As the center of the U.S. freezes this weekend, Elon Musk is trying to figure out how to save Tesla from going the way of Enron.
Religions die hard. It takes an orgy of evidence to change a person’s mind on a subject that is integral to their moral and ethical structure.
In the case of Tesla, the mania surrounding it over the past decade has been inextricably bound up with the hysteria of global warming.
For years investors ignored the obvious warning signs that Tesla would never be able to graduate from a boutique, hand-built car manufacturer and technology skunk works to a mass producer.
I’ve been very hard on Musk in the past, with good reason. But, as a guy with vision I applaud him getting Tesla off the ground and legitimizing the idea of the upscale electric car.
But it was never going to work as a mass production scheme because Musk isn’t that guy. He’s a dreamer and a schemer, not a builder. And, as I’ve said multiple times, he should have stepped down as CEO of Tesla ages ago.
A man has got to know his limitations as The Man once said.
Musk doesn’t.
People Need Religion
And this goes for the Global Warming crowd as well. There’s is a religion based around basic human hubris — that we are far more impactful on the world than we actually are and our activities need to be reined in.
This comes from worshiping the environment as a substitute for traditional religions. Marx preached organized religion is the ‘opiate of the masses’ but people need religion of some form or another to bring meaning to their lives and guide their behavior.
So if they reject Christianity, for example, they will seek out a new thing to elevate and substitute for it. I would argue that Star Wars provided that for me as a teenager and later Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
We all need a religion.
The environment is definitely one of these substitute religions. In fact, modern environmentalism has all the trappings of a classic human religion.
We have our Satan, consumerism. It is the bastard child of capitalism since this version of environment-worship is rooted in Marxism.
We have the apocalypse story, Global Warming. We will literally destroy all life on the planet turning it into Venus. It’s the rapture for Gaia worshipers.
And we have the High Priest of Technocracy who will save us from ourselves, Elon Musk. He will put a solar panel on every roof, take us to Mars while we drive around, guilt-free in our luxury Teslas.
The problem with all of it, of course, is that it was all bought with debt and government largesse, itself a consumerist fantasy created out of the opulence that capitalism provided.
And while there are plenty of reasons why electric cars can make sense, less carbon dioxide isn’t one of them. But, that’s where the billions in grants and Wall Street funny money came from.
Tesla is witches’ brew consisting of equal parts the Fed’s insane zero-bound interest rates, the elevation of global warming to religious significance by the left and cynical Wall Street profiteering.
The Fed provided the money, the government gave out the subsidies to entice the Wall Streeters and global warming provided the upscaling demand as Generation Prius gave way to the siren’s call of Musk’s consumerism.
In essence, we live in a period of history so wealthy relative to our basic survival needs we can indulge the ravings of mad Marxists at levels of taxation and wealth redistribution which are far greater than any previous economic cycle.
Why this occurred, in my view, is confluence of three things:
- Rising sun output lowering the cost of food production.
- Enshrining private property rights and the subservience of government to the people in law in some places, like the U.S.
- Accessing the deep, high-density energy reserves of the planet (Oil).
Those three things created real wealth for humanity at a rate easily double previous periods of recorded history.
There’s no doubt that this period has been messy and our institutions and cultural identities are having a hard time adjusting.
The environmentalists certainly have a point about pollution and consumerism.
But only up to a point.
And if they would confine their activities to getting polluters to pay their ‘externalities,’ limiting governments’ protection of them and educating people about being less wasteful then I would have zero problems with them.
In fact, I applaud their efforts. What they fail to understand, willfully I believe, is that the efficiency enforced by the laws of economics on producers drives waste and pollution down over time.
But their religious fervor cannot allow them to see that and allow nature, as it were, to take its course. And there’s is a religion based on the unquenchable envy of Marxism.
My substitute religion however, doesn’t tell me to expropriate 10% of world GDP to ensure I get another Star Wars movie to add to my gospel either.
But you do see that from the Global Warming extremists. And the sad part is that the same Wall St. profiteers who sold them Tesla are also selling them carbon credits, solar panels and electric luxury cars.
The very people who they rail against, Wall St. are the ones handing them the money to indulge their power fantasies about saving the world.
You can can your environmentalist cake and eat it too, Greenies.
And it would all be great if it weren’t all a complete lie. Global warming is a bubble bursting just like Tesla is because both are stories built on a foundation of debt and consumption, not privation and thrift.
Like capitalism is.
The climate cycle is changing in front of our eyes. The sun is shutting down and will likely remain so for at lest another ten years, possibly far longer.
The climate is only just now catching up to this fact. And we are woefully unprepared for this fact as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez goes full Marxist retard touting a Green New Deal.
We are in a transition state from warming to cooling. Weather is getting violent. The upper atmosphere is cooling off so quickly even the religious nuts at NASA have had to admit it publicly.
And yet, people cling to their religions because they have to. Just like they cling to Marxism that forms its foundations despite its truly horrific record of human abuse.
As Musk and Tesla fall from grace we’ll see the scales lift from many true believers’ eyes. Because nothing wakes people up faster than seeing their future gutted as their brokerage account plunges towards zero.
At that point even this cycle will turn. Expectations will be tempered and people will finally become open to truly sustainable solutions we all actually want.
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Environmentalism has been turned into a “religion”…
If environmentalism restricted itself to truly caring for our natural resources, I would have no problem with it. However, with the secret science and questionable funding that these environmental groups possess taints the whole barrel. It turns out that many claims that environmentalists make have no basis in fact and are not based on good, honest, scientific investigation. This is why environmental scientists have to hide their data, as it does not fit their agenda. A good example of this is the so-called global warming crap, now renamed climate change. For one, the climate is always changing. The East Anglia emails in which data was purposely falsified by climate scientists comes to mind. Not only that, the climate scientists purposely installed temperature monitoring sensors in cities, contrary to manufacturers recommendations and good scientific practices, in asphalt-covered parking lots, and other heat sink areas in order to prove their (faulty) hypothesis. This is scientific dishonesty at its worst.
It turns out that the solar system is in a cooling cycle due to decreased solar activity. There are two long-term solar cycles that reinforce themselves when in phase and cancel themselves out when out-of-phase. Look up the Maunder minimum. There are no SUVs on Mars or other planets, yet they are also experiencing the same solar variability.
Environmentalism has been the method used to impose communist principles on western society, especially in the USA.
Environmentalists are not content with promoting clean water, air and land, but are hell-bent on controlling human behavior, and yes, promoting extermination plans for much of humanity as these anointed types consider mankind to be a pestilence (except for themselves) to be reduced in population by any means necessary.
Environmentalists HATE the God-given concept of private property and have imposed government-backed and enforced land use controls on private property owners without compensation, clearly an unconstitutional taking of private property. If environmentalists want to control land use, let them purchase it themselves, not by government force. Today the only method of negating government-imposed land use restrictions is shoot, shovel, and shut up.
If environmentalists had their way, the earth’s human population would be reduced by approximately 90%, with the remainder to (be forced) to live in cities, in soviet-style high rise apartments, utilizing bicycles, buses and trains for transportation. The use of automobiles and access to pristine wilderness (rural) areas would be off-limits to us mere mortals, and would only be available for these anointed environmentalists.
The endangered species act is another abuse of environmentalism. Species are always changing, to adapt to their environments-survival if the fittest. In fact, the hoopla over the spotted owl (that placed much northwest timber land off-limits to logging) turned out to be nothing but scientific misconduct and arrogance. There are virtually identical species in other parts of the northwest.
More scientific malpractice occurred when government biologists attempted to plant lynx fur in certain areas to provide an excuse for making those areas off-limits for logging or development. Fortunately, these scientists were caught, however, no punishment was imposed.
In order to promote the false religion of “global warming” aka “climate change”, NASA “scientists” purposely installed temperature sensors in city parking lots and roads contrary to good scientific principles and practices in order to “skew” the “global warming” results.
In a nutshell, today’s environmentalism IS communism like watermelon-green on the outside and red (communist) on the inside.
It is interesting to note that communist and third-world countries have the WORST environmental conditions on the planet. Instead of the USA and other developed countries spending billions to get rid of that last half-percent of pollution, it would behoove the communist countries to improve their conditions first. Here is a question for you environmentalists: Why is there a push for restrictive environmental regulations, but only on the developed first-world countries, and not the gross polluters such as India and China?
I’m with you, Anarchyst on the abuse of The Endangered Species Act. You’re a little off on the spotted owl deal. The spotted owl situation was based on good science. That’s a species that can not survive without old-growth. There have been others in the past that we’ve lost not understanding that, the ivory-billed woodpecker being the most notable. It would have been easy to save that one in the 1930s and 40s, but we logged out the rest of the southern old-growth to make decks for PT-boats. However the spotted owl was also the genesis of all the abuse of The Endangered Species Act. Since those forests were protected, that has become the go-to play to block any sort of development project that somebody objects to, for any reason.
I must respectfully disagree with your assertion that the “spotted owl” was being driven to extinction. There was a virtually identical species discovered not far from the logging operation. The markings were a little different, but from a genetic standpoint they were virtually identical.
As to extinctions, nature extinguishes species all of the time without mankind’s “help”. Evolution, in its normal operation does insure “survival of the fittest”, and some species just “have to go”.
Let’s face the fact that species are always “changing” (evolving).
Regards,
You are referring to the barred owl. Barred owls are able to exist in a variety of habitats, they aren’t nearly as specialized as a spotted owl. We have pileated woodpeckers also, they look about the same as an ivorybill, but they can live anywhere, while the ivory-billed went extinct when it lost its habitat. We don’t need to lose the spotted owl. All it takes to maintain it is to preserve some old growth forest, which isn’t a bad thing. That’s different than letting the science get queered to stop human advancement, as has been done more and more frequently since the spotted owl case.
You use the word envy…I would introduce Mannon, one of the 7 princes of hell.
Lucifer: pride
Mammon: greed
Asmodeus: lust
Leviathan: envy
Beelzebub: gluttony
Satan: wrath
Belphegor: sloth
No one wants to talk about greed and it’s affect on society.
To the left – socialism / environmentalism / bicycles / trains are their religion.
At the end of his day, the tired and dirty farmer comes inside, takes a quick shower down in the basement, has a light supper, flips on the radio to hear the closing commodity prices, talks with his family, reads them a few verses from the Bible, then goes to bed, hoping there will be some rain overnight.
It’s all about perspective.
“China will build more than a million electric cars this year. And with massive support from the government, they are challenging the world’s auto industry.”
CBS featured the e vehicle industry in China last week. Of interest to me was their cars were designed with an interchangeable battery pack that can be changed out by a robot in a few minutes.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-china-an-electric-car-lifestyle-60-minutes/
Getting people with paid for vehicles to buy electric cars that don’t have the range needed. Having a charging station and then dealing with higher electric costs. I was waiting for the hydrogen-powered car. Oil companies burn off natural gas and all large trucks and SUV, S Could run on it.
I did see a new electric truck that is supposed to sell for around ninety grand!
“Musk isn’t that guy. He’s a dreamer and a schemer, not a builder. And, as I’ve said multiple times, he should have stepped down as CEO of Tesla ages ago.” Let’s recap the week at Tesla, shall we? Musk wrote the check to pay off a 930 million-dollar bond. They announced the $35,000 model 3 will be available in two weeks. And in 10 days they introduce the model Y crossover. Struggling, aren’t they.