This sort of "tribal purity" logic is silly: "if you've ever done anything negative, it means you never intended to do anything positive."
This is nothing but the environmentalism equivalent of the old "you're either with us or against us, we're at war!" fallacy.
Rockets have always used fossil fuels. This is not news. The fact that SpaceX is vertically integrating changes nothing about that. On the contrary it likely reduces leaks (which is a good thing) by shortening the processing chain.
There aren't any exact numbers yet, but Starship will burn about 5000 metric tons of propellant in a single launch. Assuming a stoichiometric ratio of CH4 to O2, that'll emit about 2600 metric tons of CO2 (the rest is water). According to the ICAO emissions calculator, a roundtrip by plane between LA and London emits about 0.9 metric tons of CO2 per passenger. Thus, a Starship launch generates the same emissions as 2900 passengers making that trip.
At the $400 price I get for that trip on Google Flights, those 2900 passengers generate about $1.2 million in revenue for the airline. A single Starship launch will generate $100 million in revenue for SpaceX.
Are there any public statements on SpaceX's financials? The rumor from their last round is that it's a classic Elon money-burning enterprise - and profitability is always one quarter away. Revenue is of course pointless, since it's quite easy to have revenue when you're not profitable.
If Greta Thunberg flew on a commercial airplane somewhere far away, she'd be accused of being a hyprocate, so she uses a sailboat to cross a freaking ocean when she wants to.
This may be tribalism purity from the part of conservatives, but that's always going to be the reaction from the "opposite" side in this kind of situations because that's the obvious human response. This is not silly logic, this is how humans behave and if you refuse to believe your eyes when you see this again and again, you're the one being silly.
The point here is, what is good for the climate isn’t the purview of these simplistic views of climate science.
Drilling a well doesn’t automatically kill everything Mother Nature created or anything. . . The economic shift that Tesla single handful brought about to get all of traditional auto to move to electric cannot be overstated.
So stop using “The Environment” as a battering ram that only your point of view protects. It is wrong.
It baffles me that this is so often repeated when it is quite clearly inaccurate if you just think about it for a second.
First of all, you don't "trim" a forest the size of many small countries. This isn't a city park. It would take every man, woman, and child's sum efforts to 'landscape' even a fraction of the forests in the PNW. That's like saying that the reason the sea is rising is that nobody is running an ice cube maker to refreeze the ice caps.
But to speak to the real origination of this point - resource extraction for the benefit of those who control the cable news narrative: You don't prevent forest fires by logging. That is an old meme from the resource extraction industry - not only does it not prevent wildfires, it also destroys biodiversity of the ecosystems where old, diverse growth is replaced with pine stands.
Forest fires are required for the natural lifecycle of a forest - there are species that cannot reproduce without a forest fire. Not only small brush type plants that thrive in the absence of overgrowth but also the largest organisms in the forest- the trees themselves! Vast areas of the PNW are dominated by so-called 'serotinous cone' deciduous trees whose cones will lay dormant for years, coated in a thick plastic-like resin layer that only allows the cone to release seeds after the resin is melted away by forest fire (when the chances of successfully growing are highest)
Forests require fires to be healthy. A big part of why wildfires are so bad now is that we haven't let them happen for so long because there are more and more people moving into the areas that previously experienced healthy burns. This lead practices to try to prevent fires from happening. Meanwhile, brush built up year after year after year and eventually the fires that do happen are orders of magnitude worse. Climate change and the resulting temperatures and changes in the 'moisture battery' throughout the year are also massive contributors, but that is a whole other post.