Jane Goodall-ing with Elon Musk’s early, conservative critics (Part I: TSLAQ)

Several years ago, when Tesla’s fans and marketing machine could still paper over the red flag parade of Elon Musk’s character and business practices, I became part of a community of his critics. We called ourselves TSLAQ (ESGHound was the first to use the term), a moniker which combined Tesla’s stock symbol (TSLA) with the suffix attached to companies’ stock symbols when they’ve gone bankrupt (Q). Several were short-sellers betting against Tesla stock. I owned one share for a few weeks in 2018 so I could vote for more Board of Directors oversight to rein Musk in. The motion failed and Musk called a soccer team-rescuing hero diver a “pedo guy” soon thereafter.

The community was diverse – everyone’s antennae had triggered at different times and for different reasons – but leaned more conservative and libertarian than I was and am.  So I had the “Jane Goodall” experience of being welcomed into a tribe of primates very different from the hominids I usually hung out with. Discussions about ZEVs and public policy naturally expanded into broader topics including energy and the environment.

Pre-emptive Defensiveness

Some TSLAQ members nursed the impression that environmentally conscientious people were more interested in judging others than living their ideals. That wasn’t my experience at all, but in fairness to these friends there was no shortage of Tesla supporters who bought into the white South African Musk’s idea of being an elite vanguard smarter and superior to the vast, backwards majority of their countrymen.

My friends’ cynicism made me think of how anti-evolution pastors and TV preachers had poisoned my formative impressions of Christianity. I might still be under those impressions’ influence, if not for a chance exposure (Dec 18, 1999) to a book by a liberal Christian theologian in a bookstore. The book, and the many I read next, and conversations with local progressive Christian leaders, gave me a deep appreciation of parts of that faith community, even if it isn’t for me.

As opposed to the PhD organic chemist crank caller a few years later, I had the presence of mind to hear out my conservative TSLAQ colleagues’ perspectives, on the basis that they’d been smart enough to see through Elon Musk too. (Maybe they extended patience to leftist me, on the same basis.) I also inquired about their own fields of expertise, to demonstrate that I wasn’t going to try to teach them things without offering to be a student first.

These friends-of-a-different-feather were generally willing to discuss their concerns (some valid, others misinformed) with EV enthusiasts, but had no patience for apologists who’d devoutly defend every deficiency. They’d gotten enough abuse online – and in several cases, harassment offline – from the Tesla Elon Musk stans of the time. At least three people I knew got doxxed. Circa 2019 someone contacted my manager at my day job to complain about an unflattering-to-Tesla article I’d written. Based on the Carl Sagan lament about the bamboozled, they’re probably still defending Musk now.

I should point out that the harassment suffered by TSLAQ and male journalists was a mild breeze compared to the hurricanes of abuse hurled at women journalists on the Tesla beat. I would later learn women journalists face more mistreatment than men journalists in many domains. This doesn’t change the fact that Musk was and is a magnet for conceited men: as they say, “like attracts like”.

Pawn to King Four

With these EV-askance comrades, I settled on an opening – my “pawn to king four” – of starting with the superiority of public transit. Giving the moral high ground to something different than electric vehicles made it easier to convey the large lifecycle merits of EVs over combustion vehicles. No one gets a big head doing harm reduction, but people who think they’ve got a cure can be insufferable. Declining the moral high ground conveyed that I wasn’t clinging to a sense of superiority like some stock character in an early Buddhist fable.

Listening long enough made it possible to dig past my friends’ stated positions and unearth the values or paradigms underpinning them. I could then rebut specific positions (especially if based on inaccurate information) while affirming the deeper paradigm had some merit, at least in the abstract.

The idea of distinguishing positions from values had actually been one I’d read about in the business book Getting To Yes – and even used in supplier negotiations – but had promptly forgotten outside of office contexts.[i]

ZEV credits - being a form of subsidy - often weren’t to their liking; but what if we could quantify the reduced medical system costs? Since ZEV incentives mainly went to their political opponents, what if government also supported clean technologies preferred by their political kin? [The late U.S. Inflation Reduction Act largely adopted this “something-for-everyone” approach before it got beheaded.] If they were upset about free rider effects, what if ZEV owners in their state paid an annual levy equivalent to the average driver’s fuel taxes? How about if ZEV company CEO’s were decent and law-abiding, instead of what Elon Musk had already shown himself to be, by 2016 and before?

I didn’t bring anyone over completely to my way of thinking – certainly not in one conversation – but the practice of mapping my TSLAQ friends’ perspectives proved valuable. I put it to successful use with skeptical hosts and audiences in a variety of contexts, including hostile callers on local and national talk radio. It was paradigm-changing to realize that advocacy to skeptics and the hesitant wasn’t a sprint; it wasn’t about interrupting others to race out rebuttals as fast as possible. The better analogy was sailing: adapting my approach to the prevailing conditions and not worrying that it might take longer to arrive at my preferred destination.

I felt I’d stumbled onto something useful that I couldn’t prove – like a Buddhist monk convinced meditation does something to the brain, but lacking the scientific training, tools or methods to show it.

Until I read University of British Columbia sociology professor Emily Huddart Kennedy’s book Eco-types: Five Ways of Caring about the Environment.

That story’s for next time.

[i] In one case we needed our supplier to show they weren’t just within specification for two key parameters, but that they had statistical process control: basically, that they would always be within specification. They didn’t want to reveal precise values for fear of giving away competitive information. We settled on them sharing control charts of these parameters without labels on the y-axis, but with written confirmation  that their “control limits” were within our specification limits. They got to keep their specifics proprietary while we saved time and money from not having to test every new shipment to confirm it was OK to turn into finished product.