• Bringing solar power to a home near you…
  • What is Tesla’s carbon footprint?
  • A glimpse of the future of medicine…

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our weekly mailbag edition of The Bleeding Edge. All week, you submitted your questions about the biggest trends in technology.

Today, I’ll do my best to answer them.

But first, I wanted to extend another reminder that the replay of my Emergency Briefing is still available for a short time. On Wednesday night, I told attendees all about an area of the market that has gotten lots of bad press that isn’t deserved.

These negative headlines have gifted us an opportunity, though. This is a space I believe could lead to $1 trillion of profits over the next couple of years… And right now, we can get in at beaten-down prices.

If you’d like to watch the replay – and learn the name of the free recommendation I gave out on-air – then go right here to catch up. It will only be available for a few more days.

If you have a question you’d like answered next week, be sure you submit it right here.

Now let’s turn to today’s questions…

How the Tesla solar roof project is going…

Let’s begin with a question on Tesla’s solar roof:

Hi Jeff, I am a Brownstone Unlimited subscriber, and like your other subscribers, I am waiting optimistically for the various stocks in our portfolio to pop. Today, I wanted to ask you about the Tesla Roof.

I live in N.E. Florida and am building a new house. I wanted a Tesla roof but was told it was unavailable in my area. Then it became available through an Authorized Distributor. They started work on it this week! Coincidentally, we purchased our first electric vehicle (EV) a couple of weeks ago, a Model Y – the intent being to move to an EV once we could use solar to charge it, and now things are finally coming together. I would be interested to hear how your roof is progressing. I really appreciate your insight, on matters general as well as financial.

Best regards,

 – William T.

Hello, William – you beat me to it. Well done. The truth is that I’ve been having some trouble with both my house plans and with Tesla.

I originally planned to begin construction last fall, but I ran into some issues with the necessary permits from my town. That will all get resolved, but there are no shovels in the ground yet.

And the pandemic hasn’t helped. I’m hearing about large potential delays caused by supply chain problems that amassed during the pandemic. Everything from small electronic components in appliances to building materials can cause unwanted delays.

And who would have guessed that lumber prices would shoot up around 360% over the last twelve months and are now trading at all-time highs?

The combination of inflationary monetary policy and supply chain problems has driven up prices to ridiculous levels. This is negatively impacting all consumers, whether we recognize it or not.

And then there is Tesla…

A few weeks back, I received an email notifying me that the price of the roof would be increasing without much explanation at all. It basically doubled, and the power output was less than the original quote.

Tesla offered a free Powerwall to offset the pain of the increase in price. Many were very upset over this move for obvious reasons. I hope you were able to get in under the wire before the price change happened.

A much bigger problem that I’ve been having is that we simply can’t get support and information from Tesla. My architect needs to have details on how transitions happen with the Tesla roof at valleys, ridges and dormers, as well as which kinds of flashing are used.

This information is critical to the architect and builder, as we need to coordinate with the tradesmen for things like gutter installation and masonry around the chimneys. My electricians also need to get the roof connected with the Powerwalls in the garage.

Tesla’s generic new construction guide simply doesn’t have the details.

This has been frustrating to say the least. I’m glad your experience has been much better. I know it’s a great product, and I still hope to get it done. But Tesla really needs to improve its support and product information.

You are doing it the right way. Purchasing an EV when we can fuel it with electricity produced by the Sun is clean.

Fueling an EV with electricity produced by coal, natural gas, or oil is not clean at all. It simply displaces where the carbon-based fuel is burned. It is remarkable how many EV owners don’t understand this simple, inconvenient truth.

If it’s not too much trouble, William, it would be great to hear from you again after you have used the roof for six to 12 months.

Let me know how it’s performing, how much electricity you are producing, how much you’re saving on electricity, and how you’ve been able to reduce your utility bill.

How to determine carbon footprint…

Next, let’s continue with another Tesla topic:

Hi Jeff, first I must say what a fabulous service you and your staff supply. I only at present subscribe to The Near Future Report and Blank Check Speculator, and if this year will be even half as profitable as last year, I’II be very happy.

Like many other folks, I’ve seen bitcoin drop substantially in the last week since Elon Musk criticized it for using too much electricity to mine the coins. It seems rather hypocritical of him when Tesla produces EV cars and uses the same power source from fossil fuel. I can’t help but wonder how big a carbon footprint his companies have.

 – Andrew S.

Hi, Andrew. Thank you for your kind words and for being a subscriber. I’m sure we’ll be able to take some good profits again this year.

You’ve touched on an interesting topic.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has become very popular over the last couple of years. Companies are going to great lengths to at least appear to be providing some kind of social good, and to be environmentally sensitive or working toward some kind of carbon neutrality.

To your point, car manufacturers have large factories that are largely powered by fossil fuels.

In addition to any carbon emissions produced during the car manufacturing process, their carbon footprint also contains the emissions produced by those cars during their lifetimes. That’s why Toyota’s carbon footprint is even greater than oil company BP’s.

We may think that Tesla is in the clear on that front. It makes electric vehicles that don’t emit carbon dioxide when in use.

But we can’t forget that an EV’s batteries are “fueled” with electricity. And that means the source of a country’s baseload power generation determines whether EVs are truly “clean.”

As you noted, if the energy powering an EV comes from burning fossil fuels, then the EV is no cleaner than a vehicle powered by gasoline. The only thing that changes is where the fossil fuels are burned.

Instead of in the car, it happens at the power plant that produced the electricity. Worse yet, around 7% of all electricity is lost through transmission. One could make an argument that this kind of waste is worse than just driving a car with an internal combustion engine.

At an even higher level, a recent report identified that a consumer has to drive an EV for more than 50,000 miles just to break even on the fossil fuels required to manufacture the car and its batteries.

And this doesn’t account for whether or not the car is using clean electricity or electricity produced by fossil fuels.

The reality is that many people who purchase and drive an EV have a larger carbon footprint than those who drive an efficient internal combustion engine car.

The exception is those who fuel their EVs with energy from solar panels – that is the ideal solution.

So what is Tesla’s carbon footprint?

Well, unfortunately, it’s difficult to say with any certainty. The carmaker currently doesn’t disclose its emissions from on-site power consumption, purchased electricity, or the cars it sells.

That doesn’t mean Tesla isn’t working hard to reduce its carbon footprint. It’s adding solar panels to its Nevada Gigafactory to lessen its dependence on the gas-based power grid, for example.

And as the previous question discussed, its solar-powered roofs are a great move to help Tesla owners ensure that their cars really are clean.

And it’s also worth considering the other side of the equation. While no one disputes that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin require vast sums of energy – roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of Sweden – the carbon footprint of this energy is less clear.

For one, miners can work almost anywhere, which enables them to use power sources that are inaccessible for other applications. For example, areas of China produce huge amounts of hydroelectric energy every year that are wasted. That clean energy can be put to good use to power a blockchain network.

These areas alone are responsible for around half of all bitcoin mining during the wet season.

This is just one example. Miners also exploit other inefficiencies, and there is active attention being paid to this issue. The Crypto Climate Accord was created to help the mining industry work toward reducing bitcoin’s carbon footprint.

And, of course, as the world moves toward clean energy production like nuclear fusion (not fission), which I have discussed many times in these pages, we can expect the carbon footprints from both electric vehicles and cryptocurrency mining to become much less significant.

The visit that may have saved my life…

Let’s conclude with a question about my visit to La Jolla:

Dear Jeff,

Could you please tell me what is the name of the medical organization in La Jolla, CA, that you went to and the ability to contact them?

I need this information for a relative who has serious medical problems, and I hope you can help me in this situation.

 – Jay B.

Hi, Jay, and thanks for writing in. I’m happy to point you in the right direction, and I wish you and your relative all the best.

The trip you’re recalling was to the Health Nucleus in La Jolla, CA. You can find contact information on Health Nucleus’ website here.

Please feel free to use my name. Tell them I sent you. I know you’ll be very well taken care of.

And just to be clear, I have not received any compensation from the Health Nucleus. I paid full price to go there, and I am only sharing this information because I believe that it will potentially help others. It is the kind of information that I’d like to have if our roles were reversed.

To catch up any new readers, I visited Health Nucleus in August last year to investigate its bleeding-edge approach to preventative medicine, genetics, human longevity, and what I believe to be the future of health care.

This is an emerging approach to identify, treat, and prevent diseases by considering each person’s genetic makeup, environment, and lifestyle.

We won’t need to wait until we present symptoms of a disease before seeking treatment because our genes will alert us to future problems.

And if we get sick, we won’t use a “one size fits all” approach to treat the disease. We will treat the underlying cause of the disease, not just the symptoms.

In other words, precision medicine is the opposite of what our health care system is today.

That’s why I flew to California last year to put myself through tests and diagnostics so that I could deeply understand what the future looks like.

Health Nucleus’ mission is straightforward. It evaluates us from head to toe (our phenotype) and compares that to our whole genome sequence – an analysis of all 3.2 billion base pairs of our human DNA.

By doing so, it maps our genetic structure to our current or future conditions.

And I got to experience this process firsthand.

During my visit, the team there first drew lots of blood…

I underwent a full-body magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan on the latest 3 tesla machine…

Then came my computed tomography scan (CT scan)…

Next up was my echocardiogram and electrocardiogram (EKG).

And finally, my last major diagnostic test at Health Nucleus was a bone densitometry scan.

Any one of these tests can give us a few data points on our condition. But no single test tells the whole story. That’s why Health Nucleus collects all of this data… to paint a complete picture of our health.

And that’s exactly the point.

If we don’t have a complete picture of our health, we may very well be missing something. And that “something” could be quite serious and materially affect our longevity.

In fact, Health Nucleus and its parent company, Human Longevity, published some unbelievable research in 2020 that analyzed the results from 1,190 adults who went through the same testing that I did.

Here is what they found:

  • 17% had a rare genetic mutation that affects their health.

  • 7% discovered that they had moderate-to-severe cardiovascular risk.

  • 29% had elevated liver fat, which was mostly non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

  • 2.5% discovered that they had body or brain aneurysms.

  • And 1.7% discovered that they had cancer.

To me, these numbers are remarkable. They explain why one out of every four adults who reach 55 never make it to 75. We simply don’t know what’s wrong. And if we don’t know, we can’t take positive actions to heal ourselves.

And that idea quickly gained personal significance to me…

My trip to Health Nucleus wasn’t because I was ill. In fact, I didn’t have a single health concern before my trip to La Jolla.

But because of my trip, I discovered I was in the 1.7%. A lesion found during the MRI indicated a high likelihood of prostate cancer. And a biopsy confirmed it.

There was no reason to justify me getting a full-body MRI or even a prostate-specific MRI. The cancer would have likely gone unnoticed for years, and it could have potentially cost me my life.

The great news is that we found the cancer early, and I’ve been working hard over the past months to change my outcome. (Stay tuned for Monday’s edition of The Bleeding Edge to hear more about this.)

One way or another, I’m confident that I’m going to be fine.

My experience truly shows the power behind this precision medicine trend. It will completely revolutionize the field of medicine. And it will give us extraordinary investment opportunities along the way.

That’s why I will continue to go the extra mile to bring my readers the latest developments in this space.

And if you’d like to join me in investing in the companies powering this trend, you can go right here for more details.

That’s all we have time for this week. If you have a question for a future mailbag, you can send it to me right here.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge

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