Musk and Trump: The Climate Debate that Missed the Mark

Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have made contradictory, often fact-free claims about global warming, including that rising sea levels will create “more ocean ownership” and that reducing carbon emissions There is no urgent need, during an event dubbed “the dumbest climate conversation of all time” by a prominent activist.

Trump, the Republican US presidential candidate, and Musk, the world’s richest man, weighed in on the climate crisis during their much-hyped conversation on X on Monday, formerly known as Twitter, and Musk owned, agreed that the world has had enough time, if at all, to move away from fossil fuels.

You can’t get away from it at this point,” Trump said of fossil fuels. “I think we have, you know, probably hundreds of years left. No one really knows.” The former US president added that sea level rise due to melting glaciers would have the benefit of creating “more sea fronts”.

Trump, who once called the climate crisis a “hoax,” also said it was a “disgrace” that the Joe Biden administration had not opened up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling. , baselessly claimed that farmers are having to give up their work. Cattle are at greater risk due to climate change and the possibility of nuclear war.

“One thing I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” Trump said of the exchange. Considered during

Musk meanwhile

said it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry, which is the main driver of global-warming pollution, and that the only imperative to phase out fossil fuels was that they one day will be dry.

Musk, who is also the chief executive of electric car company Tesla, said that if we stopped using oil and gas now, we would all starve and the economy would collapse. “We want to move to a sustainable energy economy over time because eventually you run out of oil and gas.

We still have a lot of time … We don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, people from having steak or basic things like that. stop Like leave the farmers alone.

read more

Musk said the biggest risk of allowing carbon dioxide to accumulate in the atmosphere was that it would eventually become difficult to breathe, giving people “headaches and nausea.” This would occur with carbon dioxide at about 1,000 parts per million in Earth’s atmosphere, twice the current record-breaking concentration.

Scientists have shown that current global temperatures are warmer than at any point in human history, and perhaps even longer, with increasing rates of heat waves, droughts, floods and destruction of the natural world. causing disastrous effects.

Governments have agreed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with researchers warning of catastrophe beyond that point. To avoid these worst impacts, the world needs to rapidly reduce emissions this decade and then reach net zero by 2050.

Despite Trump’s claims about new beaches, sea levels are rising faster than the global average along the U.S. coastline, with sea-level rise expected to rise by 1 foot over the next 30 years — more than the last century. That’s equal to the total increase seen during , US government scientists found.

Major flooding events have increased by 50 percent since the 1990s, affecting millions of Americans as homes, highways and other infrastructure are inundated. In Florida, where Trump owns his beachfront property at Mar-a-Lago, several insurers have decided to pull out of the state because of the rising costs of flooding from rising seas and severe storms.

Trump and Musk’s discussion of the climate crisis, therefore, “reached completely new levels of stupidity,” according to Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org. McKibben wrote that it was “the dumbest climate talk ever”.

The harmful effects of climate change, and particularly more extreme weather events, such as wildfires, floods, heat waves, more intense hurricanes, are actually in many cases far greater than predicted just a decade ago.” “It’s sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist and author. He is literally denying what science says here.

Mann said that if CO2 levels become so high that it becomes difficult to breathe, then the effects of the climate crisis will be “so catastrophic that it has already caused societal collapse. There are false statements that are causing headaches and nausea.

Mann added that Trump’s statement that sea level rise will lead to more beachfront property “doesn’t betray a lack of understanding of climate physics. It betrays a lack of understanding of grade school geometry.”

During his campaign, Trump routinely disparaged electric vehicles but recently changed his stance on them after the endorsement of Musk, who previously described himself as a moderate Democrat. is given

Trump, a former president who has been convicted of 34 felonies, has vowed to end the “insanity” of Biden’s climate policies if he returns to the White House. And new gas drilling is expected to accelerate and displace gas exports. America, once again, from the Paris climate agreement.