Musk tries to educate climate change sceptic Trump on greenhouse gas peril, renewable energy

Elon Musk, the electric car magnate, sought to educate Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump about climate change, greenhouse gases, and the future of renewable energy.

In his conversation on Monday with the climate change denier who has derided electric cars and green energy, Musk gingerly approached the subject calling himself a moderate who doesn’t think the gas and oil industry should be vilified or immediately shut down.

Making the case for renewable energy, he spoke to Trump as if he were tutoring a kid, that there are two reasons for adopting it – the finite petroleum resources and carbon dioxide (CO2) build-up’s impact on health.

There has to be a move towards sustainable energy resources because eventually, “if you run out of oil and gas, it's not there. It's not infinite. And there is some risk” to the economies.

As for the health aspect, he said: “If you just keep increasing the parts per million [of CO2] in the atmosphere, long enough, eventually it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe.”

“People don't realise this: If you go past a thousand parts [of CO2] per a million in the atmosphere, you start getting headaches and nausea,” he said.

“So even without global warming, it's not a comfortable place. So you don't want to get too close to that [number],” he said.

“We're now in the sort of 400 range [and] we're adding, I think, about roughly two parts per million per year … it means it is like we still have quite a bit of time” before disaster strikes, he added.

“But it's not the sort of like we're all going to die in five years. Stuff that that's obviously BS,” he said.

“Solar is just going to be a majority of Earth's, energy generation in the future,” said Musk, whose company manufactures batteries for electricity storage.

“So you get the solar power, combine that with batteries 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,” he said.

Trump was a distracted pupil.

First, he tried to change the subject by veering off into drilling for oil in Alaska and then into how “nuclear warming” – the danger of a nuclear war – was a greater threat than global warming.

Musk, who has said that he voted Democratic, including for Biden, confessed: “My track record historically has been moderate, if not moderate, slightly Left.”

Trump replied: “I actually always did think of you as somewhat Left.”