Juggling Dynamite

“Elon Musk dreams big. It’s hard not to get taken along for the ride — whether it’s a soon-to-launch cross-country Supercharger network that allows Tesla drivers to cross from Los Angeles to New York, an in-the-works reusable rocket that will help pioneer the colonization of Mars, or a hypothetical replacement for high-speed rail called the Hyperloop.

He was the evening speaker at D11 on Wednesday, where he said a mainstream Tesla is three to four years out, shook off electric car naysayers, announced the new nationwide Supercharger network, explained why he’s so excited about Mars, shared his views on immigration and how they diverged from FWD.us and tried to convince other smart folks to join him in doing big-picture stuff.”

See: Tech Renaissance Man

Here is a direct link.

Musk mentions the inspiration he took from the EV1 demise story. You can see the excellent documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” here on line.

For the past 5 years I have espoused a general thesis that in a post credit bubble world there is less money–less money to waste on non-essentials, less money to spend on essentials, less money to export to other countries.  Seems obvious: getting more for less is key. (Always is really, but while credit and cash flow are easy many people forget about efficiency).

As one of our largest necessary expenditures, energy is an obvious area of focus.  Countries, like households, must find every intelligent way to stitch up the pocket holes that are draining precious cash flow and escalating debt.  All western countries must focus on reducing their imports and developing domestic energy sources of all kinds for different applications.  The solution is not one type of energy, but many.   This is no time for pig-headed dogma and rigid attachment to old ideas.  We humans must evolve or die–I vote evolve.  Yes we can.

For all of these reasons, it makes perfect sense that North America will continue to develop, consume and sell its own domestic natural gas.  But at the same time, it is critical to comprehend that while Nat Gas is presently serving as a bridge fuel toward stronger fiscal health, it is far from the end goal of free, clean, renewable energy that does not add to our carbon emissions.  See David Suzuki Foundation’s explanation here:  BC’s gas plan is a short-sighted pipe dream

The end goal is literally a smorgasbord of low-carbon energy options that are available and developing as we breathe:

• Solar Photovoltaic
• Passive Solar, Solar Thermal, and Solar Hot Water
• Wind
• Hydropower
• Large-Scale Hydro
• Small and Low-Head Hydro
• Nuclear
• Bioenergy
• Biomass
• wave and tidal
• geothermal
• hydrogen combustion

Along with a whole bunch of other smart solutions being imagined and invented today that most of us have never even dreamed about. See: An inventory of Low-carbon energy.   and Life after Oil and Gas for solutions that are available here and now. (Remember 20 years ago when we could not imagine how or why the world would ever use an “internet”? Same thing with alternative energies today.)  This progress can and will be done.  It is happening, and all the passionate naysayers are just making fools of themselves again.

p.s Just saw the excellent movie “42-The Jackie Robinson Story” last night. Further reminder on how resistant and biased the masses generally are against major turning points in human thought and behavior. Worth some reflection.

One of the things that frequently stands out is the willful blindness and intellectual dishonesty of many investment gurus. Risk-sellers and perpetual equity bulls love to describe bonds as “ridiculous”, “return-free risk”, an investment for “suckers”. Meanwhile most global stock markets have made little or negative gains over the past 15 years, while some sectors like commodities, precious metals, and resource shares have recently turned in capital losses of 30% to 75% respectively over the past few years again. I guess some gurus prefer to recommend “capital-evaporating risk.”

In any event, in an investment world full of nonsense and mass madness, its always nice to see that there are at least a couple of other managers who are not recommending capital suicide–buying risk assets at every price and extreme valuation–“because low interest rates leave no alternative”. Here is DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach in an interview last week:

“I think that the complacency regarding stock market risk is very similar today to 1998, 2006 and 2007. This concept that it’s the only game in town. This reason to own the stock market is TINA (there is no alternative). That’s ridiculous. There’s just as many alternatives as there’s ever been. There’s cash, there’s bonds, there’s real estate, there’s hedge funds, there’s commodities, there’s foreign markets. What a strange world. I can’t even think of a worse argument to own a market than TINA. It’s transparently flawed on the surface of it. We’ll see what happens. I think we’re at 92% bullishness right now in the world of advisors on stocks. The most extended sentiment I’ve ever seen is 98% bearishness mid-March of 2009. I’d say the bullishness today looks remarkably similar to the bearishness of March 2009.

See:Gundlach: Gibson, Gas and Governments