Tempo e espaço nas soluções ambientais: o Tesla Roadster como uma máquina do tempo

Abstract

The environmental issue is probably one of the most important topics in international politics today. Dealing with the idea of the possible end of the world, countries' actions become necessary so that this “great evil” is avoided. Enormous efforts from different areas of knowledge have been focused on trying to solve the problem and find the best way to prevent current pollution levels from maintaining or reaching a level where there is no way back. This work, in an attempt to seek possible answers to the inability to resolve the situation so far, turns to the human process of constructing meaning of the agenda as a whole, using debates and criticisms already made both regarding the state's impossibility of dealing with the problem, and in terms of human capacity and agency in the process of building a possible solution. As a central point, the notions of space and time, both undertheorized in international relations, will be used as possible answers to the inability to address the problem. As an analytical scope, environmental debates from the 1970s onwards and their influence in the United States, the country with the largest historical pollution, will be delimited. In this sense, it will be analyzed how the launch of the Tesla Roadster used the available tools to build its success and change the future perspective in American environmental debates. What is argued in this monography is that the launch of the electric car enabled a new idea of the future for the country (using a situation that allowed this process), which sought an energy alternative, and defined the basis for a disconnected environmental debate of the environment. An idea of a “sustainable” future that only supports the group’s current way of life, disregarding the idea of the future itself due to the expectation of a change that has not proven to be materially viable (time) and disconnected from the disasters and consequences that have already occurred in other places and are no longer felt in the protection and security of the country (space).