Thanks for keeping it respectful — this calm back and forth is actually why I love Medium (as opposed to other platforms where everyone loses it before a real discussion can take place).
Ad hominem attacks are either about character or motive (in this case the latter) instead of the substance of the argument, in this case, whether Tesla is sustainable. Where I work is even more of an ad hominem attack given that I make clear I am writing my own opinions and not those of anyone else including the institution at which I am employed. But since you brought it up…
Your statement about my institution makes clear that you know little to nothing about it other than it being in the UAE. It is private, not-for-profit, and secular, deriving its funding from student tuition and an endowment funded by alumni donations (so exactly like every other equivalent American institution without the federal aid for student loans). I doubt you would attack someone who was a professor at NYU or USC as having questionable sources of funding on that basis. And I appreciate that all of that is hard to swallow because it’s in the UAE, but facts are facts.
Furthermore, the UAE has a pretty extensive set of relationships with Tesla that would make the core of your ad hominem particularly silly. It would odd indeed if the country that is transitioning its taxis to a Tesla fleet was anti-Tesla. Nevermind the UAE’s hyperloop connections with Elon.
What I’m not is an owner of Tesla shares, a Tesla car or a short seller, something that might conceivably be relevant. Are you any of those things? Or are you in a country (like Norway, Canada, or Australia) that derives a substantial amount of its government revenues from natural resource extraction? I frankly don’t want to know and don’t care because they are irrelevant to the argument (this is why ad hominems are usually categorized under logical fallacies). But these are questions that would naturally follow from your line of argument earlier.
The second part of your reply I love because it gets at the real issues. I’m pretty clear that I love EVs. If you thought otherwise or I could have stressed that more, fair enough. But that’s not really the point of the piece.
The point is that sustainability is holistic and encompasses not just what you claim to do but how you do it. Producing EVs can be done sustainably, but it can also be done unsustainably. Tesla is not producing them sustainably, while other companies are doing a much better job of producing EVs sustainably. I’m still not sure where our disagreement is in this.
