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Site Claims Musk & Tesla Are Anti-Environmental

Because Elon Musk has so many kids is he being environmentally irresponsible?

  • No, Go ye forth and multiply.

    Votes: 3 13.6%
  • No, if he can afford it, so what.

    Votes: 4 18.2%
  • Yes, over-population is root of all other environmental problems, so he looks like a hypocrite.

    Votes: 2 9.1%
  • He may not be green, but it shouldn't affect the positive eco impact of his cars.

    Votes: 10 45.5%
  • We should not be interested in his personal life

    Votes: 3 13.6%

  • Total voters
    22
  • Poll closed .
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I totally disagree that overpopulation is the worlds biggest problem.

A far greater problem is that a small fraction of the world's population consome most of the world's resources and thus the worlds food. There is enough food produced in the world every year to feed everyone on the planet, but the poorest cannot afford it.

Most of the countries where hunger is widespread are actually net food exporters, they export to the rich countries that can pay more for their food as animal feed than the poor can afford to spend to consume it themselves.

The "new green revolution" stuff is bunk. If we produced more food there would just be a slightly larger group at the top eating luxury food items while the same poor were hungry.

If everyone in the world had the same consumption footprint of those in the US, the sustainable population of the planet would probably be less than half of what it is now. Who wants to tell the other half?

Read: World Hunger 10 myths by Lappe,Collins,Rosset

The impression I've gotten is that much 3rd world hunger is politically caused. One side in a conflict causes a famine for the other side by destroying crops and blocking food aid.

The well intentioned food aid givaways destroy the market for locally grown crops, put local farmers out of business, and make the problem worse the next year.

President Bush proposed buying food for food aid from places near the recipient that produce a surplus, thus stimulating local food production. Congress shot him down. US food aid by law must be US grown. It's yet another agricultural subsidy.
 
Overpopulation has many more facets than simply enough food for everyone. Water usage, waste processing, spread of disease, population density, etc. are all having a negative impact on the local environment of many third world nations as well as more developed areas. Whatever the parameters limited resources will go farther with fewer people using them. I can feed my dog scraps and let him run around my woods pooping with no noticeable effect on the environment, but if I lived in a dense population with others around me doing the same it would be a mess. Fewer people = good.
 
Yes, but the environment in the developed world is getting better, and not only because we've exported much of our heavy industry. As people become wealthy, they are more willing to spend resources to clean things up. When your kids are hungry it's harder to worry about air polution.

The third world rightly views population control efforts with suspicion. Their infant mortality and general poverty makes having many children the only practical old-age policy. If they have too few children they risk having zero grandchildren and starving to death in old age. If they could improve their economic status the tradeoffs would change.

As it is they accept the improved medical care., their infant mortality rate improves, and the political and economic situations deteriorate. Most of the aid programs seem to make things worse.
 
Yes, but the environment in the developed world is getting better, and not only because we've exported much of our heavy industry.
Only in some ways is it better. Our bodies have plastic molecules floating around inside, along with many other chemicals, and our water is increasingly full of drugs. Who knows what effect this will have in the long run. Fewer people will mean less discharge into the environment. Population growth will eventually have to stop, one way or another. If we are proactive it needn't be a disaster.
 
Rich is exactly correct that there is no food shortage. Nor is there likely to be one. Our main issue is the logistics of getting food to the people that need it before it spoils. India grows more than enough for it's own population. The problem is that their transportation system is not up to the task of efficient distribution, so a large amount goes bad before being consumed.

This is common everywhere. I recall reading that on average everything in your grocery cart was transported 1,700 miles before you eat it. That is a lot of energy for refrigeration during transport. That is why there is such a movement towards locally grown produce.

If you are worried about Peak Oil (and I am) then thinking about locally grown food should be a priority. I think within the next 5 to 15 years, the current methods of long haul trucking food distribution will become much more difficult to sustain.
 
I mostly agree--the current food problem has more to do with distribution than production, food distribution uses a lot of petroleum, and this may cause more problems in the future. Local food is part of the solution, and my family has been buying only local produce for several years (I admit to being reluctant when my wife pushed me to do it at first).

But, when the oil supplies dwindle, I fear that food production may be a problem as well. Part of the other "green" revolution (producing more food since the 1970's population scare) has been due to fertilizing with petroleum products. There is not enough nitrogen in the earth's soil to produce as much food as we currently do. Of course we can probably come up with other nitrogen sources, and we can partly move to grains from meat to reduce requirements, but this is still something that's likely to be a problem at some point.

I don't have numbers at hand, but I think that Jared Diamond went over them in "Collapse".
 

The author having a lot of dogs as part of a dog shelter he and his wife apparently run in New Mexico (El Rancho de Chihuahua) has nothing to do with Elon Musk having more children per capita than is good for the planet. The dogs Kotler cares for have already been born. Kotler isn't breeding dogs, he's caring for abandoned ones.

Attacking Kotler makes no sense as a way of defending Musk. Either the planet has too many people, which most scientists agree it does, or not. And either it is environmentally irresponsible to have five kids or not. If yes to both, ergo Musk is environmentally irresponsible.
 
Attacking Musk makes no sense as a way of attacking Tesla either. One could argue that Musk is just taking care of his existing kids as well. I do agree that no one needs 5 kids. 2 is enough for anyone, taking into account that many will have 1 or none.
 
Attacking Musk makes no sense as a way of attacking Tesla either. One could argue that Musk is just taking care of his existing kids as well. I do agree that no one needs 5 kids. 2 is enough for anyone, taking into account that many will have 1 or none.

I think we agree in many ways. Certainly Musk should take care of the kids he has. But Musk did make a conscious decision at some point to have more kids than is healthy for the planet. Kotler is not breeding dogs. Musk could have adopted, which is what Kotler did with his dogs.

I disagree, however, with you when you say that Musk's anti-environmental breeding habits have nothing to do with his car. Musk's anti-environmentalism in his personal life isn't definitive in judging Tesla Motors, of course, but it does make his sales pitches for Tesla cars suspect.
 
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To understand Husk, you must know that family is vital to him--not just his real-life mom and siblings but the idea of family, as it relates to saving the human species and advancing the genome. "People have to make sure they rove at least as many babies as people who tie," Musk said. "The death rate has to equal the birth rate. Otherwise you get a population inversion, which is what happened in Japan and is happening in Europe, where there are birth rates of 1.2, 1.3 children per woman. You need 2.2 to retain parity." The Musks have done their part to stave off inversion. They have five children, twins and triplets, mostly towheaded like their mother. The Musks' first child died of sudden infant death syndrome. They were devastated. Yet they realized something important. "No amount of money can insulate you from tragedy," Justine said.

Rocket man: Elon Musk doesn't just want to revolutionize space travel. He wants to save humankind from extinction | Los Angeles Magazine | MyWire
 

Based on Musk's quote, I'm starting to question the man's intelligence. Why would he think it's important to retain human population parity for humankind to survive when experts believe (see The Five-Year Baby Ban) that we long ago reached the human carrying capacity of the earth and have far exceeded it. Increasing or maintaining the current human population isn't a guarantee of our survival; quite the opposite. It guarantees catastrophe, the death of billions of our fellow humans and possibly our own extinction--along with the thousands of other species we have already caused to be lost. If Musk wanted children so badly, with so many orphans, why didn't he just adopt?
 
Firstly, Elon had twins and then triplets. Clearly he didn't consciously plan to have five kids.

Secondly, past family planning decisions between him and his ex-wife are their business. For example, perhaps they just wanted a daughter?


You can debate global over population issues here as much as you like, but if you continue to just use half the facts to attack the man himself then I will lock the thread.
 
Repeated multiple births strongly suggests artificial intervention. Regardless of his personal family, if he truly believes we need more people on this planet I'd have to seriously question his reasoning. The likely model for human extinction will be from overpopulation and a subsequent crash, either through war, disease, environmental change or some combination there of. It's almost a no brainer that fewer people equals more resources for all.
 
He doesn't advocate more people on the planet. He advocates balancing birth and death rates at the same level, according to the interview above.

I presume you are advocating Chinese style family planning here?


By the way, the following was an interesting documentary: BBC - BBC Two Programmes - Future of Food, Episode 1

It looked at issues around food production and overpopulation, and how the former is intimately linked to the availability of oil and how Cuba has already dealt with the issue. The conclusions were interesting to say the least. Worth finding a copy online, if there is one.
 
In the face of an exploding population I find it odd to worry about balancing birth and death rates. I can't understand how a declining population would be seen as a bad thing. We need to drastically cut population growth or we will end up like China. China is the first country to have to deal with the reality of out of control population growth and they had to take drastic measures. There will be population control of one kind or another at some point, I think it's better to be a bit more aggressive in controlling it now before we have to get really aggressive in the future, or it gets completely taken out of our hands. The perpetuation of the human race will actually benefit from fewer people procreating. Put too many fish in a small tank and they will all end up dead.