The two most dangerous men on Earth
Bill Mckibben for the The Crucial Years
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.
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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 2030.
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:
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.
© 2022 Bill McKibben
Bill Mckibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is "Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?." He also authored "The End of Nature," "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," and "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."