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Climate activist Bill McKibben wrote with disgust and dismay about the X conversation that owner Elon Musk (“the richest person in the history of money”) shared with former US President Donald Trump (“gave his standard riff”) on Monday evening. McKibben described the Trump and Musk exchange as “spreading the most absurd and dangerous misinformation about the biggest crisis the world has ever faced.”
In their good ole boy banter, the two billionaires both made circuitous and deceptive statements about climate pollution, rising sea levels, Big Oil, and net zero carbon emissions. Looking specifically at the way Trump and Musk discussed the climate crisis, McKibben summarized that “they spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity.”
An activist, writer, and professor, Bill McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action.
To McKibben, the climate crisis is “a time-bound emergency that must be tackled full on, right now.” However, the Billionaire Bros agreed on Monday night that the planet isn’t in immediate jeopardy from human dependence on fossil fuels — if at all. “And yet here are these two blithe fools,” McKibben described, “just wandering on in their talk.”
Trump and Musk became buddies at some point in recent months or years, and Musk created a PAC to support Trump’s quest to retake the White House. Musk made a case for Tesla’s electric vehicles to Trump and his supporters, who have generally failed to embrace zero emissions transportation. Trump conceded during the Monday night lovefest that he wouldn’t fight the transition any longer. “Your cars don’t require too much (sic) gasoline,” he told Musk. “You do make a great product … That doesn’t mean everybody should have an electric car, but these are minor details, but your product is incredible.”
McKibben offered a deep dive about the climate points of the X conversation, saying that to “insist that nothing need be done now, that we should just go on expanding the fossil fuel industry” is indicative of Trump’s ties to Big Oil. “Trump’s biggest funder after Elon may be Harold Hamm, the fracking billionaire,” McKibben divulged. “He took Trump up on his offer that for a billion dollars he’d give the oil industry whatever it wanted, and he’s been working the phones ever since.”
Trump’s Short-Sightedness about Sea Level Rise
McKibben outlined how, at the beginning of the X confab, Trump talked “about how it was no problem if the sea level rose because it would just create ‘more oceanfront property.’” McKibben called the comment “factually wrong” and countered that “people around the Gulf are trying to figure out how to pay skyrocketing insurance bills.” Instances of significant flooding have risen by 50% since the 1990s, with millions of US residents affected. Florida alone has seen several insurers abandon its policy holders due to the increasing costs of flooding from the rising seas and fiercer storms.
McKibben argues, “We’re now living through the hottest temperatures in 125,000 years; it’s causing crazy levels of flood and drought, fire, and storm. The poles are melting. The latest study predicts that the great currents of the Atlantic will collapse between 2037 and 2064, with a median prediction of 2030.”
Despite Trump’s claims of new beaches, sea levels are rising faster along the US coastline than the global average, with up to 1 ft. of sea level rise expected in the next 30 years — an increase that equals the total rise seen over the past century, US government scientists have found.
Musk’s Changing Position on the Climate Crisis
McKibben was particularly critical of Musk because Musk acknowledged during the X livecast that he’s shifted his “views on, you know, climate change and oil and gas, because I think I’m probably different from what most people would assume.”
McKibben labeled Musk “careless.”
The Biden–Harris administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law grant program has greatly supported Tesla. That has translated into more revenue for Tesla and increased brand allure. Now Musk sees additional profit from a relationship with Trump, and, by extension, Big Oil. How is that going to work?
“We do over time wanna move to a sustainable energy economy,” Musk conceded, but then clarified, “because eventually you do run out of, I mean, you run out of oil and gas.” Musk actually went so far as to offer his support for Big Oil’s century+ efforts.
“I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry and the people that have worked very hard in those industries to provide the necessary energy to support the economy. And if we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse.”
It’s all about the profits, baby.
McKibben rephrased Musk’s comments. “What Musk is explaining here is that he didn’t buy Tesla because he thought he could help solve global warming—he doesn’t care about global warming at all because he doesn’t think it’s real.” Yes, it’s now evident that Musk has shifted from the position he took in Master Plan 1 in which he described the global necessity to move from a “mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.” On Monday night he questioned the existential risk of climate pollution, saying, “I think it’s not, the risk is not as high as, you know, a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming.”
What happened to Musk 1.0? Remember how, in 2018, the Tesla CEO asked, “Why not go renewable now and avoid [the] increasing risk of climate catastrophe? Betting that science is wrong and oil companies are right is the dumbest experiment in history, by far.” Who’s looking dumb now?
During Monday night’s X space sit-down, Musk offered a convoluted and inaccurate account of the cost per million that would need to build to make human breathing uncomfortable and when symptoms of headaches and nausea would set in.
“And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range. We’re adding, I think about roughly two parts per million per year. So, I mean, it still gives us, so what it means is like, we still have quite a bit of time, but so there’s not like, we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that.”
McKibben mused that there is not a “serious climate scientist on planet earth” who’s ever suggested that a thousand parts per million is “anything less than panic and horror.” He related how research showed that, once you got levels of CO2 that high inside buildings, you “may cut our basic decision-making ability by 25% and complex strategic thinking by around 50%.” So Musk seems to think diminished cognitive capacity is okay — as long as corporate profits are protected.
McKibben summarized Musk’s climate position and motivation:
“What Musk’s math implies, of course, is that we have endless time to deal with this crisis. Why is Musk doing this? Who knows? After all, the success of Tesla has been mostly driven by government subsidy that grows out of the effort to slow the growth of carbon in the atmosphere. My only conjecture is that he hopes the world will become barren enough that we simply have to pony up for his big trip to Mars.”
Featured photo: No To Climate Death ! by Alisdare Hickson (CC BY-SA 2.0 license)
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