. Climate change concern rests upon the historic correlation between atmospheric CO2 and climate and the fact that industrial era CO2 is off the charts with unknown survival consequences for the whole of humanity. It is not a counter argument to suggest that access to fossil fuels is a safeguard against a natural planetary-scale reaction to our presence as an irritant. The total solar energy hitting the earth and accumulated in the sea puts our total fossil fuel energy output to shame. We literally do not have the combined power in every machine at our disposal to stop any natural event even on a regional scale, let alone on a global scale. I have many times looked out in awe over a snow covered landscape that the next day or two is thawed to green grass. That's hundreds of gigawatts of power right there witnessed in a simple an normal event that we are literally powerless to prevent.
If the same environmental determinacy observed in the ice records indicates a return to natural CO2 levels over our dead bodies, it will happen irrespective of the full power of mankind to do a damn thing about it. We have but one sensible choice when it comes to nature: Cooperate or else.
It is not for "environmentalists" to promote the risks of out of control CO2 levels. It is for the fossil fuel industry to prove beyond any and all reasonable doubt that doubling background CO2 levels in a flash of geological time is a good idea. Until that is proven beyond all doubt, ideally somewhere other than our home planet, then with all gratitude to the giant leaps corresponding to fossil fuels, prudence dictates that we stop taking planetary-scale survival risks given the increasing availability alternatives.
Postulating that digging stuff out of the ground and burning it in the air we all breath is the pinnacle of human progress is a gross insult to the human condition. A very useful stepping stone it has been. If one were to design human progress from 300 years back to 300 years in the future, there may well have been a place for fossil fuels somewhere along the time line, but to argue that this is a desirable destination is nonsensical.
Right now the atmosphere is accumulating CO2 annually at a rate of 63% of everything we pump into it from industry and transport. We can wring our hands and tear our clothes about it, or we can take it as an opportunity. The rate of increase is within our grasp to fix (it is 63% of amounts under our direct control, not 163%), and every man, women and especially young person and child that is concerned about this represents a marketplace of seven+ billion customers for the biggest economic boom in the history of mankind. That is an opportunity available to businesses in the immediate. The company you have targeted with your criticism is case in point with greater than 400% gains in market cap in a single year to date. Exxon Mobil: 6% gains + 2.5% dividend in the same time span. Where do you see the economic benefits for mankind again?
I should also like to overturn the mantra regarding delivering the benefits of electricity to the 1.4bn without it. This does not necessarily demand coal and grid and given the political instability in many of these regions nuclear is pretty much out of the question. It is even questionable whether a hydro dam could be protected for more than a few years at a time. Imposing the cost of an electricity grid over vast regions of Africa (for example) is completely unproductive when modern solar with battery back-up can deliver electricity directly from abundant sunshine. The same principle of skipping the grid has applied successfully to the delivery of wireless telecommunications in a similar setting. In the same way it would seem to be practical for emerging economies to go direct to solar and EVs.
In your manifesto you concur with Ayn Rand's observation that a poorly-formulated environmental policy disingenuously lumps together the human and non human environment. Then you go on to do exactly that by countering concerns for the natural environment with arguments for the human environment. Beyond this hypocrisy it would appear to be gross arrogance overlook the fact that the Randian distinction breaks down at a juncture when we simply do not have the power to defend ourselves from impingement from the natural environment. Natural forces out-gun the sum total of of human power output from all sources including fossil fuels by a gargantuan margin. We cannot stop a single tsunami let alone a general seal level rise. In a game of cat and mouse with nature, we are not the cat despite all appearances to the contrary. We can carve out a habitat within reasonable bounds. Misguided "save the planet" environmental nonsense aside we cannot save ourselves from an overwhelmingly hostile planet and risking that outcome when instead we can get richer and happier not risking it is foolishness. I would argue that your promotion of such foolishness is on-balance a destructive force.
The undulations in CO2 levels on the 800,000 year ice-core data are not just what should be happening, until proven otherwise, it is what does happen on this planet. We can either create a boom of economic activity in the business of cooperating with the natural determinacy of CO2 levels or most likely CO2 levels will be corrected to the median of around 240ppm whether we approve of the process of getting there or not. Alternatively we can spend the remaining few years or generations of this species fighting the tide both literally and figuratively, until natural forces, including our natural propensity to combat each other for scarce resources flattens human populations to as close to nil as nature requires.
