alt Hacker NewsI'm weird. Just to be fair I'll acknowledge that certain political actors in the US deny there's any man made climate change and fight renewable energy because it conflicts with some narrow business or political interests. I'm not denying that.
But...
The political criticism in the US (and in Canada where I'm from) against fossil fuel extraction makes no sense. We should want that fossil fuels are extracted here. Not overseas. It's true some element of the "right" are ideologically driven here in the wrong direction but many in the "right" are also pragmatic. Instead of fighting we need to get to common ground and the way to get there is by market forces. Most would prefer the get solar energy if it's cheaper vs. more expensive fossil fuels. And certainly if all else was equal (panels made in the US, American jobs, whatnot). So you can take the adversarial route or you can take the pragmatic route and make real progress.
The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.
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Why does it matter where on the planet the fossil fuels are extracted in terms of dealing with global climate change?
The US and Canada combined are responsible for 28% and 31% of the global oil and natural gas extraction respectively. If this share were eliminated, then it would force global demand down via the supply/demand price curve especially as there are competitive clean alternatives to burning fossil fuels for energy these days.
We're approaching a global crisis point - and every country needs to reign in fossil fuel extraction and consumption. It's morally indefensible to continue profiting from the sale of products that are f*cking up the planet. Just because there are others that are immoral, doesn't give you an excuse to act without morals. Or claim it's better that you act immorally than someone else.
By your own market argument, increasing oil supply depresses prices and boosts usage. And NA oil isn't particularly clean or environmentally-friendly - the benefits of local production are primarily political, with a side of cheaper gas, which again, is not fighting climate change with market forces.
And Tesla is not the only game in town for electrification, and it's been like that for years already. Tesla's EU sales plummeted while overall EV share rose quickly during the peak of the 2025 "boycott". Someone who was going to buy a Tesla but got turned off by the Musk-Trump coalition just bought an electric/hybrid from someone else - there is no movement to buy gas cars just to spite Musk (unlike, say, the "roll coal" crowd).
Pragmatism is better than adversarialism, sure, but when it comes to the environment the locus of adversarialism is more lopsided than you're trying to make out.
> The other stupid political battle here is boycotting Tesla. How does that make sense? We "punish" Elon by using more fossil fuels.
There are other EV manufacturers. Boycotting Tesla != buying ICE vehicles. That’s a bad faith framing.
I don't understand. Are you making the argument that extracting fossil fuel here is better than extracting it elsewhere? Or, perhaps more to the point, you do see that the issue is the use of fossil fuels and that extracting _more_ is just contributing to it?
About the (unrelated) boycott question, I would invite you to consider the reasons motivating people to boycott Tesla. If think everyone do that to "hurt" or "punish" Musk, perhaps that's why it doesn't make sense to you.