Ever Wanted To Start Your Own Country? With Your Help, We Can Try It!
Have you ever wanted to start your own country? We’ve probably all had that thought, especially around election time when politics are at their worst. Plus, if you were in charge of your very own country, you could run it the right way instead of watching the clowns run it, right? If I know CleanTechnica’s readers at all, my guess is that you’d want that little country to be run on nothing but renewables. Plus, the country’s mission would be a lot like Tesla’s mission: to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy.
The sad reality is, we can’t really start our own country. The people who run the existing countries obviously wouldn’t be very happy about that, and we also don’t want them thinking we’re dangerous extremists or anything (we all love our dogs). But, there’s nothing stopping us from making a tongue-in-cheek “micronation” to prove a point! Plus, we could do some good in the world, and have some fun along the way.
So, I hereby declare independence for the Mobile Micronation of CleanTechnia!
What Micronation? Where Is CleanTechnia? Why The Weird Hexagon Font & Logo?
You’ll never see CleanTechnia on a map, and to be honest, I couldn’t give you a latitude and longitude right now, either. You see, uh, we haven’t built it yet. Plus, it’s going to be portable, so it won’t always be in the same spot, so we definitely can’t put it on a map unless it’s an internet map we can change and update when it moves (we will do that).
What we can tell you is what it will look like.
Envision these Shiftpod “Burning Man” shelters with some solar panels set beside them to charge battery banks inside. Image by Shiftpod.
Next to the shelters, we’d have 4 or 8 of these solar panels, charging a Jackery battery bank (which we already have) and inverter. Picture by Jennifer Sensiba
Our little mobile micronation will be inside several Shiftpods (portable, insulated hexagon-shaped shelters). If you’re into Burning Man, you’ve probably seen these before. They’re like a tent, but they have some insulation in their walls and they can be set up and taken down in just a few seconds. Plus, they’re a lot lighter than the ice fishing shelters that they look like.
Having a little bit of insulation will help these little shelters be efficient with the solar-powered heating and cooling systems I’m getting for them.
What Point Are You Trying To Prove? (or, Why Do This?)
First, our “micronation” will show that it’s possible to not only travel on renewables like we do now with EVs, but to power comfortable temporary living space with just a few solar panels and a small lithium battery bank. No propane or other fossil fuels will be used in the mobile micronation, so this will prove that we don’t need fossil fuels to glamp. Its minimal weight and folded-up size will also allow minimum emissions when moving it. Even the shower and toilet will be designed for minimum environmental impact without major inconvenience.
I’m sure it will take some trial and error to get this setup to work right, but once it’s done, others will be able to do it without going through the testing we’d go through to make sure it all works well together. Unfortunately, the needed items are currently expensive because there’s not much demand for them. If we could all help popularize them, low-impact travel and camping like this could become a lot cheaper.
Pioneering this would also help EV drivers a LOT. If you want comfortable quarters out in the backcountry, the only easy option right now is to pull a camper along. Once we get the guesswork and techniques figured out, anybody will be able to put a few items in the back of their EV to do this, and they won’t have to worry about whether a big travel trailer would kill their range and leave them stranded.
There are also many homeless people in the developed world, impoverished people in developing countries, and people who have faced disaster who would love to have the kind of security and energy independence that such a shelter would provide. We hope that our efforts will make it possible for them to enjoy the benefits of clean energy like this, too.
One Other Thing We’d Like To Do: Tell The Untold EV & CleanTech Stories
The mobile shelter will also be used to chase the EV and clean technology stories that just don’t get told because they’re too expensive to travel to. Sure, when a big company has big dollars to bring journalists in to tell their story, they make sure to take care of things like plane tickets, hotels, and even meals. When the little guy needs to tell their story, or the story isn’t obvious, nobody wants to take a chance on going out there to see what’s going on and share it with readers.
By taking advantage of cheap and free camping space in rural areas, we can more cheaply chase these important stories to make sure they actually get told.
Being able to practice what we preach through low-impact travel and low-impact shelter on the road would also be a big plus. There’s already too much room for people to criticize clean technology advocates, and we want to shut them up for good with this.
What We Need Help Getting
The $30,900 for this project (you can find our Kickstarter here) will be used to purchase the following:
- Money for 3 nights of paid camping space each month, for a year (other nights will be on public land or in free camping areas, up to 2 weeks per month)
- Money for gas or DC fast charging (depending on whether our Nissan LEAF can reach the destination)
- 12 months of Starlink service and the Starlink hardware
- Two Shiftpod portable quick-deploy insulated shelters, plus a “tunnel” to connect them.
- Efficient <250 watt low-power heating and cooling for the shelter (powered by our Jackery 1500 solar generator we already have, which needs two additional solar panels)
- A low-power electric cooktop, non-plastic mess kits, etc
- Fold-up camping furniture, solar shower bags, miscellaneous campsite items
- A composting toilet
- A small enclosed cargo trailer to carry all of this, plus two e-bikes we already have
If Our Readers Are Particularly Generous, & Overfund Us…
If we get overfunded, we have several flex goals:
At $40,000, we would add a third Shiftpod to our “micronation” complex for more room to work and record videos. This would require a second Jackery solar generator and more panels, another small HVAC unit, and another “tunnel.”
At $43,000, we would add one more mini shiftpod for bikepacking adventures in even more remote areas, with some related bikepacking gear. We already have the e-bikes to do this.
Our final flex goal ($130,000 max) would be to upgrade our Nissan LEAF to another electric vehicle with more range, so we could avoid burning gas on nearly all trips. Ideally, this would be a used Tesla Model X with a hitch to tow the small trailer mentioned above, but there are other EV options we could afford with less.
In other words, all donations, no matter how far above the goal we get, would be used to further the project.
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The BP logo is displayed outside a petrol station that also offers electric vehicle recharging, on Feb. 27, 2025, in Somerset, England.
Anna Barclay | Getty Images News | Getty Images
BP shares jumped on Wednesday after activist investor Elliott went public with a stake of more than 5% in the struggling British oil major, which has pivoted back to oil in a bid to restore investor confidence.
BP shares were last seen up 4.75% at 9:44 a.m. London time. The London-listed stock price is down around 5% year-to-date.
Hedge fund Elliott Management has built its holding in the British oil major to 5.006%, according to a regulatory filing disclosed late Tuesday. BP’s other large shareholders include BlackRock, Vanguard and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.
Elliott was first reported to have assumed a position in the oil and gas company back in February, driving a share rally amid expectations that its involvement could pressure BP to shift gears from its green strategy and back toward its core oil and gas businesses.
Within weeks, BP, which has been lagging domestic peer Shell and transatlantic rivals and posted a steep drop in fourth-quarter profit, announced plans to ramp up fossil fuel investments to $10 billion through 2027. This marked a sharp strategic departure for the company, which five years ago became one of the first energy giants to announce plans to cut emissions to net zero “by 2050 or sooner.” As part of that push, the company pledged to slash emissions by up to 40% by 2030 and to ramp up investment in renewables projects.
The oil major scaled back this emissions target to 20% to 30% in February 2023, saying at the time that it needed to keep investing in oil and gas to meet global demand.
Since switching gears, BP’s CEO Murray Auchincloss and outgoing Chair Helge Lund — who is expected to depart the company in 2026 — retained their posts but were penalized with reduced support during BP’s board re-election vote earlier this month amid pressure from both revenue and climate-focused investors.
BP’s strategic reset back to the company’s oil and gas activities took place just as crude prices began to plunge amid volatility triggered by U.S. tariffs and Washington’s trade spat with China, the world’s largest crude importer.
Energy analysts have broadly welcomed the strategic reset, and BP CEO Murray Auchincloss has since said the pivot attracted “significant interest” in the firm’s non-core assets.
The energy firm nevertheless remains firmly in the spotlight as a potential takeover target, with the likes of Shell and U.S. oil giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron touted as possible suitors.
BP is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings on Tuesday. The company has said it anticipates lower reported upstream production and higher net debt in the first quarter than in the final three months of 2024.
Tesla’s earnings report dropped today, and news isn’t great. But instead of recognizing his failures that have led to Tesla’s downturn, CEO Elon Musk lashed out with conspiracy theories while also hypocritically failing to acknowledge that his company was only profitable this quarter due to regulatory credits.
The numbers are in on Tesla’s dismal quarter, with sales, profits and margins tanking significantly for the company despite a rising global EV market.
You’d expect a drop in car sales to be top of mind for a car company, but instead of talking about this, CEO Elon Musk opened the call by talking about his ineffective advisory role to a former reality TV host.
Musk is heading up the self-styled “Department of Government Efficiency,” an advisory group that is focused on reducing redundancy in government. The office is not an actual government department and has a redundant mission to the Government Accountability Office, which is an actual government department focused on reducing government waste.
Musk originally claimed that the department would be able to save $2 trillion for the US government, which is actually impossible because federal discretionary spending is $1.7 trillion, which is a (gets out abacus) smaller number than $2 trillion.
He has, of course, failed at this task that anyone with any level of competence would have known was impossible before setting it out for themselves, and now projects that the department will save $150 billion next year, less than a tenth of his original estimate. But even that projection is likely an overstatement, given that most of the supposed savings that DOGE has found are not actual savings at all.
On top of this, the US government’s deficit has grown to the second-highest level on record – with the first happening in 2020, the last time Mr. Trump squatted in the White House. Which means the government isn’t saving money, it is in fact borrowing and spending more of it than ever before.
So, Musk’s tenure in the advisory board has been an unmitigated failure by any realistic account.
But if you listened to Tesla’s call, you wouldn’t have known this, as Musk was quite boastful of his efforts – starting a Tesla conference call with an irrelevant rant about his fake government department, instead of with Tesla business.
He claimed that he has made “a lot of progress in addressing waste and fraud” and that the job is “mostly done,” which is not correct by his own metrics. Musk stated that his purpose is “trying to bring in the insane deficit that is leading our country, the United States, to destruction,” and as we covered above, that deficit has only increased.
But he also went on to spew some rather insane conspiracy theories about the reasons behind his company’s recent failures, all of which of course put the blame on someone else, rather than himself. The buck stops anywhere but here, I guess.
His primary assertion was that the “blowback from the time I’ve been spending in government” (which, again, is an advisory role, not an actual government position) has come mainly from protesters that were “receiving fraudulent money” and are now angry that the government money spigot has been turned off.
Which, of course, he’s provided no evidence for… and he’s provided no evidence for it because it’s false.
Besides, that’s not how protests work. But incorrect claims that protests do work that way are often used by opponents of free speech, with the motivation of putting a chilling effect public participation. Fitting behavior for an enemy of the First Amendment like Elon Musk.
Meanwhile, this assertion also comes from a person who tried and failed to bribe voters to win an election. Perhaps his admiration of Tesla protesters is aspirational – he wishes his ideas were good enough to inspire that sort of grassroots political effort that money, demonstrably, cannot buy.
But this hypocrisy extends beyond Musk’s hatred of free expression, and strikes at the heart of the business he is the titular leader of, Tesla, the organization that has made him into the richest man in the world. Because not only is it not true that Tesla protests are driven by his ineffective government actions (they are, in fact, driven by him doing Nazi stuff all the time), it’s also objectively true that Musk’s companies are a large recipient of government money.
And that’s particularly relevant today, to the very earnings call where Musk made his ridiculous assertion, because in Q1 2025, Tesla only turned a profit due to government credits. Without them, it would have lost money.
Tesla only profitable in Q1 due to regulatory credits
Per today’s earnings report, Tesla earned $595 million in regulatory credits in Q1. But its total net income for the quarter was $409 million.
This means that without those regulatory credits, Tesla would have posted a -$189 million loss in Q1. It was saved not just by credit sales, but credit sales which increased year over year – in the year-ago quarter, Tesla made $442 million in regulatory credits, despite having higher sales in Q1 2024 than in Q1 2025. So not only were credits higher, but credits per vehicle were higher.
This is a common feature of Tesla earnings, and we even said in our earnings preview that we expected it. While Tesla had a bad quarter, nobody expected it to become actually unprofitable, because there was always the possibility of increasing regulatory credit sales to eke out a profitable quarter.
And this has been the case many times in Tesla’s past, as well. In earlier times, Tesla’s first few profitable quarters were decried by the company’s opponents as an accounting trick, suggesting that regulatory credit sales weren’t “real” profits, and that the cars should have to stand on their own.
This is a silly thing to say – businesses do business in the environment that exists, and every business has an incentive structure that includes subsidies and externalities. If we were to selectively write off certain profits for certain businesses, we could make a tortured case that any business isn’t profitable.
Plus, these opponents didn’t extend the same treatment to the oil industry, which is subsidized to the tune of $760 billion per year in the US alone in unpriced externalities, yet that is somehow never mentioned during their earnings calls.
Musk has even claimed, probably correctly, that if all subsidies were eliminated both for EVs and for oil & gas, that EVs would come out ahead compared to the status quo (more recently, Musk has become one of the biggest funders of anti-EV forces, allying himself with a bought-and-paid oil stooge who is giving even more preferential treatment to the oil industry).
But, setting aside the debate over whether credits are valid profits (they are), for years now we’ve been well beyond Tesla’s reliance on credits. The company has produced significant profits, regardless of credit sales, for some time now.
At least, until today. That’s no longer true – Tesla did rely on credits to become profitable in Q1. And Musk starting the call with a ridiculous rant about government handouts not only shows his hypocrisy and projection on this matter, but his detachment from reality itself. He is, truly, too stuck in the impenetrable echo chamber of his self-congratulating twitter feed to realize what an embarrassment he’s being in public – to the point of inventing shadow enemies to explain the very real, very simple explanation that people aren’t buying his company’s cars because he sucks so much.
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No matter how badly a fleet wants to electrify their operations and take advantage of reduced fuel costs and TCO, the fact remains that there are substantial up-front obstacles to commercial EV adoption … or are there? We’ve got fleet financing expert Guy O’Brien here to help walk us through it on today’s fiscally responsible episode of Quick Charge!
This conversation was motivated by the recent uncertainty surrounding EVs and EV infrastructure at the Federal level, and how that turmoil is leading some to believe they should wait to electrify. The truth? There’s never been a better time to make the switch!
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