Seems more like pattern recognition to me. What else do you expect from the rich, when our society is explicitly set up to elevate greed to the highest virtue?
He did sell them, though how much this matters is more like "were CO2 permit trading prices set correctly?" rather than something to blame Musk for.
For me personally, things like this make me question the value of the businesses rather than the environment. Like, I'm not sure if it's true this year, but in several recent years you could correctly say Musk personally made more money selling Tesla shares than Tesla made lifetime net profit, and likewise could correctly say that if all government subsidies and artificial markets were removed Tesla would not have made a profit at all.
Carbon trading is the "free market" solution to getting businesses to price-in what would otherwise be a free externality.
I won't praise Musk for it (at best praise goes to the governments setting up the rules), so we're probably on the same page, but it did feel like you were painting him as a villain for taking part in something that at least solves one of the common criticisms of carbon emitting industries.
Not exactly, the "free market" solution would be a carbon tax. The distinction matters here - had Musk not sold Teslas offsets, those other businesses would have paid a higher (and more accurate) price.
It may feel like that because it takes away Musks "at least he built the Autobahn" (even though the statement is of course also inaccurate for the original). But I consider it very dishonest to assign CO2 savings from electric cars to him, without also mentioning him profiting off of those emissions in other places.
... as allowed and intended by our government, and using the proceeds to build the factories that allowed them to scale production to the point where the best-selling car in the world can be electric, which otherwise would have taken longer. Having served their purpose, these emissions credits are now going away.
They will be, as the faster scaling of electric car production means more emissions will be saved going forward, and there won't be any more emissions credits offsetting them. And Tesla sold cars in places without emissions credits too. I'm sure there were more than enough of those to offset the rockets with plenty left over.
But Tesla is one of America's roadblocks to scaling EV usage. They cancelled their $25,000 EV plans after the US blocked economic competitors like BYD from entering the US market. The ostensible goal of Tesla is not to reduce emissions through democratized EVs, but to protect their bottom-line and forcibly prevent competition from undermining their profits.
It's not Elon's fault the US put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs. It's not even Trump's fault. Biden did it! You can't pin that on Elon.
Tesla isn't afraid of Chinese competition. They compete directly with BYD in China and win. Model Y outsells any BYD model. All other US automakers, on the other hand, are terrified. And for good reason.
Meanwhile, Tesla is still making a $25,000 EV. It's just not designed for personal ownership. Tesla is betting on autonomous fleets as the future of cars. But they're still electric. Shared fleets would be way more efficient than personal car ownership, so this is even better for the climate, actually.
And they're doing Semi and Megapack and Superchargers (open to all EVs) too. They're doing their own battery R&D at their own battery factory, their own lithium refining, their own solar cell production. Honestly ridiculous that you would try to paint Tesla as some kind of climate traitor.
BYD sells several times more different EV models in twice as many countries, yet it only totals 38% more EV units than Tesla (2025). What puts them in the top 10 is their non-EV sales, which Tesla doesn't do at all.
Cybertruck is a flop, no argument there.
The reason Tesla hasn't scaled further is that a few years ago they pivoted in strategy and are no longer heavily pursuing the consumer market with new models for personal ownership. For better or worse they are all in on autonomous fleet vehicles and Optimus. The pivot was probably a few years too early. Many think it'll never work and I'm sure you're among them, but time will tell.
Not aggressively pursuing future new consumer models is not the same thing as being a low volume manufacturer. Autonomous fleet vehicles are also not going to be low volume, either.
Model Y continues to have the highest production volume of any model in the world, and you want to call that low volume manufacturing? I'm done engaging here, have fun.
> If Ford told the DoD you can't use the tanks they bought however they need to, and had a kill switch in it in case they wanted to cut the DoD off, then that would obviously be a supply chain risk.
This is a misrepresentation of the situation. Anthropic did NOT sell something to the DoD and then restrict usage - the DoD purchased their offering fully aware of this clause.
That's true for every company and every individual involved with the dod. They can all put guns or pencils down and refuse at a future date for a unspecified reason.
That has nothing to do with supply chain risk designation. That comes from sabotage
The damage tracking doesn't seem to be effective at reducing the computational cost. Measurement:
Opening https://nh2.me/low-fps-spinners/smooth-spinner.html it doesn't matter if I zoom the spinner to 25% or 500%: Despite the 400x difference in pixels redrawn, the "GPU Process" CPU usage in the "Browser" tab of the Chromium Shift+Esc task manager is equally high.
It only scales down the cost when reducing the FPS.
Even that would be manageable with enough solar panels and batteries, no? Or is it certain that too much surface area would have to be covered with panels?
Batteries work for 1-2 days right now. These wind breaks can be 1-2 weeks.
Like, to be fair, batteries have improved so much in the last decade that this may be solved, but I'm generally sceptical of one thing that will save us, as I reckon we'll need multiple things to ensure resilience (which is really, really, really important when it comes to core needs like electricity and heating).
Is the need for "pretty large breakthroughs" based on realistic calculations, or are you just guessing? I know that most people subscribe to your position, but I can't say I've really seen convincing analyses that show the numbers:
- What thresholds of $/kWh, charge speed, power density etc. do we need to reach before scaling becomes viable? What are those thresholds based on?
- Where are we now on those metrics, and how did they evolve over the last 2-3 decades?
Still, everyone seems very confident that scaling is non-viable now. But IMO it should be possible to demonstrate the non-viability using the approach above - even if the exact numbers are wrong, the orders of magnitude should be good enough, right?
> Is the need for "pretty large breakthroughs" based on realistic calculations, or are you just guessing?
I'm just guessing. But absent some kind of path to get there, I'd prefer to plan for needing to cover this situation with nuclear or other storage (I feel like pumped storage may make sense, but again haven't done the numbers).
Like, if you're correct then we'll end up with lots of power we don't really need. That's great, as we can use it to decarbonise other parts of the economy, however, if I'm correct and we dont build some kind of baseload/storage solution then we'll be in trouble in the winters, which I really want to avoid.
If you're correct, we'll end up with tons of extra power, since the nuclear plants would have to cover everything on their own anyway! But it would also take unbelievable amounts of money, and thus delay the energy transition by decades. We don't have that much time left.
Instead of guessing, maybe it's worth looking into the numbers?
Humans aren't always rational actors. Many people are delighted by having the power to inflict fear and pain upon others. Policing jobs seem to structurally attract such people, I've seen incidents and scandals of this nature in many places.
> The USA has a robust legal system that draws its powers from the people, who elect legislators that can rectify situations where the law is wrong or if the courts have wronged someone incorrectly.
Not sure why this is relevant, since the same holds true for any democratic country, no?
Americans have no say on its laws and procedures, and it is not accountable to the American people. Many of its member states are themselves semi-democratic or totally autocratic. People such as Afghani women, for example, have no rights at home and by extension no say on the procedures of the ICC, but they can be judged by it, because their dictators are signatories and do have a say.
> Americans have no say on its laws and procedures, and it is not accountable to the American people.
Maybe I'm missing your point, but what stops Americans from having a say in its laws and procedures? If the US signed on, Americans would have the same voice as everyone else, no? Though I guess its voice would actually still be louder, because the ICC draws its power from the member countries.
Regarding the accountability - yes, it's not solely accountable to the American people. That's the core idea behind an international court: it is not beholden to any single country.
> Many of its member states are themselves semi-democratic or totally autocratic. People such as Afghani women, for example, have no rights at home and by extension no say on the procedures of the ICC, but they can be judged by it, because their dictators are signatories and do have a say.
While I get the idea, I'm not convinced that the absence of an ICC-like institution would in any way help disenfranchised people with gaining these rights. As the last few years have shown, the US - left to its own devices - will gleefully support an ongoing genocide.
> If the US signed on, Americans would have the same voice as everyone else, no?
But you can’t force them to accept a foreign sovereignty. It would be like the USA saying that US federal law now applies to Greenland, and they have a right to participate in federal elections.
> I'm not convinced that the absence of an ICC-like institution would in any way help disenfranchised people with gaining these rights.
I’m not convinced that the ICC is capable of helping anyone. They can run tribunals after-the-fact, if some other power has already taken care of the perpetrator, which may be useful in some situations, like when a devastated country doesn’t have the resources to run a trial themselves, but it can’t prevent or stop anything from happening. Doing that would usually mean the ICC would have to raise an army and go to war.
For example, in 2024 the ICC issued arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas. Palestine, which is a signatory, did nothing to try and arrest them. Neither did any of the other ICC countries, because executing that warrant would require going to war in Gaza (which is what Israel did). Neither has the warrant for Netanyahu made any difference.
> But you can’t force them to accept a foreign sovereignty.
...No, that's why the ICC requires us to sign on.
We voluntarily accept a joint sovereignty over each other.
The problem is that for the past 80 years or so, the US has gotten very, very comfortable forcing other nations to accept our sovereignty. Over them. The powers that be really, really don't want to give that up and be accountable to anyone.
That's not sustainable, it's not ethical, and it's guaranteed to lead to more conflict down the line.
The ICC as currently constituted may be imperfect, but IMO it is a good step forward toward a world where we are all accountable to each other, and we collectively enforce an agreed-upon set of ethics for every country's operations.
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