US President-elect Donald Trump greets Elon Musk at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
Elon Musk has described himself as “pro-environment” and “super-pro-climate.”
But he also threw himself wholeheartedly into electing as president someone who has dismissed global warming as a hoax.
Now, as US President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to enter the White House, one big question is how much sway – if any – Musk’s views on climate change and clean energy might have in the new administration.
During the campaign, Trump noticeably softened his rhetoric on electric vehicles as he grew more friendly with Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla.
After months of bashing plug-in cars and promising to halt their sales, Trump backtracked slightly this summer.
“I’m constantly talking about electric vehicles, but I don’t mean I’m against them. I’m totally for them,” he told a crowd in Michigan. “I’ve driven them and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”
At the time, Musk claimed credit for Trump’s apparent shift, telling Tesla shareholders at a June meeting, “I can be persuasive.” Referring to Trump, he said: “A lot of his friends now have Teslas, and they all love it. And he’s a huge fan of the Cybertruck. So I think those may be contributing factors.”
Now Musk, who spent election night at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and posed for a group photograph with the president-elect’s family, is expected to have a direct line to the White House in the coming months. Musk’s companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, already make billions from government contracts and federal policies, and he is expected to seek additional advantages for his businesses.
But whether his persuasion might extend to other realms, such as climate issues, remains to be seen.
“It’s a real question,” said Paul Bledsoe, a lecturer at American University Centre for Environmental Policy. “Does Musk only advocate for the interests of Tesla and SpaceX?
“Is he just a self-interested lobbyist? Or does he try to influence Trump to recognise that as an economic matter, clean energy is a huge opportunity for the United States to outcompete China?”
Musk and Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump’s views on global warming and energy policy are no mystery.
He has doubted whether the Earth is getting hotter. (Scientists are unequivocal that it is.) He has falsely described climate change as “where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years”.
(Sea levels have already risen an average of roughly eight inches over the past century and are expected to rise several feet or more by 2100 as glaciers and ice sheets continue to melt.)
The president-elect has promised to withdraw, yet again, from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, under which nearly 200 nations pledged to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet.
He has attacked solar panels and wind turbines. And he told a crowd of supporters post-election the United States would amp up oil production even beyond current record levels. “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world.”
Musk, by contrast, has consistently said he thinks climate change is a problem – although he’s sometimes wavered on how urgent that problem is. He has long been a major proponent of shifting to low-emissions technology like solar power, batteries and electric vehicles.
In a biography published last year by Walter Isaacson, Musk was described as becoming interested in solar power and electric vehicles as a college student because he was worried about the dangers of global warming and the prospect of the world running out of fossil fuels.
Tesla’s success in producing electric cars with mass appeal helped supercharge a global industry. Musk’s company also sells rooftop solar panels as well as batteries that can provide back-up power to homes or help balance wind and solar power on the grid. This year, battery storage accounts for roughly 10% of Tesla’s revenue.
“I think we should just generally lean in the direction of sustainability,” Musk told Trump during a two-hour, live-streamed chat the two men held on social media platform X in August. “And I actually think solar is going to be a majority of Earth’s energy generation in the future.”
Musk has also supported nuclear power, which does not produce any greenhouse gases and which Trump has sometimes endorsed. “Nuclear electricity generation is underrated,” Musk added during their chat.
“People have this fear of nuclear electricity generation, but it’s actually one of the safest forms of generation.”
Yet Musk also suggested there was no hurry to stop global warming. “We still have quite a bit of time, we don’t need to rush,” he said in August. He later added: “If, I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re mostly sustainable, then I think that’ll probably be okay.”
That puts him at odds with many world leaders and environmentalists, who have urged nations to slash their emissions much faster, to around zero by mid-century, to keep global warming at relatively low levels.
Scientists agree the longer it takes humanity to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the air, the greater the risks of deadly heat waves, wildfires, drought, storms and species extinction.
In recent years, Musk has urged caution about drastic societal changes to address climate change. “I’m super-pro-climate, but we definitely don’t need to put farmers out of work to solve climate change,” he wrote on X last year, commenting on farmers in Belgium who were protesting limits on nitrogen pollution.
He also said in his August chat with Trump: “If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse. So it’s, you know, I don’t think it’s right to vilify the oil and gas industry.”
However, in the past he has openly disagreed with Trump on climate issues. In 2017, when Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, Musk stepped down from two presidential advisory councils in protest.
“Climate change is real,” he wrote. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
At the time, several officials in the Trump administration – including Rex Tillerson, then Secretary of State – were also urging the president to stay in the Paris accord.
But in the end, Trump sided with those in his cabinet who dismissed climate change altogether and wanted to exit the pact.
Some observers point out Musk isn’t the only influential donor on the issue of energy in the president-elect’s orbit.
During the campaign, Trump raised more than US$75 million ($126m) from oil and gas interests, including the billionaire Harold Hamm of Continental Resources. Hamm has had Trump’s ear since 2016 and pushed him then to appoint Scott Pruitt to run the Environmental Protection Agency, where Pruitt denied the science of global warming and unravelled various climate regulations. (Hamm did not respond to a request for comment.)
“One can only hope that Donald Trump will put conspiracy theories to the side and take the decisive action to address the climate crisis that the American people deserve,” said Dan Lashof, US director of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group.
“But I won’t hold my breath.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Brad Plumer
© 2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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