I have been interested in Teslas since a neighbor told me about the cars back in 2013, a year after the Model S made its debut. It was quite some time before I saw one for real. I agreed with my friend that they were spiffy-looking cars. Then I saw the video of Elon Musk revealing the Model S P85D in the fall of 2014. I was hooked.
As I noted the following year, I am in some ways an unlikely enthusiast for Elon Musk. From the beginning of his career, Musk has said that his two governing passions are “sustainable transport” to battle “global warming” and finding a way to make mankind an interplanetary species, beginning with a space colony on Mars. “For my part,” I wrote,
the word “sustainable” has me reaching, if not for my revolver, then at least for an air-sickness bag. I regard the whole Green Lobby as a cocktail composed of three parts moralistic hysteria mixed with a jigger of high-proof cynical opportunism (take a look at Al Gore’s winnings from the industry) fortified with a dash of beady-eyed left-wing redistributionist passion. You can never be Green enough, Comrade, and if the data show a 20-year “hiatus” in global warming (so much for Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick), that’s no reason not to insist that capitalist powerhouses like the United States drastically curtail their CO2 emissions right now, today, while giving egregious polluters like China a decade or more to meet its quotas.
No, when it comes to energy, I often quote, sometimes with attribution, the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce: what the world needs now is cheap, abundant energy, period, full stop, end of discussion. My motto is: frack early, frack often. Do you want to help the poor/clean up the environment/save the spotted wildebeest? Then you need economic growth, and to achieve that you need energy, which at the moment means you need fracking. Q.E.D.
As for making mankind an interplanetary species, I quoted the end of Robert Frost’s great poem “Birches”:
Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
I haven’t changed my mind about either. But my enthusiasm for Elon Musk is undimmed. I remain excited by all things Tesla—the cars, the robots, the software, and autonomous driving. My only disappointment is Musk’s decision last winter to retire the Model S. I have owned a few and have loved them all. At the moment, there is no real successor to that elegant, well-appointed, and gratifyingly zippy sedan.
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