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When Donald Trump speaks at length — at a rally, at a press conference, or in an interview — subsequent news reports often clean up his remarks through well-placed ellipses and generous paraphrases, imposing a coherence nowhere to be found in the original. So it was with his recent conversation with Elon Musk on X, during which the two spent a fair amount of time laying out their deep thoughts on climate change, to the horror of many observers. (Bill McKibben called it “The dumbest climate conversation of all time.”)
At the risk of being too kind to both men, there was a silver lining to be found in their tête-à-tête, even if its purpose was to help get Trump back in the White House. For all he has devolved into a right-wing internet troll, Musk might convince Trump — and the millions who follow them both — to shift their perspective on climate change a critical few degrees in a useful direction.
That’s not to say the Trump-Musk confab wasn’t uncommonly stupid, because it was. In addition to a litany of false statements and odd non sequiturs, Trump was illogically dismissive of climate concerns: “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years and you’ll have more oceanfront property.” He also lamented the imaginary fact that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle,” an area apparently of deep concern to him; elsewhere he has claimed that Kamala Harris “wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change.” Neither of these things is remotely true (though farmers forced to sell their cattle due to drought are now eligible for extra tax relief as of 2022).
The Tesla chief offered his own brand of misinformation; like many a semi-informed autodidact, he often says things that are true in some sense but deeply misleading. Talking about carbon in the atmosphere, he told Trump, “Eventually, it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don’t realize this. If you go past 1,000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range … we still have quite a bit of time. We don’t need to rush.” While it’s true that it would be difficult to breathe at a CO2 concentration of 1,000 parts per million, the danger of rising carbon emissions isn’t that someday we might all choke to death; as climate scientist Michael Mann said in response, by the time we reach that point the myriad effects of climate change “will be so devastating as to have already caused societal collapse.”
On the whole, the interview showed Musk praising Trump and nodding along with some of the former president’s loopier statements, but eventually attempting to convince him that carbon emissions can be lowered painlessly (albeit in ways that would just happen to make Musk even richer). “People can still have a steak and they can still drive gasoline cars, and it’s okay,” he reassured Trump. “When you look at our cars, we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re sexy. They’re cool,” Musk said, concluding that “I’m a big fan of, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s work towards a better future.”
That has always been Musk’s position, and while one certainly might disagree with parts of his argument (or his prior claim that “I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on Earth”), if the goal were to talk Trump into lessening his opposition to any and all efforts to mitigate climate change, that might be the only way to do it. Even in the course of the conversation one could see Trump coming around, at least here and there. “I’m sort of waiting for you to come up with solar panels on the roofs of your cars,” he told Musk. “I’m sure you’ll be the first, but it would seem that a solar panel on the roofs, on flat surfaces, on certain surfaces might be good, at least in certain areas of the country or the world where you have the sun.” There are already a number of cars with solar panels on their roofs — no one is waiting for Musk to devise one — but the fact of Trump speaking positively about any kind of solar power is more significant than whether he is aware of the latest technology.
For the moment, Trump’s bromance with Musk — or marriage of convenience — has even led the former president to moderate his rhetoric on electric vehicles, which he has often condemned in the past. “I’m constantly talking about electric vehicles but I don’t mean I’m against them. I’m totally for them,” he said at a rally in July. “I’ve driven them and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”
None of this is to say that Trump has anything but a deeply reactionary climate agenda. The oil magnates pouring money into his campaign are not being fooled about the return they can expect on their investment. The Republican nominee himself may have few fixed ideas about climate, but the people he appoints to another administration and the Republicans in Congress that support him will be committed to rolling back President Biden’s climate programs and finding new ways to promote fossil fuels and undermine the policy changes that are beginning to reduce emissions.
Nevertheless, rhetoric does matter, and Trump doesn’t have to become a climate hawk to begin influencing his admirers to see the issue in a slightly different way. Even if all it means is that they become a little more open to looking at climate mitigation as not a dire threat to their way of life, but rather something that won’t make much of difference to them one way or the other — in other words, if they move from being hostile to climate efforts to being simply indifferent — that would be a significant change.
The theory behind favoring carrots over sticks in climate policy — more subsidies, fewer mandates — is in part that diffusing opposition is an important component of policy success. If Elon Musk encourages Trump to start talking about climate in ways that make addressing the problem sound less threatening to his supporters, it couldn’t hurt.
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In the closing minutes of the first presidential debate tonight, Donald Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris took an odd, highly specific, and highly Teutonic turn. It might not have made sense to many viewers, but it fit into the overall debate’s unusually substantive focus on energy policy.
“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” he said, addressing Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel. We’re not gonna do — things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not.”
“Germany tried that and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” he continued. “We’re not ready for it.”
What is he talking about? Let’s start by stipulating that Harris has renounced her previous support for banning fracking. During the debate, she bragged that the United States has hit an all-time high for oil and gas production during her vice presidency.
But why bring Germany into it? At the risk of sane-washing the former president, Trump appears to be referencing what German politicians call the Energiewiende, or energy turnaround. Since 2010, Germany has sought to transition from its largest historic energy sources, including coal and nuclear energy, to renewables and hydropower.
The Energiewiende is often discussed inside and outside of Germany as a climate policy, and it has helped achieve global climate goals by, say, helping to push down the global price of solar panels. But as an observant reader might have already noticed, its goals are not entirely emissions-related: Its leaders have also hoped to use the Energiewiende to phase out nuclear power, which is unpopular in Germany but which does not produce carbon emissions.
The transition has accomplished some of its goals: The country says that it is on target to meet its 2030 climate targets. But it ran into trouble after Russia invaded Ukraine, because Germany obtained more than half of its natural gas, and much of its oil and coal besides, from Russia. Germany turned back on some of its nuclear plants — it has since shut them off again — and increased its coal consumption. It also began importing fossil fuels from other countries.
In order to shore up its energy supply, Germany is also planning to build 10 gigawatts of new natural gas plants by 2030, although it says that these facilities will be “hydrogen ready,” meaning that they could theoretically run on the zero-carbon fuel hydrogen. German automakers, who have lagged at building electric vehicles, have also pushed for policies that support “e-fuels,” or low-carbon liquid fuels. These fuels would — again, theoretically — allow German firms to keep building internal combustion engines.
So perhaps that’s not exactly what Trump said, to put it mildly — but it is true that to cope with the Ukraine war and the loss of nuclear power, Germany has had to fall back on fossil fuels. Of course, at the same time, more than 30% of German electricity now comes from wind and solar energy. In other words, in Germany, renewables are just another kind of “normal energy plant.”
Hunter Biden also made an appearance in Trump’s answer to the debate’s one climate question.
Well, it happened — over an hour into the debate, but it happened: the presidential candidates were asked directly about climate change. ABC News anchor Linsey Davis put the question to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and their respective answers were both surprising and totally not.
Harris responded to the question by laying out the successes of Biden’s energy policy and in particular, the Inflation Reduction Act (though she didn’tmention it by name). “I am proud that as vice president, over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy,” Harris noted.
The vice president immediately followed this up, however, by pointing out that gas production has also increased to “historic levels,” under the Biden-Harris administration. This framing, highlighting an all-of-the-above approach to energy, is consistent with Harris’s comments earlier in the debate, whenshe claimed to support fracking and investing in “diverse sources of energy.” Harris went on to reiterate the biggest wins of the Inflation Reduction Act, namely, “800,000 new manufacturing jobs,” and shouted out her endorsement from the United Auto Workers and its President Shawn Fain.
Trump, who earlier in the debate called himself “a big fan of solar” before questioning the amount of land it takes up, started off his response by once again claiming that the Biden-Harris administration is building Chinese-owned EV plants in Mexico (they are not). Then Trump veered completely off topic and rounded out his answer by ranting about Biden (both Joe and Hunter). “You know, Biden doesn’t go after people because, supposedly, China paid him millions of dollars,” Trump noted. “He’s afraid to do it between him and his son, they get all this money from Ukraine.”
Trump’s answer included no reference to climate or clean energy — but it did include a shout out to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” so there’s that.
Is that a problem? Let’s do the math.
Former President Donald Trump has been warming up to the idea of electric vehicles in recent months, and he used the debate podium on Tuesday night to announce that “I’m a big fan of solar.” But don’t get too excited: He apparently can’t name three of their albums.
During a heated back-and-forth over Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on fracking, Trump started to get worked up about what will happen if Democrats win the election. “They’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead,” he warned. “We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant?”
Trump went on: “By the way, I’m a big fan of solar, but they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil.”
Trump has a history of exaggeration, but this is neither particularly hyperbolic nor as concerning as Trump would have you believe. About 34,000 acres of public land are currently devoted to solar energy, and a common estimate is that the U.S. would need to expand solar to an additional 700,000 acres to meet 2035 renewable energy goals. That’s about 1,100 square miles, or 1,555 Trump-sized solar farms (or 0.031115% of the entire United States, per Clean Technica).
And while it’s true that most utility-scale solar photovoltaic facilities are only a handful of acres, it only takes about five to seven acres to generate a megawatt — so a project of Trump’s reckoning would generate about 65 megawatts, which, as Mads Rønne Almassalkhi, an associate professor of electrical and biomedical engineering at the University of Vermont, pointed out, isn’t all that shabby:
The U.S. government also recently determined that some 31 million acres of public land in just 11 states are not on “protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitat” and are close to transmission lines or “previously disturbed lands,” and therefore hypothetically suitable for solar development. To put it in simpler terms, solar takes up a fair bit of land but: Desert big.
To be sure, there are absolutely valid concerns and debates to be had over siting and the environmental impact of solar farms in America, regardless of how small their ultimate relative footprint will be. And Trump could have raised those arguments. But from what he showed us on Tuesday, he doesn’t make a very convincing fan.