Why Elon Musk needed to address the climate crisis what actions can we take that
that will accelerate the transition out of the fossil fuel era
so there’s a certain amount of carbon that is circulating through the environment soit’s going into the air getting absorbed by plants and animals and then going back into the air and this carbon is just circulating on the surface and this is fine and it’s been doing that for Millions hundreds of millions of years the thing that’s changed is that we’ve added something to the mix so this is what I would call the short of the turd in the punch more.
We added all this extra carbon to the carbon cycle and the net result is that the carbon in the ocean’s atmosphere is growing over time it’s much more than can be absorbed by the ecosystem. It’s really quite simple we’re taking billions of tons of carbon that’s been buried for hundreds of millions of years and is not part of the Carbon cycle taking it from deep underground and adding it to the Carbon cycle the result is that a steady increase in the the Caron in the atmosphere and in the ocean which doesn’t look like much if you look at it on this chart but when looked at in the context of of History it actually looks like this so, the carbon POS filion has really been bouncing around the 300 level for around 10 million years and then the last few hundred years it went into a vertical climb this is the essence of the problem this is very unusual and a very extreme threat as you can see from this rate of growth then this is accompanied by a temperature increase as one would expect then this temperature increase if people talk about 2 degree or 3° it’s important to appreciate just how sensitive the the climate actually is to.
Caron in the atmosphere and in the ocean which doesn't look like much if you look at it on this chart
Temperature and it’s important to look at it in terms of absolute temperature not in degrees Celsius relative to zero we need to say what is the temperature change relative to absolute zero that’s how the universe thinks about temperature.
It’s how physics thinks about temperature it’s relative to absolute zero for small changes result in huge effects so New York City Under Ice would be us 5° New York City underwater would be plus 5° but looked at in a as a percentage relative to absolute zero it’s only a plus- 2% change so the sensitivity of climate is extremely high we’ve Amplified this sensitivity by building our cities right on the coastline and most people live very close to the ocean some countries of course they are very low-lying and would be completely underwater in in a climate crisis we we’ve essentially designed civilization to be super sensitive the important thing to appreciate is that we are going to exit the fossil fuels error so it is inevitable that we will exit the fossil fuel error because at a certain point we will simply run out of carbon to mine and burn so the question is really when do we exit the era not if the goal is to exit the era as quickly as possible that means we need to move from the old goal with the pre-industrial goal which was to move from chopping down forests and killing lots of whales that the old goal was to move from chopping wood and killing whales to fossil fuels which actually in that context was a good thing but the new goal is to move to a sustainable energy future and we want to use things like Hydro solar wind.
geothermal nuclear is also a good option in places like France which don’t aren’t subject to natural disasters and we want to use energy sources that will be good for a billion years so how do we accelerate this transition away from fossil fuels to a sustainable era and what happens if we don’t so if we wait and if we delay the change the best case is simply delaying that inevitable transition to sustainable energy so this is the best case if we don’t take action now at the risk of being repetitive there’s going to be no choice in the long term to move to sustainable energy it’s to logical we have to have sustainable energy or we’ll simply run out of the other one so the only thing we gain by slowing down the transition is just slowing it down it doesn’t make it not occur it just slows it down the worst case however is more displacement and destruction and all the wars in history combined okay this is these are the best worst case scenarios so then we have about 3% of scientists that believe in the best case about 97% that believe in the worst case this is why I call it the dumbest experiment in history ever but why would you do this that the transition is delayed or or or is happening slowly is because there is a hidden subsidy on all carbon producing activity in a healthy Market if you have say € of benefit and 4 years of H to society the profit would be €6 this sort of you know makes OB obvious sense this is where the incentives are aligned with a good future this is not the case today but if you have the incentives aligned then the forcing function towards a good future towards a sustainable energy future will be powerful in an unhealthy Market you have your 10 years of benefit give you 4 but the four doesn’t isn’t taxed so you have untaxed negative externality this basically economics 101 so you have basically unreasonable profit and a forcing function to do carbon emitting activity because this cost to society is not being paid the net result is 35 g tons of carbon per year into the atmosphere so this is analogous to not paying for garbage collection and it’s it’s not as though we should say in the case of garbage have a garbage-free society it’s very difficult to have a garbage free Society but it’s just important that people pay for the garbage collection so we need to go from having untaxed negative externality and which is effectively subsidy of enormous size 5.3 trillion do a year according to the IMF.
every year we need to move away from this and have a carbon tax this is being forced quite hard by the the carbon producers and they’re using tactics that are very similar to what the cigarette industry or the tobacco industry used for many years they would they would take the approach of even though the overwhelming scientific consensus was that smoking cigarettes was bad for you they would find a few scientists that would disagree and then they would say look scientists disagree that’s essentially how they would try to trick the public into thinking that smoking is not that bad the solution obviously is to remove the subsidy so that means we need to have a a carbon tax and to make it something which is neither a left nor a right issue we should make it probably a revenue neutral carbon tax so this would be a case of increasing taxes on carbon then reducing taxes in in other places so maybe there would be a reduction in sales tax or vat and an increase in Caron tax so that only those using high levels of carbon would pay an increased tax in in order to give industry time to react this could be a phased in approach that maybe it takes 5 years before the carbon taxes are very high so that means that only companies that don’t take action today will suffer in 5 years but there needs to be a clear message from government in this regard because the fundamental problem is the rules today incend people to create carbon and this is madness and what have you incent will happen that that’s why we we’re seeing very little effect thus far and depending what action we take we’ll we’ll drive the the carbon number to either extreme or or moderate levels I I think it’s pretty much given that the 2 degree C increase will occur the question is whether it’s going to be much more than that not if there will be a 2° increase so the then the question is so what can you do I would say whenever you have the opportunity talk to your politicians ask them to enact a carbon tax we we have to fix the unpriced externality I talk to your friends about about it and fight the propaganda from the carbon industry so that’s the basic message I have to.