When Tesla was first starting to become a real sensation, my boss’s boss sold his perfectly good late-model sports car to buy a Roadster. Now the buyer of his old car was burning the same gas as before, and you could add to the ledger the environmental cost of all that new steel and those open-pit rare earth mines and intercontinental shipping and the concrete and machinery for the Tesla factory, and the cost of all those factory workers driving their ICE cars to work, and then you still have to burn natural gas to charge the car. What a win.

Later I worked for someone who already had an electric car and a luxury hybrid for a two-person household, but still bought a Model S anyway to have a nice car to show off. The old electric would just sit in the driveway unused. What a win.

Also for many years I lived in a city with relatively good public transportation. Most people could absolutely get by without owning a car at all if they wanted to accept a little inconvenience. I mostly just took the subway or walked. But some people drove to work and to get dinner every day and everything. Who cares, you’re still being environmentally friendly because you’re buying a Tesla! The streets were choked with Teslas. I want to say maybe like 1 in 10 cars sometimes?

Handing money over to Tesla means funding their lobbying to keep car culture alive and kill real :train-shining: development. And it means building a brand new car when your old one was probably fine. We can not wiggle out of climate catastrophe by harnessing consumerism and frantically building mountains of slightly shinier new stuff every year.

edit: not directed at you btw ulysses, just writing/ranting my thoughts down :vivian-shrug: