I think Musk deserves credit for recognizing that the USA is so car-centric that any effort to get people to use trains and busses would be met with enormous resistance, whereas popularizing electric variants of the most dominant form of transport can actually be impactful.
I would certainly like to see a marketing-savvy billionaire start a sustained campaign of "ride the train/bus." I've wondered for some time, both what that would look like and whether it could have a meaningful impact in any given metropolitan area.
(And rinse and repeat for other vital public goods, like parks, libraries, public health, and so on.)
He gives electric transportation and storage with one hand, and takes away with the promise of literally thousand of ultra-low-efficiency fuel (methane) burning rocket launches with the other.
Musk's main climate sin is sabotaging real mass transit with ridiculous low-throughout pipe-dreams: his cars in small tunnels.
This is as much a sin against functional cities as it is against the climate.
Rocket launches really aren't bad at all in comparison. He could take one every single day without the same level of damage as stopping a single new transit line.
Politicians and NIMBYs killed mass transit in the US long before Musk entered the picture. In fact, Boring Co is a direct reaction to mass transit projects routinely being turned to boondoggles by politics, corruption, mismanagement, and obstructionism — building mass transit via the traditional means is practically impossible.
I won't pretend that the Boring Co's loops are efficient or a real solution but I don't believe that pinning the blame on it is quite right.
General Motors did, with help from others in automobile, oil, and tyre industries:
The General Motors streetcar conspiracy refers to convictions of General Motors (GM) and other companies that were involved in monopolizing the sale of buses and supplies to National City Lines (NCL) and its subsidiaries, and to allegations that the defendants conspired to own or control transit systems, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The suit created lingering suspicions that the defendants had in fact plotted to dismantle streetcar systems in many cities in the United States as an attempt to monopolize surface transportation.
Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[3] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations. Other systems, such as San Diego's, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry.
Musk is proposing to make an expensive part, boring tunnels, cheaper. But then he also proposes a fundamentally boneheaded change that makes any improved efficiency there much worse: individual vehicles which are fundamentally unscalable.
So I wish he would keep the good part, cheaper tunnels, but not sabotage those tunnels with an unworkable vehicle proposal. It also gives a ton of power to the obstructionists to sabotage real transit projects and increase their costs, because they can say "let's try what Musk is proposing".
How are rocket launches "ultra low efficiency"? Compared to what? I mean, no one is putting stuff into orbit with any other technology.
Rocket engines are the most efficient heat engines in existence, and the energy efficiency of a rocket (in the sense of fraction of jet kinetic energy that ends up in the kinetic + change in potential energy of the thing put in orbit) can be very high.
It takes a lot of propellant to get to orbit. That isn't because rockets are ultra low efficiency, it's because it takes a lot of energy to get to orbit.
Whether we should include Mars as a distination for transport, or indeed incrementally faster broadband as good uses for energy are up for debate. But Elon does, so here we are. Light 'er up and let the hippies argue amongst themselves!
SpaceX may have the absolute bee's knees in rocket engine, but that assumes that leaving the atmosphere is what we need to do, and need to do now. People are mumbling 'mass transit' and 'intercontinental travel' with respect to Starship for crying out loud. It's completely insane.
High specific impulse can actually reduce efficiency, though. Consider: a rocket is most efficient at converting jet kinetic energy into the kinetic energy of the vehicle if the exhaust velocity = - vehicle velocity (so the jet is left stationary in the chosen frame of reference). An ideal (and unrealizable) rocket would have Isp that increases during the launch. It should initially be very low, then increase with time. Efficiency can (ideally) approach 100%.
But I wonder what you mean by efficiency of conversion of fuel "to transportation". Do you mean the irreducible minimum energy needed to achieve a given transportation task? Because the latter can be ZERO here on Earth: the energy needed to go from one place to another at the same elevation and latitude is zero: there is no change in kinetic and potential energy before and after. By your criterion, a terrestrial transportation system has 0% efficiency in this case (and extremely low efficiency in many more cases.)
> SpaceX may have the absolute bee's knees in rocket engine, but that assumes that leaving the atmosphere
Yes, tell me about what can be done in space without leaving the atmosphere. You seem to have written a veiled screed against space travel itself. It's not about efficiency at all.
