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Ah yes, the "The ends justify the means" move.
I was just thinking about this phrase in regards to Musk about ten minutes ago. “The ends” are the most laudable things I can imagine: electrifying the world and colonizing other celestial bodies. While I love the goals, I am afraid of what a mission-driven person might rationalize and do to achieve them.
Additional context > Musk’s SpaceX aims to use a site in South Texas to launch rockets to carry people and cargo to the moon and Mars. To do that, the company intends to drill gas wells to make its own fuel and electricity, according a Federal Aviation Administration document seen by Bloomberg. > The SpaceX site in Texas will be supplied by at least five nearby gas wells, along with two gas-fired power plants, accord…
If anyone had any doubt about whether Elon really had the environment in mind when he founded Tesla, I think now you've got your answer. In fact, most people driving electric cars likely wouldn't think twice about building a fracked well if they knew they could make millions from that... if they really cared about the environment, they wouldn't even drive around.
Its common to try and redefine these as the EPA cracks down on them and they are environmentally bad. The last major push in industry was to try calling them a steam flare.
Disclosure: I worked a few years in refineries as a mechanical maintenance contractor.
The article shows many tables without ever quoting sources. In the previous article in the series, the author claims: > ... I’m a “forensic environmental data specialist” (I invented the term just now). I use the troves of free to the public data located in regulatory submittals and permits to extract useful information. ... Great. If free to the public, where are the links? Clicking on those table images just links…
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The ultimate plan is actually to make it from water and CO2 in the air, using the same tech they'll use to make methane on Mars for the return trip. They're just not there yet.
Sure, and I have a bridge to sell you. The technology already exists. Fundamentally (damn laws of thermodynamics) it is also a energy negative process, and hence expensive. It is far cheaper to just frack and burn fossil fuels (where that energy expense was paid however many millions of years ago by someone else), than it is to expend the energy to reverse the process - even if they were getting nearly free energy.
I don't think that anyone is trying to make the claim that SpaceX will use the Sabatier process to fuel Starships here on Earth right now routinely. As you say, gas is cheaper to buy here on Earth. But they still must have the technology mastered before they fly away from the low Earth orbit.
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This makes sense. If the EPA is slacking and rubber-stamping things, that warrants investigation and criticism. But I'm not buying the angle that the FAA should be expected to enforce the EPA's rules. That's what the EPA is for.
The EPA was utterly gutted over the past 4 years. The sad part is that it takes much longer to rebuild than it does to tear down. The EPA being unable or unwilling to enforce environmental protections is by design.
The EPA headcount was 14,779 in 2016 and was 14,172 in 2020.
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I also don’t see what all the fuss is about here. SpaceX making a well to power the human colonization of mars is a drop in the bucket vs all the other wells in the state.
Well, what SpaceX is doing doesn't really matter. I can't just show up to Arkansas and say I'm fracking for oil to cure cancer and get hand-waved through. They're private entities, no matter what they're doing, and they're subject to the same scrutiny that everyone else puts up with.
The FAA is subject to NEPA review, and hence any SpaceX activity in this area must go through the same process as every other industrial activity that impacts federal interests.
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Forest fires are part of forests' natural life cycles and are, in general, carbon neutral. Forests fixate atmospheric carbon and release it through cellular respiration, decomposition and fires. That atmospheric carbon is then fixated again via vegetative growth. The issue is burning hydrocarbons we pump out of the ground, because doing so interrupts the equilibrium between atmospheric carbon and natural carbon sinks…
Where did you come across this idea?
Here's a short slideshow about the carbon cycle from a meteorology course[1], under short-term carbon cycle you'll see wildfires, decomposition, cellular respiration etc. Here's research from NASA[2]. Here's a paper that cites numerous references to these facts[3].
Here's what the state of CA says[4]:
> Fire is an important part of the carbon cycle. Fire consumes organic matter, releasing greenhouse gases including CO2, methane, carbon monoxide, and other materials. Trees and plants not immediately consumed in the fire may be killed and decompose rapidly, releasing CO2.
> Although fire produces carbon emissions, it is also a natural and necessary part of the ecosystem, especially in California where plants are adapted to fire. Rather than eliminate fire, the goal is to maintain historical fire regimes and thus avoid catastrophic fires that occur when fuels build up to unnatural levels.
[1] https://www.sjsu.edu/people/frank.freedman/courses/metr113/s...
[2] https://icp.giss.nasa.gov/research/ppa/2001/tpenafort/
[3] https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs_other/rmrs_2014_loehman_r001.p...
[4] https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resourc...
But Zuck is the devil for giving you the option (but not the obligation) to watch pics of other people's vacations.
You know you study the game, you think you understand, you look at the logic which should be the strong point of HN and reddit type crowd...but in the end it always ends exactly where all the other "lesser" social phenomenons end up:
it's all about that "OMG he's so emotional and like deeply cares about it, I can see it in his eyes and his voice"
teenage girls, always looked down upon, understand their feelings better than most adult men.
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>If anyone had any doubt about whether Elon really had the environment in mind when he founded Tesla, I think now you've got your answer. This sort of "tribal purity" logic is silly: "if you've ever done anything negative, it means you never intended to do anything positive." This is nothing but the environmentalism equivalent of the old "you're either with us or against us, we're at war!" fallacy. Rockets have alway…
SpaceX will pay hefty taxes if carbon tax is implemented, yet Musk is still strong proponent of carbon tax.
There aren't any exact numbers yet, but Starship will burn about 5000 metric tons of propellant in a single launch. Assuming a stoichiometric ratio of CH4 to O2, that'll emit about 2600 metric tons of CO2 (the rest is water). According to the ICAO emissions calculator, a roundtrip by plane between LA and London emits about 0.9 metric tons of CO2 per passenger. Thus, a Starship launch generates the same emissions as 2900 passengers making that trip.
At the $400 price I get for that trip on Google Flights, those 2900 passengers generate about $1.2 million in revenue for the airline. A single Starship launch will generate $100 million in revenue for SpaceX.