Elon Musk tried Monday night to help former President Donald Trump understand the threat of climate change.
But Trump brushed off the hint during a rambling two-hour conversation between the two men that Musk — a Trump supporter and owner of the social media company X — hosted on the platform.
Musk may be the closest person who can talk to Trump about climate change. And on Monday, he tried to convince the former president, who is a proud ally of the fossil fuel industry, that more clean energy is needed.
“My view is, like, we do, over time, want to move to a sustainable energy economy, because eventually you do run out of, I mean, you run out of oil and gas,” Musk said. “It’s not infinite and there is some risk.”
But Trump wasn’t buying it.
The Republican presidential nominee repeated much of the climate disinformation he has spread for years. Trump told Musk that climate change would be beneficial because “you’ll have more oceanfront property.”
And he said that “nuclear warming” was bigger threat than global warming — a Trump reference to nuclear war. He also estimated the country had up to 500 more years of fossil fuels left to burn.
Musk tried to nudge him in a different direction. He said the country should shift toward a more sustainable economy not centered on fossil fuels — though he said there is plenty of time to do so.
“I think we want to just move over, like, if, if I don’t know, 50 to 100 years from now, we’re mostly sustainable, I think that’ll probably be OK,” Musk said.
That’s a different view than Trump is used to hearing, and it’s different from many of the prominent climate deniers who have thrived on Musk’s X site, formerly known as Twitter. Under Musk, X has become a font of climate disinformation.
The new partnership between Musk and Trump is the latest twist in an on-again, off-again relationship between two attention-seeking business owners who now share some political beliefs but long have had different energy and climate agendas.
Musk has done more than any individual to foster America’s turn toward electric vehicles. He took the helm of Tesla Inc. in 2008 with the express purpose of combating climate change. He then led it to produce a series of vehicles that made electric, zero-emissions transportation realistic — even desirable — and galvanized traditional automakers to follow suit.
By contrast, Trump has elevated oil drilling and climate inaction as key pieces of his political agenda. During most of this presidential campaign, he has attacked EVs as feeble cars that “don’t go far” and claims they are being forced on Americans by the Biden administration.
Musk has come to embrace a Trumpian worldview, posting on X, his social media site, about the “woke mind virus” and portraying the Republican Party as a champion of personal freedoms. He used X to host Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign launch, and last month endorsed Trump after the assassination attempt on the former president in Pennsylvania.
For months, Trump has spent a portion of his rallies and speeches trashing electric vehicles and calling them unreliable, claiming they would devastate American auto manufacturing.
But recently, he has toned down his message.
Since receiving Musk’s endorsement, Trump has softened his language on electric vehicles, saying they deserve to be “a small slice” of the vehicle market. However, the change seems less an evolution of his worldview than a symbol of his transactional approach to politics.
Monday night’s conservation on X, made it clear that Musk still has plenty of work to convince Trump on the importance of clean energy.
“It’s not like the house is on fire immediately, but I think it is something we need to move towards and on balance, it’s probably better to move there faster than slower,” Musk said.
Trump made it clear that was not his goal. He then repeated his false claim that scientists created the term climate change to deceive the public.
“It’s very interesting you use the word global warming, and today they use the word climate change, because, you know, you have some places that go up,” Trump said. “So they were getting themselves in a little trouble with the word global warming, because not every place is warming, some places are going the opposite direction.”
This story also appears in Energywire.
