I'm not presenting this as fact but the argument is clearly that Musk's net effect on the global population is positive through his career choice and life's work, and that jetting around is necessary for him to complete this life's work.

The baseline condition is everyone is still in ICE cars -- he changed that and have altered the trajectory - the transaction cost is his own emission to raise capital and build companies. Now add in the CH4 rocket fuel - might do some counter damage to the net impact but I haven't run the calculations -- probably could do a quick one. Should be using H2 if he cared about the environment ;)

In essence, billionaires are humans like the rest of us. If we're asked to make concessions, they should have to make the same concessions.

Mind you, social morality (IE the "We should stop flying so much!" idea) not backed up by law is toothless and ignorable. Which Elon is clearly doing.

why should that be a goal of his? I mean, unless you expect that just because he's rich, that he's obliged, how his enormous amount of money is spent is not something anyone else can critisize.

Because there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of other truck owners also using the same justification to keep their truck?

This isn't sticking up for hypocritical wasteful billionaires, just pointing there are not very many of them in the grand scheme of things. Truck owners reducing emissions by a few percent (let alone dropping to what a car would do) would have a much bigger effect than billionaires or celebs reducing by 100%.

Great logic. By that strand, I suppose they could also be allowed to abuse people, I mean it’s more important that we make sure the general population doesn’t abuse right? That’s what truly moves the statistic, not the crime perpetrated by a few billionaires?

Where did I say it was OK for billionaires to waste so much? Did calling them wasteful and hypocritical sound to you like I was supporting them?

If we want to extend the fallacies in the other direction - Why should the rest of the world do anything when these wasteful Americans insist on having so many trucks?

Your switching from a truck to a car makes effectively ZERO difference in global emissions. If EVERY non-commercial vehicle in the US went down to ZERO pollution, it wouldn't even be noticed in the statistical noise of the country's pollution.

But if everyone just cherry picks a worse example than themselves to justify not doing anything until they are the worst, then no progress will ever happen.

Unfortunately, I can't tell if the source linked actually uses this metric but isn't being clear, or if it's just focused on CO2, and I'm struggling to find another source that does use CO2 equivalent emissions as a metric.

Logic won't win you any friends; and it certainly won't change anyone's feelings.

As trite as my post is: I don't see the merit in yours.

The sad reality is that it doesn’t much matter. The damage we’ve done is baked in and hundreds of millions of people in the next few generations are going to have it pretty rough. Can’t unring the bell of a century+ of society not giving a shit about the environment and just pointing fingers at someone else and calling them the problem.

If you’re loaded, you may as well just take the PJ flights and enjoy them.

And that's indeed what happened. A huge amount of the luxury vehicle market shifted to the Model S. Model S sales went way up and other luxury brands had years of record low sales.

Also in general, people are buying EVs to replace their old cars, so every EV sale is a "not-ICEV" sale. It's going to be rare that someone buys a new EV and a new ICEV at the same time to replace their old ICEV.

December 5th: 28 tons CO2

That's more than the typical American does in a year and he did it in a few hours. Between Dec 1st and Dec 5th his flights resulted in 100 tons of CO2.

Gates, between Dec 7th and Dec 13th (similarly 5 days) produced 262 tons. https://web.archive.org/web/20221214164008/https://twitter.c...

It’s a bit like telling people that volunteer that they’re just doing it to feel good and so that they’re selfish.