When Trump and Musk Sought Climate Action - a Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...
I can’t imagine you’ve missed the flurry of efforts to fact check the climate change portions of the surreal Elon Musk X Space conversation with Donald Trump. (If for some reason you desire to revisit the event, here’s a transcript and audio…)
I tried to ignore this, given that no amount of reality checking is likely to change any votes in the presidential race - or anything else that matters to the climate system for that matter. Others chose to don protective gear and dive in. Read the detailed critiques by
and below. And of course there was a critique in The Guardian, which Musk skewered for daring to challenge his assertions (with the billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla the X intermediary):
The online backing and forthing following the X event did reveal some past statements by Musk, obviously in EV entrepreneur mode, back in 2018 that are worth resurfacing because they vividly illustrate he has either dramatically changed his mind or is utterly duplicitous.
Here’s a remarkable statement Musk made on Twitter on November 10, 2018 as he retweeted a video clip from a PBS News Hour interview with climate scientist Michael E. Mann on the impact of global warming on extreme weather events:
We know we’ll run out of dead dinosaurs to mine for fuel & have to use sustainable energy eventually, so why not go renewable now & avoid increasing risk of climate catastrophe? Betting that science is wrong & oil companies are right is the dumbest experiment in history by far …
Makes me so mad when smart, ethical scientists I know are accused of publishing climate papers for “grant money”. They earn 🥜 vs their other opportunities, but give that up to help world. But their accusers make billions by slowing down clean energy. Which is more credible?
That is kind of ironic given that Musk’s slam this week of The Guardian’s fact check - “My little finger nail knows more about climate issues than the entire staff of The Guardian” - was actually a critique of a key source in their analysis of Musk’s and Trump’s assertions - Michael E. Mann.
Trump’s climate contortions
And of course Trump’s dismissal of global warming shows off his lifelong pattern of flipflopping between stances. On X today, I couldn’t help circling back to 2009, when Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump all were signatories on a full-page newspaper ad calling for then President Barack Obama and Congress to raise ambitions and cut an agressive climate deal at the treaty talks in Copenhagen that December.
As I wrote in June 2016 on Dot Earth, “Donald J. Trump has had such a habit of reversing past positions that you can find some 30 varieties of flip-flops with his name on them for sale on Zazzle.”
It’s almost not worth pointing out weirdnesses in other Trump statements. But I did note with bemusement the moment he said this:
You know, the biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one one eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. The big and you’ll have more — you’ll have more oceanfront property. Right. The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming, because we have five countries now that have significant nuclear power and we have to not allow anything to happen with stupid people like Biden.
Let’s set aside his laughably absurd comment about oceanfront property. I do see substantial merit in what I sense Trump was trying to say in the second part of this statement: that risk of nuclear war is real and more significant in many ways than human-driven climate change, which presents epic, but far more addressable, risks. On that I agree. Hopefully you’ve read my coverage of the nuclear questions raised by Putin’s war on Ukraine and the truly terrifying prospect of “inadvertant escalation.”
But of course the science there, which I began reporting on in 1984, points to nuclear cooling, not nuclear warming. Whether or not the climate impact of firestorm-lofted sun-blocking aerosols would add up to a calamitous planet-wrecking “nuclear winter” is still unclear but almost beside the point; the world’s nations cannot risk a nuclear cataclysm. Period.
On X, I couldn’t help post that it seemed, with his “nuclear warming” concerns, Trump was mixing up my 1985 and 1988 cover stories on nuclear winter and global warming…
Here are the Trump/Musk critiques I mentioned above:
Well, the clip did show Musk being mistaken even in 2018 about the reason for limiting emission of CO2 into the atmosphere. It was not and still is not because we are going to run out of fossil fuels.