Taylor Swift lets the company that manages the jet (that she owns? that she leases? I have no clue) so it looks like it's all her but it's just under her name I think. I could be wrong.
Carbon Neutral is bullshit. Unless they are actually sequestering gasses from the atmosphere, and they don't do it. What they are doing is buying "carbon credits" (according to their own website), which means - "someone else will be responsible for my own emissions".
Running one of the worst possible businesses for emissions (vanity air travel) and having the gall to call it sustainable is rather jarring.
Basically, yes, things are as they seem and EV's carbon footprint has only a minimal manufacturing overhead to go with the extremely large consumption advantage. They aren't as good as giving up private transport entirely, but yeah: buy the Tesla.
This argument doesn't fly, basically. It's just the same recycled FUD distributed by the fossil fuel industry, just coming out of the mouths of different folks now that it turns out Musk is a political enemy.
[1] Among a ton of context. As always, "it's complicated". But the answer is definitely in favor of the EV.
That's only looking at the production of a 80 kWh lithium-ion battery
EDIT: also that's a mistaken quote. The article actually says it takes between 6,250 (all hydro) and 40,000 (all coal) miles for an ICE to produce the amount of CO2 that the manufacturing of a battery would produce.
Doesn't at all account for
1. the rest of the damn car
2. emissions due to unclean energy sources
But yes the battery is definitely the most polluting part of making an EV, so that is somewhat promising even though a battery's lifespan tends to last less than an ICE
The comparison is between an EV and an ICE vehicle. Surely 1 and 2 favor the EV by definition (no engine, so less material; and <100% fossil fuel usage vs. ==100%[1]), no? Where is the disadvantage you're seeing coming from?
You're also forgetting:
3. Much higher energy efficiency per distance travelled. Even if you have a bunch of oil and are forced to use it to push wheels around on roads with no other energy source, EV's still win on carbon output!
[1] Depending on how you classify ethanol additives, I guess. But regardless, the carbon emissions content of the electricity grid is vastly higher than any agriculturally-source fraction of the gasoline economy.
the amount of CO2 emitted in the production of a battery represented as how many miles driving an ICE to produce a similar amount of emissions
A purely arbitrary and somewhat useless comparison. That's all I was trying to point out. If you read into the source of that article it has some actually relevant figures :)
EDIT: also, you misread that bit. 2,500m is for one metric ton. The article states that a battery's manufacturing will take between 2.5 and 16 metric tons of CO2
> Just how much is one ton of CO2? As much as a typical gas-powered car emits in about 2,500 miles of driving
2.4 - 16 tons in manufacture of a 80 kWh battery = 6000-40000 miles.
That's not accounting for the GHG's emitted in generation of the electricity, which if it's coal based takes longer to claw back (and there's probably a million other things to take into consideration, weight increase is often one).
Not to shit on EV's. I think they are the future and will be a great improvement, especially in cities, but there is a non FUD manufacturing cost that needs to be worked off.
It depends more on your own use than the vehicle itself. Most old vehicles sit in garages most of the time as secondary vehicles. So extending the life of a ICE car vs. manufacturing another to do the same (light) workload is a loss. But if you're buying a vehicle to use as a rideshare or whatever for 8 hours a day, the beater is going to be much worse for emissions.
Yes, all of that can easily be boiled down to the efficiency of an electric motor versus a gasoline engine. The more miles you drive the faster you will offset any carbon from manufacturing.
BEVs on average currently take more energy than ICE to build but the difference is made up in a couple years because electric motors are so efficient compared to gas engines.
The breakeven milage is depressingly far. Electric cars take a lot more stuff and much more polluting manufacturing processes to be made.
Around 2016, the total carbon footprint of a gas car was lower than a Tesla, pretty much for its entire life. It's getting better and better as energy gets cleaner, though.
that link doesn't actually directly address the point brought up though. It uses GREET for its number though and others have used that model to answer it, but the the estimates vary widely based on inputted assumptions. E.g.[0]
Tesla Model Y (EV) vs Honda CR-V (gasoline):
9,200 miles if the grid is 100% hydroelectric
89,000 miles if the grid is 100% coal
Everyone cites this EPA piece with heavy use of the word "typically" throughout.
The gp has made two statements:
1) that manufacturing is more polluting.
This is confirmed by your EPA link - the graph shows EVs are ~ twice as polluting in this area.
> Some studies have shown that making a typical EV can create more carbon pollution than making a gasoline car. This is because of the additional energy required to manufacture an EV’s battery.
2) that in 2016, the breakeven wasn't met.
Your EPA link states figures are from 2020. Obviously the breakeven is going to vary greatly by region depending on grid mix, but renewables in the US mix used in the EPA figures has grown ~33% between 2016 & 2020 so the difference isn't going to be small here.
The gp's line may be a myth on technicalities, but not a particularly binary right-wrong one. It's recently been a close enough call to be worthy of discussion, rather than the dogmatic claims of dishonesty in the replies.
I suppose the knives have come out to "debunk" the meaning of the word "depressingly."
Personally, I did the math on a Tesla purchase in 2020 given my own climate (very cold), driving patterns (90% high-efficiency highway driving), and energy mix. The end result was somewhere between 50k-100k miles to break even compared to a small, fuel-efficient Honda.
Keep in mind that a Tesla is a comparatively big car, and if you don't want to haul around that much car, you don't have to - estimates in the literature tend to compare cars of a similar "class," when your personal alternatives may be outside that class.
Also, the Reuters folks (and the EPA) are a bit optimistic and fall on the low end of published estimates I have seen for the carbon footprints of electric cars.
However, keep in mind that there's a huge variance here and many of the factors swing both ways: comparing a Tesla model X to a Honda pilot in SoCal (warm climate and tons of green energy) for a commuter (mostly city driving in traffic) may break even at 5000 miles or less.
This is an intentionally vague statement because "depressingly" means "between 5,000 and 200,000 depending on your circumstances and alternatives, and whether you take a high or low estimate of the additional pollution involved in EV manufacturing."
So is it safe to safe that the average Tesla buyer/"consumer" is "virtue signaling" that they are actually contributing a measurable change towards climate change but instead just doing something trendy? Granted, the cars have "good tech" (fake full-self-driving claims or not).
Never take what people on this site say at face value. If someone is unwilling to provide sources, it's usually a sign they are hiding something and you should put in some effort to independently verify their claims with reputable sources.
Doing so will produce a wealth of sources that all point to OP being misinformed on this issue.
Likely. Could have been testing something after maintenance. Also the data is just for his jet, but as that flight highlights it doesn’t mean he was onboard.
You know that thing where you go to the kitchen but by the time you get there you forget why you went? Turns out that happens to billionaires, too, just on a different scale.
Probably not. This is usually because the airport you are dropping off at doesn’t have storage, hanger, mechanic, fuel, or some other thing you need for a jet this size.
The drive from airport to airport could be 45 minutes even if it takes the plane only 6.
I did this on a private jet, pilot never shut the engines down while unloading. It was a stop and go.
This likely would not have been posted or garnered upvotes if the Twitter account hadn’t been shut down. This is more “Streisand effect” than “musk hate.”
I’m not an Elon fan, but “ $2,640,000” for transporting the nominally richest man in the world is….not that much?
You could use Climeworks to actually sequester 1895 tons of CO2, forever, for €1,895,000. So about doubling the operating cost, a bit under $5 million. Still…not that much? I mean, having the CEO on-site is useful. In person meetings are useful.
Side note: I do not think Elon Musk is nearly as rich as reports make him out to be. His net worth is wrapped up in a single stock that went into a bubble, and now also in Twitter, where he is heavily underwater. He is not rich in a diversified way like Gates or Buffett.
But he is still more than rich enough to afford $5 million per year!
CO2 emissions in the upper atmosphere are generally accepted to require a ~2.6X multiplier when measuring impact FWIW.
So if you were going to sequester that CO2 in some conscience-clearing "I'm carbon neutral!" exercise, I suppose you'd have to sequester 2.6 times the amount your private jet emitted.
And that's still ignoring the social/network effects of your behavior, which are arguably non-zero. i.e. high-roller high-visibility douche bags flying constantly encourages others to behave more in a similar fashion. "at least I'm not flying as much as that Elon guy - books flight for just a dinner somewhere different"
Fair point, changes the cost to to a bit over 4 million euros. Maybe make that $7.5 million dollars?
And yeah to do this ethically you’d probably want to publicly support sequestering your own usage, say how to do it, and then you’d likely have a net positive impact.
So I’m down with people criticizing him for hyping his environmental contributions while not doing it on this point. My main point is that the overall costs are not extravagant given his position.
That said, they may well come to look extravagant depending how badly the Tesla bubble bursts….
"I'm not an Elon fan, but" Is the telltale sign of an Elon fan who knows Elon isn't cool right now... Might consider rephrasing that in the future if you're actually not an Elon fan.
"I'm not an Elon fan, but I'm going to defend him like I am."
This isn’t Reddit. I ended by saying I don’t think Elon is really all that rich and that his major holding is a bubble. I think there’s a reasonable chance Tesla blows up and lots of financial schenanigans will be revealed.
I however, do not think his private jet expenses are crazy given his nominal position as richest or almost richest person in the world.
~ 1,895 tons of CO2 emissions.
According to the EPA (https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...): "A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year."
So about 420 cars worth of emissions.