Serious about Energy Efficiency, part three. Elon Musk's carbon footprint

Try putting “Elon Musk carbon footprint” into a search engine. You will find plenty. This is, you realize, the world’s richest man, who just managed to talk his company into giving Him a trillion-dollar pay package. This is all money that Tesla is not going to spend on making their products innovative and safe (hint to investors).

You will get an answer right away. According to PC Magazine, “Elon Musk's two private jets alone—not including his emissions from other sources—generate 5,497 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or an average of 15 tonnes per day. This is equal to 11 average people's emissions in their entire lifetimes.” A tonne is a metric ton, that is, a thousand kilograms. Then you can click on a Guardian article that explains, worldwide, “Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1 million homes.” And that article is even out of date; it has gotten worse.

As if you did not already have enough reasons to hate Elon Musk. Imagine him trying to tell a government how to be more efficient.

But we will get nowhere complaining about how the richest people not only waste money while millions of people suffer, or complaining about how the rich do not deserve to be millions of times richer than the average person. Maybe a little, but not a million times. There is a serious point here.

The fault for global warming, caused by carbon emissions, is primarily due to rich nations (like America) and rich people in those rich nations. China emits more carbon than America, but it has over a billion people. The average Chinese person does not emit, directly or indirectly, as much carbon as an average American. I drove a small car when I was living in America, and my “guilt” was much less than an average American, certainly a rich American.

It is clear that one major contributor to global warming is that so many Americans are so rich and wasteful. You knew that. I just want to give you a couple of numbers to consider.

In France, where I now live, the richest ten percent are responsible for 31.2 percent of carbon emissions. But in America, the richest ten percent are responsible for 84.5 percent of carbon emissions. What this means is that rich Americans are really, really rich and wasteful. America needs to become more like France, in which the rich people (at least, the ones who live around Strasbourg) have only moderately showy wealth and are only moderately wasteful.

As long as rich Americans continue to be joyously wasteful, then there will be no solution to the problem of global warming.

Consumer Cultures, Right and Left

America consists of a mixture of different cultures. More than ever before, these cultures mix but do not blend. Part of this is because many members of the dominant white culture do not want to dilute their firearm-barbecue-bacon-yellow beer-pickup truck culture. Major store chains cater to their strange and often dangerous wishes.

Much of what these “conservatives” consume is for its cultural value only. Take, for example, pickups. They like to say they use their pickups for work. But this is largely untrue. I am collecting data about pickup trucks. I have not analyzed it yet, but it appears that less than twenty percent of the trucks are used for work. Eighty percent of the pickup trucks in Oklahoma have empty truck beds and are not towing anything. They are just for show. It is an expensive practice that depletes our resources and puts lots of extra carbon in our atmosphere.

But conservatives are not the only people who have a subculture. There is also a largely white subculture of liberals who are proud to eat portabella instead of beef, who do not own guns, who drink wine and dark beer, and drive fuel efficient vehicles. There are major store chains that cater to their strange though usually harmless wishes, too.

To see this, all you have to do is to take a stroll through a Whole Foods. Being a member of the liberal subculture, I could easily spend hundreds of dollars on the things that are available there. But if you look at those things critically, you find that very little of it is actually important, and consuming those things is not necessarily making the world better. How is using Mad Hippie Facial Cream ($26 for 2.1 ounces) or Dead Sea bath salts making the world better? My wife and I buy some of their unpackaged bulk items, and a few other things, but we find most of the products at Whole Foods humorous.

One of these packages shows a homeopathic remedy that contains poison ivy extract (Rhus toxicodendron, now Toxicodendron radicans), and a “soup cleanse” book that undoubtedly contains healthy recipes but they will not “cleanse” you of “toxins” any more than any other healthy diet.

Finally, this package is just salt. But the Indian company that sells it makes it sound that salt is part of the freedom movement of Mahatma Gandhi.

One way to make the world better is to consume less, and make more efficient use of what you consume. Don’t drive big pickups around, and don’t waste your money on Mad Hippie Facial Cream. Consume less stuff, and the corporations that cater to conservatives and to liberals will not be very happy with you.