Trump and Musk Team Up for Absolute Stupidest Climate Discussion in World History [View all]

The two most dangerous men on Earth just got together for a little chat—and it was shocking to hear with your own ears just how casual they are about the destruction of the planet we call home.

By Bill McKibben https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-musk-climate

At first Trump just gave his standard riff about how it was no problem if the sea level rose because it would just create “more oceanfront property.” This is of course offensive and ridiculous—right now people around the Gulf are trying to figure out how to pay skyrocketing insurance bills, and it’s not much help to them to point out that the guy two streets back will have a better view when their house topples into the sea. But it’s also just factually wrong, if you think about it for even two seconds: a rising ocean clearly reduces the amount of oceanfront property. If Florida goes underwater there will be a new stretch of seafront along what’s now the Georgia border—but the amount of oceanfront will be greatly reduced. If you lie in the bath with your stomach sticking out of the water, and you keep the tap running, eventually the oceanfront around your belly button will simply disappear. This is not hard.

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. He’s mildly worried about what we used to call ‘peak oil,’ the idea that at some point we’ll run out of hydrocarbons. But the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? That will only become a problem at 1,000 parts per million, and only then because of its direct effects on human beings. What he’s talking about is research from about five years ago that showed that once you got levels of CO2 that high inside buildings you “may cut our basic decision-making ability by 25 percent, and complex strategic thinking by around 50 percent.”

The world’s serious people are at work trying to somehow hold the rise in CO2 and equivalent gases like methane in check—the entire massive global effort that the Secretary General of the UN, and the Pope, and Joe Biden, and even Xi Jinping are engaged in is predicated on the hope that we might be able to stop the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere short of 500 parts per million. There is not a serious climate scientist on planet earth who has ever contemplated a thousand parts per million with anything less than panic and horror. And yet here are these two blithe fools just wandering on in their talk.

What Musk’s math implies, of course, is that we have endless time to deal with this crisis. If 1,000 is the danger level, and we’re going up two parts per million per year, that does indeed “give us quite a bit of time.” Three hundred years, roughly. Not good enough for Trump, by the way, who suggested later in the “conversation” that five hundred years might be more like it. This is the point of their conversation, at least when it comes to climate. It is to insist that nothing need be done now, that we should just go on expanding the fossil fuel industry. (Trump explained in pornographic detail his eagerness to dig up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I know why Trump thinks this—as the Washington Postreported this morning, Trump’s biggest funder after Elon may be Harold Hamm, the fracking billionaire. 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.