- In an interview with former President Donald Trump on X, Tesla CEO Elon Musk seemed to defend the gas and oil industry.
- Despite repeated warnings from the scientific community that rapid change is needed to avoid a climate crisis, Musk said that we can wait “50 or 100 years.”
- Musk contradicted himself during the interview.
In a two-hour-long interview on X with former President Donald Trump, Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted that we’re being mean to fossil fuels and that there’s still plenty of time for our civilization to transition to a sustainable energy economy, despite the fact that Tesla makes electric cars, solar panels and home and industrial clean energy storage solutions.
“My views on climate change and oil gas […] are pretty moderate,” Musk said. “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,” he added.
Then, Musk touched on the issue of climate change, where he seemed to contradict himself. First, he said that we should indeed strive to transition to a sustainable future, but then he immediately said that the risk of global warming isn’t as high as a lot of people say.
“My view is we do, over time, want to move to a sustainable energy economy because you eventually run out of oil and gas, it’s not infinite. And there is some risk, but the risk is not as high as, you know, a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming,” Musk said.
He added that if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes beyond a certain level in parts per million (ppm), people will get “headaches and nausea,” but that argument was contradicted just a few seconds later.
“I think if you keep increasing the parts per million in the outskirt long enough, eventually it simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don’t realize this, if you go past 1,000 ppm of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea,” Tesla’s CEO said.
“So we’re now in the sort of 400 ppm range, we’re adding I think about roughly 2 ppm per year. We still have quite a bit of time, so we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to stop farmers from farming or prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that.”
At another point during the interview, Musk said that the planet could transition to a sustainable energy economy in “50 to 100 years,” but later Trump changed the imaginary timeline to “100 to 500 years,” which Musk did not correct. This goes against the scientific consensus that says immediate action is needed if we want future generations to still be able to live comfortably on our planet.
