What If Electric Car Journalism Succeeded?

by Scott Chamberlin | Aug 11, 2018 | Mitigadaptation

Just like most early electric cars, media coverage of the EV industry just looks, er… different.

The cover article in this week’s Newsweek is a case in point. “What If Elon Musk Succeeds? Tesla, SpaceX Founder Wants to Transform Technology—and Put Humans out of Work.” The writer, the usually thoughtful David H. Freedman, opens the article with eight paragraphs focusing on the manic tweeting and general eccentricity of Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk — only to then turn around and say, “But if you’re focusing on Musk’s ‘bad manners,’ as he called his meltdown, you’re missing the point.”

Leaving aside the weirdly transparent exercise in projection, it’s what comes next that’s so strange:

Mobile Phones Leapfrogged Landlines. Will Off-grid Renewable Energy Do the Same to Coal Plants & Power Lines?

by Scott Chamberlin | Aug 3, 2018 | Mitigadaptation

In the first years of this century, when inexpensive cell phones spread low-cost, ubiquitous communications around the world, another amazing thing happened: the rationale for wiring the developing world for telephones vanished. Cellular technology rapidly leapfrogged old-timey telecom’s slow-motion efforts to wire remote outposts (in Africa, for instance: 2004, 2009, Pew 2015), providing phone, and later Internet, banking, and other services where they had never existed before. No matter what you think of resulting social changes, nobody mourned the utility poles, wire, labor, and time not spent on a telephone grid….