The Bright Side of the Trump-Musk Summit

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.