Free for pickup: lightly used Tesla
Low miles, high moral conflict
Jeffrey Denny
I’m one of those passionate climate-caring progressive professional parents in a walkable, bike-friendly, transit-rich, wealthy white liberal coastal urban enclave.
I’m extra privileged to work from home.
But I still shamefully need a car to chauffeur my kids to their private schools, coffee places, soccer fields and myriad activities stretching far and wide, from here to like literally eternity, even if they stink at them.
As a modern limousine liberal, my $100,000 Tesla Model X SUV seemed like the perfect solution to my combined child, car, commuting, climate awareness, comfort, acceleration, sleek styling and cultural needs. A rolling expression of my superior values-driven wealthy yet woke politics and lifestyle.
Many people pretend they’re not impressed to hear that I charge my Tesla from my $50,000 home solar panels. And how I own my fossil-addicted utility by selling energy back to them, netting up to $20 a month. Which I give to the Environmental Defense Fund, making me a Platinum Climate Hero for my circularity.
But I also want people to know that virtue-modeling isn’t as easy as it sounds.
For instance, my family had to suffer when our battery died on the New Jersey Turnpike while stuck in 20 miles of dead-stopped traffic during a freak July ice storm. For the third straight summer!
I told the kids this is the sacrificial price we pay to save the earth and reminded them of what Greta Thunberg said: “You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up is never an option.”
As they respectfully eyerolled, they muttered what sounded like “skibidi Ohio toilet rizz” when I suggested that we sing Dave Matthews’s greatest hits together to ignore our onset hypothermia, bladder infections, TikTok withdrawal and madness as in “The Shining.”
But we made it home again just fine. And love that, thanks to our Tesla, we’re not one of those families that talks the climate talk but doesn’t walk or drive it.
Then along came Elon Musk with his latest acquisition: The President of the United States.
Apparently it wasn’t enough for Captain Multiverse to own the future of personal transportation, social media, outer space and MAGAs who control our nation’s destiny.
This presents a personal quandary:
I have no idea what to do with my Tesla. Or, for that matter, the extra wealth from my Tesla stock that just jumped. Especially since, as a progressive, I’m generally uncomfortable with capitalism and shareholder greed anyway.
So you can see my beliefs have confronted my beliefs like a millionaire Righteous Gemstones megachurch fundamentalist Christian preacher who screws his flock and his neighbor’s wife, and loves Trump more than Jesus.
My Tesla is now a rolling expression of my superior hypocrisy.
No more smug satisfaction that I was doing my part to bequeath a planet to my children that’s not like Death Valley at our Aspen summer home that I’ll also bequeath to them.
No more preening about how, by driving my Tesla, I save 650 pounds of CO2e per year, similar to the emissions from a transatlantic flight for one person.
So no more consolation that at least I covered my flight over to Azerbaijan for the COP29 global climate conference. Where I realized that even the dwindling number of participants emitted enough CO2 to turn the North Pole into a sun-drenched organic kale farm big enough to feed every vegan in Brooklyn Heights for a year.
Never mind that by having one less kid than spouse wanted, I saved not only 58.6 metric tons of CO2 but $200,000 from having to trade up to the bigger Range Rover EV. Like the ones we see idling in line for drop off and pick up at our kids’ climate-forward private school.
Oh, sure, there are other six-figure family-size luxury EVs that impress valets—Rivian, Lucid, BMW, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes, you name it.
Meh. These don’t come close to delivering that feeling of being for the future ahead of everyone else like Musk’s brainchild once did.
Musk’s latest brainchild is not so futuristic.
He’s excited about helping Trump take America back to the past by leading the delightfully oxymoronic “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Beyond sounding like a Monty Python skit, establishing a new uber-bureaucracy that would wrench up the current ones must be such a beyond-brilliant form of creative destruction efficiency that only stable geniuses like Trump and Musk could understand.
Shades of Reagan’s Grace Commission, also headed by a billionaire businessman, that after two years and countless meetings, “man hours” and monies, came up with efficiency measures it promised would save America $1.9 trillion in six years. It went nowhere.
And given Trump’s “drill baby drill” climate change denial, it’s reasonable to expect that agencies the people’s Congress funded to advance liberal non-fossil transportation solutions will be more of a gleam in Musk’s eye than his 12 kids were. Although Trump got EV-fluid once Musk boarded the Trump train with a $75 million ticket to ride.
So now my Tesla sits in my garage, a shame that dare not speak its name.
Even driving it a few blocks to Whole Foods — further shame since the horrible Amazon billionaire Bezos canceled the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and let democracy die in darkness — I risk being canceled.
Lesson learned: You can often be wrong for doing the right thing. So why bother?
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
