This doesn't seem like a very serious criticism.
1. If I understand correctly, most climatologists think that humanity should eventually stop contributing carbon into the atmosphere on net.
2. It's unlikely that we'll completely delete all car dependency any time soon. (Will every person living in a rural area have a personal train?)
3. Electric vehicles already contribute less carbon over their lifetimes than gas vehicles do, and can theoretically be made to be completely carbon neutral.
So electric vehicles seem helpful to me at mitigating risks from climate change. I also don't see why caring about climate change would cause me to care about endangered turtles in Texas
Yes, that makes sense.
> It's unlikely that we'll completely delete all car dependency any time soon.
That is not the goal I am advocating. I would like more transit and less people driving alone in SUVs and living in overly large single family homes.
> Will every person living in a rural area have a personal train?
No, that would not make any sense.
> Electric vehicles already contribute less carbon over their lifetimes than gas
Yes, but expanding highways and stroads is not carbon neutral. Heating individual homes is not carbon neutral. Mining lithium is not carbon neutral and pollutes the environment. His ideas around hyper loops and Tesla tunnels under Las Vegas make no sense when we already have trains.
> I also don't see why caring about climate change would cause me to care about endangered turtles in Texas
Yeah that is my point. There is a link to climate change and habitat destruction. Elon moves to Texas and supports conservatives that do not care about climate change at all. They profess that climate change is not happening at all. Elon recently advocated more natural gas and oil production and drilling. It is all incoherent. I am not saying all of his ideas are bad, but I am saying he does not seem to make coherent sense.
He wants to go into the history books as the man who got humanity off earth. He wants to be space Christopher Columbus.
I hate Tesla as a company and won’t ever buy their products, but I will still benefit immensely from their work. Credit where it’s due.
For the sake of argument, you may be entirely right and, he may be entirely wrong. But your mode of argument still betrays an inability to understand that your view of humanity's best interests is not necessarily universalizable. Especially the fetish for mass transit. It has a use case, but is not a panacea for several reasons, many of which people who obsess over everyone living in cities choose to ignore.
The infrastructure around them (just one more lane and traffic will get better) is itself unsustainable. Our suburbs designed around cars are not dense enough to economically support them (roads, water, waste, etc) and the taxes required are bankrupting communities already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
To say they have a "fetish for mass transit" is both intentionally inflammatory and unnecessary. Also, it is essential for moving people around. Having personal vehicles sitting idle, worth $5K to easily $70K, for most of the day is a massive waste of resources, income, and more. Elon's imaginary robotaxis will not fix it.
Everyone doesn't need to live in cities but everyone needs to start paying for what they consume instead of taking (from cities) from others (the future generations). We would need several Earth's if everyone lived like Americans.
People keep saying this, yet technology keeps advancing, and the poorest people today live like the kings of centuries ago. Henry VIII didn't have an HDTV or a smartphone.
That is a naïve take.
Fundamentally, my issue is that Elon does not have humanity's best interests at heart. It is incoherent to produce EVs that supposedly aid in preventing climate change, and have a space company that dumps carbon into the atmosphere (investments in natural gas), and a launch site the harms nature, and has goals to extricate humans from the planet. His technology encourages single use personal vehicles and does not improve mass transit. His technology has quality issues, but at every turn he blames his customers for any fault. I could go on and on.
I don't doubt that people are fans of his, but you can't say there are no reasons for concern.