The Meaning of Life 71
oped the Camel truck with a capacity to carry 300 people. In
small towns, the Cubans used horses and mules to transport
goods. They ate less, and they walked and biked across the
country, so the average Cuban lost 12 pounds [6 kg]. This
healthier lifestyle decreased the number of heart attacks,
diabetes, and strokes. Solar panels were too expensive for
most households, but 2 000 schools were equipped with
them.44,45
Peak oil and global warming are often confused with
each other. There’s an owner of an electric car who has
a bumper stick on his car saying, “Environmentalists took
money from the poor to pay me to buy this car.”^206 But it
doesn’t matter whether global warming is a hoax or not
- what matters is that we are running out of oil. Elon has
always been someone who’s a big fan of facts, and peak
oil is a fact. “It’s not like there’s some infinite oil supply,”
Elon said. “If there was hypothetically no environment or
national-security issue, and all the oil in the world was in
the US, we would still need to find a sustainable mode of
transport because the oil will run out, and there will be
economic collapse. We will run out of even the fracking
resources.”363,366,433
Before we run out of oil, we have to save at least some
of it. “I think we should be saving our oil resources for
the future when we really need it and make sure that it’s
applied for the highest use in the economy, which would be
things like pharmaceuticals and plastics production,” Elon
said. “We shouldn’t really be burning the stuff in our cars.
It’s pretty valuable as an industrial ingredient.”^433