Trump & Musk on, Like, Climate, and Stuff.
Leo Hickman, director of Carbon Brief, ex-Guardian journalist (once described by Ben Pile as the Guardian’s Climate Agony Aunt) did us all the favour of publishing a transcript of the section of the Musk/Trump conversation that dealt with climate change, renewable energy & nuclear power.
In his tweet about it he calls it: “Just off-the-scale levels of ignorance, denial, misinformation and half-truths”, and he’s not wrong.
I’m not going to fact-check it. It’s not that sort of conversation. For those who really can’t bear reading the transcript, here are some typical extracts:
Musk: .. obviously my view is like, we do over time wanna move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of, I mean, you run out of oil and gas.It’s not there, it’s not infinite. And there is some risk. 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. But I think if you just keep increasing the cost per million in the atmosphere long enough, eventually it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don’t realize this. If you go past a thousand parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. 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. Like leave the farmers alone.
Note that Elon can’t do 1000 minus 400 divided by 2 in his head fast enough to finish his sentence. Luckily, he’s a financial genius and not a British Labour shadow minister being interviewed on Radio 4, or he’d be the laughing stock of the world, instead of its richest citizen, capable of exploring Mars.
Trump: I agree. How crazy is that where, I mean, you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle and the whole world is a little crazy, but it’s largely taken its lead from us. I do say though, I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants.
Commenters seem to have missed that in this garbled but essentially correct statement Trump destroys the eco-rationale for electric cars, and could have wiped billions off Musk’s wealth if anybody actually paid attention to what he says. Trump seems to have realised his faux pas, because he changes the subject to the Alaska oil prospection that Reagan couldn’t do, nobody could do, he did, and Biden got rid of.
Musk skirts the sensitive subject of gasoline & gets on to the safer ground of renewables:
Musk: And on, you know, on balance, it’s probably better to move there faster than slower. But like I said, without vilifying the oil and gas industry and without causing hardship in the short term, I think this can be done with without, you know, people can still have, you know, a stake and they can still drive gasoline cars. And this, you know, it’s okay. It’s like, it’s not, I don’t think we should vilify people first, but I think we should just generally lean in the direction of sustainability.
And here he gets specific at last:
And I actually think solar is gonna be a majority of earth’s energy generation in the future. And it’s certainly trending that way. And so you get the solar power, mind that with batteries. So because obviously the sun doesn’t shine at night and then you use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long-term sustainable solution.
So, electricity created by solar in the daytime has to be stored in batteries, so that cars can be charged at night when there’s no sun. So why not charge them in the day when there is?
Somewhere in Musk’s mighty brain, two ideas have collided. “Let’s have batteries to store solar energy to use at night when there’s no sun;” and: “let’s charge our cars at night when we need less energy.”
Collided, but not coalesced.
Would you get in a spaceship to Mars with this man?
On a lighter note:
Musk: And, you know, that’s what Tesla is trying to move things towards. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress in that regard. But when you look at our cars, like we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re, you know, sexy. I mean, they’re cool. In fact, literally, I mean, the sexy joke, Model S, Model 3, Model X and Y spells out sexy. It’s probably the most expensive joke out there. But I, you know, I just, I don’t know, I like cheesy humor, you know? So, but I’m a big fan of like, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s work towards, you know, a better future.
S3XY – geddit?
Reading this, it’s hard to believe the many theories that billionaires form a vast cabal that is out to screw us via their Green energy scam or their Big Oil scam. It’s hard to imagine them conspiring with their peers about anything, because they have the greatest difficulty even conducting a conversation with them. Dealing with equals is not their thing.
They can’t speak in sentences because no-one’s ever dared tell them that they need to in order to be understood. You can’t fact-check billionaires. You can’t accuse them of misinformation because they don’t deal in information.
