Leo Hickman, director of Carbon Brief, ex-Guardian journalist (once described by Ben Pile as the Guardian’s Climate Agony Aunt) did us all the favour of publishing a transcript of the section of the Musk/Trump conversation that dealt with climate change, renewable energy & nuclear power.
In his tweet about it he calls it: “Just off-the-scale levels of ignorance, denial, misinformation and half-truths”, and he’s not wrong.
I’m not going to fact-check it. It’s not that sort of conversation. For those who really can’t bear reading the transcript, here are some typical extracts:
Musk: .. 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. Like leave the farmers alone.
Note that Elon can’t do 1000 minus 400 divided by 2 in his head fast enough to finish his sentence. Luckily, he’s a financial genius and not a British Labour shadow minister being interviewed on Radio 4, or he’d be the laughing stock of the world, instead of its richest citizen, capable of exploring Mars.
Trump: I agree. How crazy is that where, I mean, you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle and the whole world is a little crazy, but it’s largely taken its lead from us. I do say though, I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants.
Commenters seem to have missed that in this garbled but essentially correct statement Trump destroys the eco-rationale for electric cars, and could have wiped billions off Musk’s wealth if anybody actually paid attention to what he says. Trump seems to have realised his faux pas, because he changes the subject to the Alaska oil prospection that Reagan couldn’t do, nobody could do, he did, and Biden got rid of.
Musk skirts the sensitive subject of gasoline & gets on to the safer ground of renewables:
Musk: And on, you know, on balance, it’s probably better to move there faster than slower. But like I said, without vilifying the oil and gas industry and without causing hardship in the short term, I think this can be done with without, you know, people can still have, you know, a stake and they can still drive gasoline cars. And this, you know, it’s okay. It’s like, it’s not, I don’t think we should vilify people first, but I think we should just generally lean in the direction of sustainability.
And here he gets specific at last:
And I actually think solar is gonna be a majority of earth’s energy generation in the future. And it’s certainly trending that way. And so you get the solar power, mind that with batteries. So because obviously the sun doesn’t shine at night and then you use that to charge the electric cars and you have a long-term sustainable solution.
So, electricity created by solar in the daytime has to be stored in batteries, so that cars can be charged at night when there’s no sun. So why not charge them in the day when there is?
Somewhere in Musk’s mighty brain, two ideas have collided. “Let’s have batteries to store solar energy to use at night when there’s no sun;” and: “let’s charge our cars at night when we need less energy.”
Collided, but not coalesced.
Would you get in a spaceship to Mars with this man?
On a lighter note:
Musk: And, you know, that’s what Tesla is trying to move things towards. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress in that regard. But when you look at our cars, like we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re, you know, sexy. I mean, they’re cool. In fact, literally, I mean, the sexy joke, Model S, Model 3, Model X and Y spells out sexy. It’s probably the most expensive joke out there. But I, you know, I just, I don’t know, I like cheesy humor, you know? So, but I’m a big fan of like, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s work towards, you know, a better future.
S3XY – geddit?
Reading this, it’s hard to believe the many theories that billionaires form a vast cabal that is out to screw us via their Green energy scam or their Big Oil scam. It’s hard to imagine them conspiring with their peers about anything, because they have the greatest difficulty even conducting a conversation with them. Dealing with equals is not their thing.
They can’t speak in sentences because no-one’s ever dared tell them that they need to in order to be understood. You can’t fact-check billionaires. You can’t accuse them of misinformation because they don’t deal in information.
They don’t read. As a David Mamet Hollywood Mogul character says: “We have boys to read stuff.” They have intuitions, and issue orders to their “boys”, whose talent is interpreting their ramblings and turning them into some kind of meaningful prose that can be acted on to make money at whatever it is they do.
They may well be geniuses at whatever it is they do, but whatever it is, it doesn’t involve sustained rational thinking.
This is what enrages their enemies, and makes their accusations of lying and misinformation so futile. It’s pointless pointing out their “lies.” Their meandering utterances are too fogbound to ever be designated by such precise terms as “true” or “false.” It would be like pointing out that “S3XY” doesn’t really spell “SEXY.”
Still, never mind. There’s always Kamala, whose grammatically well-formed, though meaningless, endlessly repeated phrases have all the precision of insanity.
Poor U.S. Poor us.
Climate Scepticism 
It’s all about Feelz, not facts. The Trump/Musk ‘conversation not interview’ feels like climate change denialism. The Cackling One’s word salad speeches on climate and energy feel like climate alarmism and Green Deal advocacy. Are Trump’s Feelz more credible as policy than Harris’ Feelz?
Tune in, like, next week or next month, like, for an update.
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While appreciating the humour I think there’s a serious side here.
There was a desperate attempt by the EU to squelch whatever global free speech was involved beforehand. Cue Michael Shellenberger (among thousands of others)
Then the row back afterwards
My Feelz were great throughout!
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Richard
I see two serious sides here. The one you mention is the threat of censorship issued by Thierry Breton, later countermanded by von der Leyen. This was a shot across the bows threatening to use the new EU Digital Service Act, which can impose billion euro fines on internet companies. The shocking thing is that it was a warning issued to just one company, X, over an item that didn’t even exist at the time. Musk is a litigious fellow, and EU lawyers must have had kittens when they saw the letter. There’s also the irony that Thierry Breton was the subject of several judicial enquiries about conflict of interest when he was a French Government Minister.
The second serious side is the huge reach of the interview (50+ million views the last time I looked) and its effect on democracy. Defenders of Trump & Musk say it’s refreshing to hear leaders talking like ordinary human beings, and I get that. But in my limited experience, ordinary people, when they go to a meeting intending to participate, prepare themselves, research the subject, think about what they want to say and how to say it. The fact that Musk and Trump apparently didn’t seems to me an insult to their audience.
In any political system, even the most democratic, there’s a hierarchy of discourse. Lenin didn’t talk to Soviet factory workers like a factory worker. He talked like the intellectual he was. And the same is true of course of Churchill or de Gaulle. Only the Tony Blairs and the Kamala Harrises change their way of talking to conform to their audience. (I don’t think Trump does that. I can believe he’s just as vulgar in board meetings & the White House, though maybe he makes an effort for Kim Jong Un.) Leaders are chosen for their ability to enunciate ideas clearly. These ideas are announced to the followers, who do with them what they can. It’s been like that since the Iliad, for Zeus’s sake.
The system can go wrong, with leaders turning into dictators, or followers reduced to a mindless rabble, but at least it’s a system.
The best you can say of Trump & Musk is that they don’t have it in them to be fascists. It’s not 1984 that threatens – more like a sequel to “Lord of the Flies,” starting at the next to last chapter, and getting worse.
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Geoff, I think you’re missing something in the Cliscep-internet age: the rise of the long-form podcast. Joe Rogan is the market leader, with audiences dwarfing all UK newspapers combined. For very long sessions in which he gives his subjects a lot of opportunity to explain their point of view. Musk and Trump were seeking to follow suit, with some important variations. Which are worth going into. I agree with a lot else.
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Geoff,
I’m not going to fact-check it. It’s not that sort of conversation.
True, but try telling that to the BBC:
Trump’s chat with Musk on X fact-checked
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0jpn2q76n1o
But if we are going to pick the bones out of what people have said about climate change, we should start with Kamala Harris’s detailed proposals:
I am reminded of Churchill’s “We will work together on the beaches” speech.
Anyway, fact-check that one, BBC!
https://www.theconservateur.com/politics/kamala-harris-quotes-that-prove-we-are-living-in-veep
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Hi Geoff!
For some reason I can ‘Like’ the entire piece, but I still can’t ‘Like’ individual comments.
Any ideas?
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“Project 2025 promises billions of tonnes more carbon pollution – study
Experts say climate policies contained within rightwing manifesto would wreck US climate targets and cost jobs”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/14/trump-project-2025-climate
The impact of Donald Trump enacting the climate policies of the rightwing Project 2025 would result in billions of tonnes of extra carbon pollution, wrecking the US’s climate targets, as well as wiping out clean energy investments and more than a million jobs, a new analysis finds.
Should Trump retake the White House and pass the energy and environmental policies in the controversial Project 2025 document, the US’s planet-heating emissions will “significantly increase” by 2.7bn tonnes above the current trajectory by 2030, an amount comparable to the entire annual emissions of India, according to the report.
Such a burst of extra pollution would torpedo any chance the US could meet its goal of cutting emissions in half by 2030, which scientists say is imperative to help the world avert disastrous climate change. It would also, the analysis found, result in 1.7m lost jobs in 2030, due to reduced clean energy deployment that is not offset by smaller gains in fossil fuel jobs, and a $320bn hit to US GDP as a wave of new domestic renewables and electric car manufacturing is reversed.
“The US faces a fork in the road starting in January of 2025 with two climate and energy policy pathways that are highly divergent,” said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy research at Energy Innovation, a non-partisan energy thinktank that conducted the modeling. “These future policy pathways result in stark differences for our health, our pocketbooks, the economy and climate.”
Is there such a thing as a “non-partisan” energy thinktank these days? They claim to be non-partisan:
https://energyinnovation.org/about-us/
But this is what they say – they’re not disinterested regarding climate and energy policy:
Energy Innovation Policy & Technology is a non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank. We provide customized research and policy analysis to decision-makers and thought leaders to support policy design that reduces emissions at the speed and scale required for a safe climate future.
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Catweazle
I had the same problem (and it’s my blog!) It solved itself once I posted a comment, which involved identifying myself via WordPress. WordPress keeps forgetting who I am, and I keep forgetting how to remind it.
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Mark
You’re not supposed to notice that all those figures in the millions & billions only exist on graphs of future projections of the difference between what would happen if the US fulfils its present promises, or the possible promises of a possible future President.
The biggest & most fantastical figure is the $320 billion that would be lost to GNP if projected manufacture of electric cars and domestic renewables didn’t happen. Since all the indications are that there’s no demand for $320B of EVs & “renewables” (whatever they are) this “loss” will no doubt be made up by manufacturing something equally unwanted – probably arms.
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John: thanks for that inspiring excerpt from Kamala’s ‘detailed proposals’ on climate.
Going straight to conspiracist mode I think Obama is still planning for Harris/Walz to be dropped for a better combo by the time the convention comes around. But time is running out on that.
I’m following veteran journalist Walter Kirn there who said earlier I may be crazy but… as he explained, with a friend. And isn’t that how we all feel?
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Wikipedia swiftly corrects my impression there:
“I’ve enjoyed him on his joint podcast with Matt Taibbi” is what I should have said.
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Andrew McCarthy: Prepare for Trump to be sentenced to prison on September 18
with subhead “The objective here is to enable VP Kamala Harris and the media-Democratic complex to label Trump ‘a convicted felon sentenced to prison’ as voting begins”
(McCarthy is one of the most reliable writers on US legal matters and not a fan of Trump – but he’s even less of a fan of the lawfare that’s been used by his opponents for over eight years. Worth a read.)
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Richard 14 Aug 8.22PM
I’d never heard of Walter Kirn, then just today he is quoted at length in this article by Alistair Crooke
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/intricate-fabric-bad-actors-working-hand-hand-so-war-inevitable
The article concerns the dangers of war in the Middle East, but its implications are far wider. It discusses how all crises seem to be stage managed in such a way as to promote division rather than solution, and traces it back to an Obama policy that turned NGOs & other lobbyists from government advisers to government policymakers. We know all about that in the UK from the 2008 Climate Change Act.
Anyway, I’m now following him on X. Thanks for bringing him to my attention.
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Very interesting Geoff. I really like the guy but I only know him through his conversations with Matt Taibbi. (I subscribed to their podcast/substack but only for a couple of months a while back.) I learned a lot from that Zero Hedge piece but this is red hot
That is so true it hurts. Thanks for the pointer back.
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The latest from Kirn
is I think worth writing out in full.
Some of the replies are very funny indeed, including this one.
Trigger warning: you need a pretty dark sense of humour.
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Not sure if this best post to add this, but it is USA & disinformation related –
Shellenberger: Nobody At The FBI Has Gone To Prison For Their Election Interference Crimes | Video | RealClearPolitics
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