Snippets via The Guardian und The Crucial Years (Bill McKibben)

I recently tuned into Elon's and Trump's Twitter spaces meeting (listen here… if you must) and it was a horror-show. Bill McKibben and The Guardian came up with the best review summary “The dumbest climate conversation of all time”. Here are the snippets I ‘liked' the most:

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk both made discursive, often fact-free assertions about global heating, including that rising sea levels would create “more oceanfront property” and that there was no urgent need to cut carbon emissions…”

Trump and Musk’s discussion on the climate crisis, therefore, “spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity”, according to Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org. McKibben wrote it was “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”.

“If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of the electric car company Tesla. “We do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil and gas. “We still have quite a bit of time … 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.” The Guardian

“It is sad that Elon Musk has become a Klimawandel denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here”.

“Musk, meanwhile, said it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry, the key driver of planet-heating pollution, and that the only imperative to ditch fossil fuels was that they will one day run dry”.

“Trump, who famously once called the Klimakrise a “hoax”, also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration did not open up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling, claimed baselessly that farmers are having to give up their cattle because of climate edicts and that a far greater threat is posed by the prospect of nuclear war”.

“When our country’s smartest people are working on the dumbest things, we all lose out”.

So…I made a video juxtaposing Elon's comments with some facts and statistics… see below:)

cc @billmckibben indeed the dumbest climate conversation of all time – I was inspired by Musk/Trump gibberish and used @elonmusk's original audio snippet from this 'conversation' , added some counter-argument illustrations / charts to show what is really happening. See attached. pic.twitter.com/cD8j111qie

- Gerd Leonhard (@gleonhard) August 14, 2024