Elon Musk completes the journey into climate villainry

Here’s Elon Musk in 2006:

“The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.”

And in 2024:

“I don’t think it’s right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry… I think we should just generally lean in the direction of sustainability.”

In 2015:

“The goal is to exit the fossil fuel era as quickly as possible.”

In 2024:

“If, I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re mostly sustainable. I think that’ll probably be okay. So it’s not like the house is on fire immediately.”

Here’s Musk in 2015:

“If we wait, and if we delay the change, the best case is simply delaying that inevitable transition to sustainable energy. The worst case however, is more displacement and destruction than all the wars in history combined.”

And in 2024:

“The risk is not as high as a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming. But I think if you just keep increasing the parts 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.”

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Yes, that’s Elon Musk telling Donald Trump that the biggest issue with carbon emissions is that people get headaches if you get to a thousand ppm of CO2. Since we’re at 400ppm at the moment, there’s no rush. We can ‘lean in the direction’ of sustainability and get there in 50 to 100 years.

That’s a spectacular reversal of Musk’s opinion, and a truly bizarre view of climate change. Have you ever heard anyone set 1,000ppm as the baseline for concern? Probably not, because literally nobody who understands climate change thinks this.

Where does that idea come from? As Bill McKibben points out, what Musk has done there is confuse atmospheric CO2 with indoor air pollution, which does indeed have negative effects beyond 1,000ppm. (I test for this on schools visits, as schools are supposed to keep classroom CO2 levels below a thousand.) This is very, very basic science.

We could be generous to Musk and say that perhaps it was a slip of the tongue, except that he explained it this way twice in the course of his conversation with Trump. This is genuinely the message he wants Trump to get on climate.

Is Musk ignorant of climate science then? No – we have him on record explaining it properly. Here’s a talk he did for students in Paris that explains why concentrations of CO2 are important and why we need to act with urgency. There’s no question that he understood it perfectly well ten years ago.

If it’s not a mistake and he isn’t ignorant of the science, why is Musk making such spectacularly wrong statements about climate change? I don’t know. Presumably because he has decided his interests lie with the political right and with Donald Trump. The climate stuff doesn’t really fly with that audience, and so he’s rowing back on twenty years of climate advocacy.

I don’t usually write articles like this one. I try to avoid negative stories and I try to emphasise solutions. But since Musk is still considered something of an authority on sustainability in some circles, I thought it was worth making an exception. He’s a very powerful man with a social media platform coded to amplify his own views. We need to be explicit about challenging that kind of power.

Exactly how we do that is another question, and I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any ideas.