The Dumbest Climate Conversation of All Time

Trump and Musk. No more need be said, but I will.

“Someone said something stupid on the internet and I must correct them” is one of the great traps of all time—but when the someones are the richest person in the history of money, and the former and quite possible future president of the United States, and when they are spreading the most absurd and dangerous misinformation about the biggest crisis the world has ever faced…well.

Elon Musk had Trump over to his Space last night for a conversation. As Musk explained, it wouldn’t be an “adversarial” interview because instead he wanted to help “open-minded, independent voters” simply “catch a vibe. I want to emphasize it’s a conversation, and it’s really intended to just get a feel for what Donald Trump is just like in a conversation,” Musk said. In fact, the conversation ended up giving us at least much of a feel for Musk, who will definitely go on being a key player after November’s election.

One thing it showed, of course, is that he’s careless: the conversation started 40 minutes late because he’s essentially broken the $50 billion toy he brought. All around him people are conducting enormous Zoom conversations (Hair Stylists for Harris) but he failed to get his audio online. Eventually, sadly, he connected, which was when the insanity really began

I’m only going to talk about the climate parts of the two-hour colloquy, but I have no doubt experts on other areas could make the same hay. Still, on this issue they spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity. Not at first—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.

Still, who cares—it’s just the kind of dumb talk we’ve gotten used to. It was when they got into details that the real trouble emerged. I’m going to give you a big dose of transcript here, and please read it

Musk: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I should probably say something about like, you know, maybe my views on, you know, climate change and oil and gas, because I think I'm probably different from what most people would assume.

Because my views are actually pretty, I think moderate in this regard, which is that 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. So it's, you know, I don't think it's right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry.

And I, you know, the world has a certain demand for oil and gas and it's probably better if the United States provides that than some other countries. And it would help with prosperity in the US. And at the same time, 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.

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.”

One should check the co2 levels at Musk’s studio and at Mar-a-Lago, but of course that’s not what anyone else is talking about when they assess dangerous levels of carbon in the atmosphere. The historic level of co2, for all of human civilization prior to the Industrial Revolution, was about 275 parts per million. It’s now at about 420 parts per million, an increase of fifty percent. Scientists think that anything above 350 parts per million is intensely dangerous. Here’s how Jim Hansen and his colleagues put it in 2008:

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.

And of course time has proved them right. 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 2050.

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 Post reported 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:

Hamm is working “incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector,” said a Trump campaign aide. “We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.”

Some of the Trump campaign’s top individual donors include Texas oil billionaires Jeffery Hildebrand and George Bishop and pipeline mogul Kelcy Warren.

“Harold Hamm is back there — he’s my original oil guy that taught me so much about oil,” Trump said at a fundraiser in Houston in May, according to donors who attended. “This guy knows more about oil and gas. ... That’s all he knows. That’s the problem. He’s so boring to be with, you know, because all he wants to talk about is oil and gas. No, we love Harold. He’s a piece of work. I’ll tell you that.”

At another event, Trump said: “Harold can just stick his finger in the ground, and oil will come up.”

Mike Cantrell, a former Continental Resources executive, said that if anyone could eventually raise $1 billion from the oil industry, it’s Hamm. “It’s limitless what he can raise, if he wants to do it,” he said.

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.

But figuring out the psychology of fools and grifters is not useful. What’s useful is weakening them, and right now that means winning the November election. Join us at Third Act in making phone calls and knocking on doors, or find somewhere else to do it. Because these are the most dangerous men on earth.

In other energy and climate news:

+Big petition from Public Citizen to get Merrick Garland to investigate the fossil fuel industry. Sign on—as the complaint explains,

When a fossil fuel company knowingly drives climate disasters by spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and covering up the dangers, and people die — that’s a crime.

Victims who are injured or killed by the fossil fuel industry’s climate disasters deserve justice no less than the victims of street-level homicides or other deadly crimes.

+A new study shows how climate scientists engage—or don’t—in efforts to actually do something about the crisis

+EarthJustice with new and important data on the oxymoronic idea of fuel crops

Crop-based biofuels — primarily corn grown for ethanol and soy grown for biodiesel — have a devastating impact on the climate and the environment. As demand for these crops to produce biofuels rises, land is converted from grasslands and forests to cropland, resulting in large losses of previously stored carbon and reductions in carbon sequestration. (This land conversion can be either in the U.S. or, because we have a globally interconnected agricultural and food system, in other countries.) Growing biofuel crops such as corn also requires intense nitrogen fertilization — most of which runs off into surface or ground water or is converted into nitrous oxide — a GHG approximately 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Indeed, increased biofuel emissions from nitrogen fertilization alone can completely negate any emissions savings from reduced fossil fuel usage. Increased crop production for biofuels also increases air, water, and soil pollution and threatens wildlife.

Critically, it’s not just the year-to-year new conversion of land here or abroad that harms the climate. Using land to grow crops for biofuels also means that this land cannot be used for other purposes, including sequestering carbon in grassland or forest land or producing food — responding to the worldwide increase in demand. The carbon sequestration that would occur under restored natural vegetation instead of agricultural land use is also known as its “carbon opportunity cost” (COC).

Well-established science solidly recognizes this COC impact of agricultural activities (examples here, here, and here). However, biofuel advocates vehemently oppose it because when COC is factored into a lifecycle GHG emissions analysis, the climate impact of corn and soy-based biofuels is two to three times higher than gasoline or diesel fuel.

+The important climate journalist Peter Dykstra is dead at the age of 67. As Bobby Bascomb writes,

Peter got started with environmental work with Greenpeace where he created the organization’s U.S. media program. He went on to work as the executive producer of CNN’s science, tech and weather unit. He was the deputy director at Pew Charitable Trusts for a bit and then became the publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate in 2011. He won multiple awards for his work including an Emmy and a Peabody.

+Big new breakthrough in solar cells, from Oxford. As the Independent reports:

They say they have developed an ultra-thin material capable of being stuck to any everyday object to harness the power of the sun. The material can be applied as a coating and is far smaller than current solar panels as well as being more energy efficient, meaning it can convert more of the sun’s energy.

 The versatility of the new ultra-thin and flexible material is also key. “At just over one micron thick, it is almost 150 times thinner than a silicon wafer,” the university said.

Oxford University’s Dr Shuaifeng Hu said that after just five years experimenting the team have raised power conversion efficiency from about 6 per cent to over 27 per cent, close to “the limits of what single-layer voltaics can achieve today.” He said the research team believe this could be extended to up to 45 per cent efficiency.

The Oxford team believe their approach will continue to reduce the cost of solar and also make it the most sustainable form of renewable energy. In the past 14 years the average cost of solar electricity has dropped by 90 per cent, making it nearly a third cheaper than fossil fuels.