Elon Musk is not your typical human being. The mad genius of Silicon Valley has a towering intellect that shoots sparks off in all directions. He is building the world’s most desirable electric cars, is deeply involved in making batteries to store electricity, is running a space exploration company, lingers at the periphery of the Hyperloop — a far out idea that is sort of like a thousand mile long horizontal elevator, and is a dedicated proponent of research into artificial intelligence. Any one of those pursuits \would keep most people busy for a lifetime. Musk seems to be able to handle more challenges than most mortals.
Many people misunderstand the mission of Tesla Motors, which is named for Nikola Tesla, a Serbian immigrant who came to work for Thomas Edison in 1884. Edison was a proponent of direct current. Telsa advocated for the benefits of alternating current. Tesla invented the first AC electric motor, which is the motor used by Tesla Motors for its automobiles today. People mistakenly believe that Tesla Motors is a car company that also makes batteries. They have it backwards. Tesla is a battery company that also makes cars.
(Note to Donald Trump. Both Tesla and Musk are immigrants who came to America because they believed it was the best place in the world for their unconventional ideas to flourish. If you had been president when they arrived on these shores. they most likely would have been turned away.)
Everything Elon Musk does is intimately connected with his desire to show the world how to stop using fossil fuels, leave what’s left of them in the ground, and transition to a world powered by clean, renewable energy — especially solar. “There’s a giant fusion reactor in the sky,” he says. It’s called the sun and it can satisfy all the needs for electrical power of all the people on earth for tens of thousands of years.
Because solar power doesn’t add carbon dioxide to the environment, it is the only way mankind can stop filling the skies with pollution and give the environment a chance to shed some of the CO2 already in the atmosphere. Climate scientists like James Hansen say we will need a period of 30 to 50 years with no new carbon emissions at all to get the earth’s environment back to its pre-Industrial Revolution normalcy.
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