He, personally, is not, but it may in fact not be ethically acceptable to structure a society around the relentless burning of hydrocarbons, which is sort of why things like Tesla Motors exist in the first place.

It's sort of like needing to move house in order to get your kids into a better school. It's ethically acceptable to do that; indeed, it may even be an ethical obligation. It may not, however, be ethically acceptable to structure a society that encourages all the people with money and spare time to clump up in one area with lavish schools while leaving the folks who have neither time nor money in another place with deeply shitty schools.

Re: Ben's point on modern developments (it seems more sensible to thread it here than one post up in this instance):

>It's just... like virtually everything else that's considered "modern" these
>days, the whole concept is optimized for city living to the point where it's
>worse than useless to those of us who don't. One gets tired of that drumbeat
>after a while. A very short while.

To be fair, for decades nearly everything that was considered "modern" was relentlessly optimized for suburban living. If you didn't feel like living in a detached single-family structure surrounded by loads of appliances with two cars in the garage, a lot of the wonders of the jet age were sort of "Okay. Sure." So, you know. Turnabout.

Really, this speaks to a deeper issue. For decades public policymaking was (still is, really) heavily focused on subsidizing, either directly or indirectly, both car culture and suburban living. Predictably, many of our consumer goods oriented this way as well. It doesn't hurt that that lifestyle is legitimately attractive to loads of people, of course. It sure as hell is to me; I love being able to hop in a car and get to a variety of wonderful places in comfort and privacy in under twenty minutes. It's quarter to midnight right now, but if I wanted to make a nacho run I could do it.

But for the past fifteen years or so, a wave of "No, this isn't sustainable, we're headed for an awful crash at some point" has been building among people who take this sort of thing seriously. Nobody is proposing Soviet-style mass relocations, but there's a lot of focus on shifting the things we subsidize from suburban or rural living to city living, and then trusting that people will react accordingly, the same way they did when the suburbs were (are) emphasized. A lot of bright-eyed futurists who want to save the world (which is a laudable goal! that's what technology is for!) are trying to get ahead of the curve, relentlessly pushing modern technology and conveniences that are optimized for a much more dense mode of living.

Basically we live in an era of massive transition in how we live and work, in the same way our grandparents did after WWII but with a lot less certainty. It can be exciting but also very uncomfortable.

-Merc
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