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Additional context > Musk’s SpaceX aims to use a site in South Texas to launch rockets to carry people and cargo to the moon and Mars. To do that, the company

• brabel 5y ago
  If anyone had any doubt about whether Elon really had the environment in mind when he founded Tesla, I think now you've got your answer. In fact, most people driving electric cars likely wouldn't think twice about building a fracked well if they knew they could make millions from that... if they really cared about the environment, they wouldn't even drive around.
  • DisjointedHunt 5y ago
    How much carbon does one year of fires in California produce? For all the regulations on reducing usage, the wise politicians enabled conditions through neglect of forest care and trimming to allow fires so large, the plume could be seen from space and darkened skies as far north as Seattle. The point here is, what is good for the climate isn’t the purview of these simplistic views of climate science. Drilling a well doesn’t automatically kill everything Mother Nature created or anything. . . The economic shift that Tesla single handful brought about to get all of traditional auto to move to electric cannot be overstated. So stop using “The Environment” as a battering ram that only your point of view protects. It is wrong.
    • ahmedalsudani 5y ago
      Filed under non sequitur.
      • DisjointedHunt 5y ago
        There are four paragraphs in the comment. If you have the patience to read through to at least the third , you’d see the comparison. It’s amazing to see the standard of debate in a thread on HN slip so bad that people don’t have conversations anymore, but walk in with the “know it all” mentality to downvote .
        • ahmedalsudani 5y ago
          For the record I'm not against using fossil fuels for any purpose. No matter how many paragraphs you turn it into, the forest fires in California have nothing to do with fracking gas. Don't turn a discussion of a private company's behaviour into a culture war.
    • jeffbee 5y ago
      Carbon from forest fires is part of the short-term carbon cycle because it came out of the atmosphere quite recently. It is fundamentally different from carbon found underground that was deposited before humans existed.
      • DisjointedHunt 5y ago
        [Edit]: You’re a coward if you downvote to suppress an opinion without having the decency to engage in debate. Jesus. . You actually think carbon released from burning wood is exempt from the whole “making the planet unlivable” effect? Repeat that to yourself while you watch the skies turn red. That’s a ridiculous statement to make.
        • heavyset_go 5y ago
          Forest fires are part of forests' natural life cycles and are, in general, carbon neutral. Forests fixate atmospheric carbon and release it through cellular respiration, decomposition and fires. That atmospheric carbon is then fixated again via vegetative growth. The issue is burning hydrocarbons we pump out of the ground, because doing so interrupts the equilibrium between atmospheric carbon and natural carbon sinks like forests in the carbon cycle.
  • schiffern 5y ago
    >If anyone had any doubt about whether Elon really had the environment in mind when he founded Tesla, I think now you've got your answer. This sort of "tribal purity" logic is silly: "if you've ever done anything negative, it means you never intended to do anything positive." This is nothing but the environmentalism equivalent of the old "you're either with us or against us, we're at war!" fallacy. Rockets have always used fossil fuels. This is not news. The fact that SpaceX is vertically integrating changes nothing about that. On the contrary it likely reduces leaks (which is a good thing) by shortening the processing chain.
    • antattack 5y ago
      SpaceX will pay hefty taxes if carbon tax is implemented, yet Musk is still strong proponent of carbon tax.
      • Denvercoder9 5y ago
        Relative to revenue, carbon tax won't be that significant for SpaceX. There aren't any exact numbers yet, but Starship will burn about 5000 metric tons of propellant in a single launch. Assuming a stoichiometric ratio of CH4 to O2, that'll emit about 2600 metric tons of CO2 (the rest is water). According to the ICAO emissions calculator, a roundtrip by plane between LA and London emits about 0.9 metric tons of CO2 per passenger. Thus, a Starship launch generates the same emissions as 2900 passengers making that trip. At the $400 price I get for that trip on Google Flights, those 2900 passengers generate about $1.2 million in revenue for the airline. A single Starship launch will generate $100 million in revenue for SpaceX.
        • tenpies 5y ago
          > Relative to revenue, carbon tax won't be that significant for SpaceX. Are there any public statements on SpaceX's financials? The rumor from their last round is that it's a classic Elon money-burning enterprise - and profitability is always one quarter away. Revenue is of course pointless, since it's quite easy to have revenue when you're not profitable.
    • 5y ago
  • gameswithgo 5y ago
    This sort of ridiculous cynicism doesn’t help that cause.
  • nathanvanfleet 5y ago
    Wait, your argument is that everyone would build a fracking gas plant if they could? What an odd thing to say.
    • brabel 5y ago
      The argument is that most people would do bad things (build a fracked well in the case of Elon, something smaller for the rest of us, like buying cheaper electronics from places where environmentalism doesn't even exist) to make money or save a penny, even when they do some "good" things when it's convenient to do so (driving electric cars in 2021). I keep forgetting people here on HN seem to need things to be written in a very obvious, literal manner otherwise they do what you're trying to do and interpret things too literally, without any kind of abilitiy to interpret when something is a metaphore, analogy or hyperbole. Sorry.
• zionic 5y ago
  Seems like stargaze would be a good candidate for Tesla solar + mega pack installation. 10 mega packs should do the trick.