Elon Musk Interview, Talking About Climate Change in Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne 10 Years Ago!!!

what is needed to address the climate crisis. And this is the thing that if, if, if, we if we do what actions can we take that that will accelerate the transition out of the fossil fuel era. So where we are today is let's see if it's worthy. Maybe not, okay, all right, we have the we have the present era where we have the carbon cycle. And my apologies if if some of you already know all about this, but I think some of these things are maybe not as

obvious as they may seem. So there's a certain amount of carbon that is circulating through the environment. So it's going into the air, being absorbed by and getting absorbed by plants and animals, and then going back into the air and this this carbon is just circulating on the surface and this 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 sort of

the turd in the punch bowl. So we're added all this extra carbon to the carbon cycle, and the net result is that the carbon and the ocean's atmosphere is growing over time. It's much more than can be absorbed by the ecosystem. It's really 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 corbon cycle, taking it from deep underground and adding

it to the corbon cycle. The result is that a steady increase in the carbon in the atmosphere and in the ocean oceans, which doesn't look like much if you look at it on this chart, but when looked at in the context of history, it actually looks like this. So the carbon posts million has really been bouncing around the three hundred level for around ten million years, and then the last few hundred years it went into a vertical climb this. This is the essence of the problem.

This is very unusual and and a and a very very extreme threat, as you can see from from this rate of growth. Then this is accompanied by a temperature increase as one would expect, and and then and this and this temperature increase. If people talk about two degrees or three degrees, it's important to appreciate just how sensitive the climate actually is to 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. So for small changes result in huge effects. So New York City under ice would be minus five degrees. New York City underwater would be plus five degrees, but looked at as a percentage relative to absolute zero, it's only a plus minus two percent change.

So the sensitivity of the climate is extremely extremely high. We've amplified this sensitivity by building our cities right on the on the coastline, and most most people live very close to the ocean. In some countries of course, that are that are very low lying and would be completely

uh underwater in a in a climate crisis. So then we've essentially designed civilization to be super sensitive to climate change and the the the important thing to appreciate is that we are going to exit the fossil fuels era. So it is it is inevitable that we will exit the foss fuel era because at a certain point we will simply run out of carbon to mine and burn. So the question is really when when do we exit

the era? Not not? If the goal is to exit the era as quickly as possible, that means we need to move from from the old goal with the prenu real goal, which was to move from uh chopping down forests and uh killing lots of whales. That the old goal was to move from from chopping wood and and killing whales to fossil fuels, which is 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 hydrosolar, wrange geo thermal. 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 for a billion years. So how do we accelerate this transition away from fossil fuels to sustainable era and and and and what happens if we don't? So if we if we wait, and if we delay the change, the best case, the best case,

is simply delaying that inevitable transition to sustainable energy. So this is the this is the best case. If we don't take action now, at the risk of being repetitive, it's there's gonna be no choice in the long term to move to sustainable energy. It's it's totological. We have to have sustainable energy or something to run out of the other one. So the only thing we gain by slowing down the transition is is just slowing it down. It doesn't doesn't make it not occur, It just slows

it down. The worst case, however, is more displacement and destruction than all the wars in history combined. Okay, this is these are these are the best worst case scenarios. So then if we have you know, about three percent of scientists that believe in the best case, about ninety seven percent that believe in the worst case. This is why I call it the dumbest experiment in history. Ever, why would you do this? So the reason that the transition is delayed or is happening slowly is because there

is a hidden subsidy on all carbon producing activity. In a healthy market, if you have say ten years of benefit and four years of harm to his society, the profit would be six euros. The sort of you know, makes obvious sense. This is where the incentives are aligned with the good future. This is not this is not the case today. But if you have the incentives aligned, then the forcing function towards a good future, towards its

sustainable energy future, will be powerful. In an unhealthy market, you have your ten years of benefit if your four years, but the four years doesn't isn't tax. You have untaxed negative externality. There's basically economics one on one. So you have basically unreasonable profit and a forcing function to to do carbon emitting activity because this this this cost to society is not being paid. The net result is thirty five gigatons 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 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 an untaxed negative externality and which is effectively a hidden carbon subsidy of enormous size UH five point three trillion dollars a year

according to the IMF every year. We need to move away from this UH and and and and have a carbon tax. So but this has been this has been fought quite hard by the UH, the carbon producers, and they're using tactics that are very similar to what the UH cigarette industry or the back industry used for many years.

They would they would take the approach of having of even though the overwhelming scientific consensus was that UH smoking cigarettes was bad for you, they would find a few scientists that would disagree, and then they would say, look, scientists disagree, so that that 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 carbon tax and to make it sort of 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, but then reducing taxes in other places. So maybe there would be a reduction in sales tax or VAT and an increase in common tax, so that only those using high levels of

carbon would pay an increased tax. And moreover this I mean in order to give industry time to react, This could be a phased in approach, so that maybe it takes five years before the carbon taxes are very high, so that means that only companies that don't take action today will suffer in five years. But there needs to be a clear message from from government in this regard, because the fundamental problem is the rules today incent people to create carbon and this is madness, and whatever you

incent will happen. That that's why you know we're we're seeing little, very little effect thus far, and depending upon how what what action we take, well we'll drive the common number to either extreme or moderate levels. I think it's pretty much a given that that the two degree see increase will occur. The question is whether it's going to be much more than that, not if there will be a two degree increase. So 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 text where we have to fix the unpriced externality. I'll talk to your friends about it and fight the propaganda from the carbon industry. So that that's the basic message I have, and I'm happy to take questions.

take action. We could see you anywhere from five to ten percent maybe more of the land mass absorbed by water, which would which is maybe not doesn't sound like that much, but about a third of humanity lives right on the coastline or in low lying countries, so we'd be talking about maybe two billion people being displaced and their home is being destroyed and their country is being gone. So I think we should take action.

the center of rules. The government decides what rules companies will play by. And if we currently have a system which massively incents bad behavior, so even if most people don't do the bad behavior, some people will still do the bad behavior. Yeah, I mean money and prices are Prices are basically just an information mechanism. They're just they're just basically they tell you that it's money. Is mostly an information mechanism for labor, labor allocation and for you know,

and and sort of tells companies what to do. So it's just critical, This is why it's so critical to that actually be taken at a government level, because the government is the one they're setting the rules of the game, and it's just crazy to have the rules of the game favor a bad outcome. The question up top there there's a question here. Hi La Mosque. My name is Michelle.

because of possible acidification. You know, as the as the carbon as its huge levels rise in the atmosphere, some of that is absorbed into the ocean becomes carbonic acid, and a lot of the shell fish in particular are super sensitive to changes in in VH level, So I would definitely er against trying to store in the ocean. There are potentially you could try to store some of it in giant underground caverns, but the sheer quantity we're talking about. I don't think itn be stored anywhere. There's

there's just nowhere to store it. Yeah, question love right, Hello, sir.

a lithium constraint on energy storage for batteries. So I feel pretty confident that one could make enough batteries to store all the energy that the world needs with the current resources that are that are available. Yeah, I know.

Have you received any serious involvement from governments and large companies to develop such such infrastructure or do you have any serious plans within the within the United States or maybe in other countries.

The thing that's interesting about the energy storage situation is that even even without renewables, there's a there's a huge potential to make the energy grid more efficient and to be able to shut down the heaviest polluting power plants because the the energy consumption through the day usually changes by a factor of two or more so an ent Since with the exception of hydroelectric, you can't store the power,

it has to be available in real time. The world has somewhere between two to three times as many power plants as it actually needs, so if you can buffer the power with a big, big stationary battery packs, then you can actually shut down the worst half of the power plants in the world. So I think that's a that's sort of a very exciting thing that I think a lot of people don't appreciate, and I think it's it's going to make it make a big difference. Yeah.

Unless the government does something to fix the market mechanism, the it's we're fundamentally gonna have a very slow transition out of the fossil fal era. So it's it's critical that government action changed the incentive structure. Yeah, and and

that would be very clear. And so it's like, hopefully what comes out of this, out of these the climate talks in Paris, is that that the governments of the world say that they put their foot down and they say five years from now, let's say there has to be a huge change, and and and that companies know for sure that this is going to happen and if they if they do, then the the investment decisions that make today will will will bear fruit in five years.

So the for for heavy industrial application, for heavy industry, you kind of know what the world is going to look like in five years if you know what plan, what what what factories are being built today, because if you built a really big factory, to get to full

production takes about five years from from the start. And so since we know that today there are very few sustainable energy projects at large scale that are that are being built, we know that unless something changes very quickly, the sustainable energy will still be in a bad situation five years from now. So you know, I mean, there are companies like you know at Teslin and Solar City, we're quite ideologically motivated, but but that's that's relatively unusual. So Hiland, my name is Thomas.

overarching goal is to minimize existential risk. You know, so if we look at look out into the future and say, what are the things that pose a risk to humanity to what? What? What? What? What is going to make the future good versus bad? And I think if obviously, if we have sustainable energy future that's good and the

fastest that comes, the better. And then if we're a multiplanet species, that gives us much more resilience against an extinction event and also would be a really great and fun adventure.

I think we will. It's before we see significant changes, probably ten or twenty years, and there's a lot that can happen in ten or twenty years of course, so the faster we can bring that date forward, the better.

switching into sustainable and renewable energies. Then second one would be sustainability of nuclear energy.

it can go wrong. So and so I think fission is a good is a good approach. Fusion is also interesting, and it's exciting to see what's happening with the itroproject, which is a fusion plant that's being built in France. I do think fusion is is a is a feasible technology. I think we can definitely make fusion work the but but it is it is a it is kind of a far off technology. So to make fusion at the power plant level work is probably I don't know, thirty years away, and and and and and a lot of

a lot of effort. So that that's why in at least you know for now, and I think maybe even in the long term. I'm a proponent of using the big fusion power plant in the sky called the Sun, so that the Sun is a giant fusion explosion and it shows up every day, and if we have footable takes for solar panels, we can capture that fusion energy. It also needs to be stored in batteries so we can use it at night. And then we want to have high power lines to transfer solar energy from one

place to another. So but the important thing to appreciate is like, if let's say the only thing we had was with solar energy, then that was the only power source you could If you just took a small section of Spain, you could power all of Europe. It's a very small amount of area that's actually needed to generate the di trisity we need to power civilization, or in the case of the US, like a little corner of Nevada or Utah power of the entire United States.

So I generally wouldn't you know, starting companies in either the automotive arena or the energy like energy arena is of like quite a tricky business. I mean when when when we first started uh Tesla and Solar City, we thought they would fail. We thought Tesla in particular, we thought probably we've uh maybe ten percent chants of success. So it's you know, particularly particularly cars, uh the you know, it's it's hard, it's hard to stay alive as a

car company. Honestly, it's like this must be one of the worst risk suggested returns. Yeah.

increases the pricing error. But but when when the pricing error is a huge tragedy the commons issue, like we have with carbon capacity, uh, it's critical that the government put a price in it because you just can't go wrong by putting by in. Any price to put in it will be more right than close to zero, which it is right now. So this is this is by far the most important thing if we want to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. There are other less effective ways.

By providing incentives and subsidies to say electric cars or solar that that is, that is a sometimes a more politically expedient way to do it, but the best way is just to directly fix the pricing error by taxing carbon. And this is if you ask most economists, they would say the same thing. So this is sort of well known and obvious in the economics world.

smart objects and so forth. And how do you reconcile the two if you know there's a there's a long time, you know, long term major risk.

should be cautious about the adventive AI. And a lot of people that I know that are developing AI are too convinced that that the only outcome is good and we need to consider potentially less good outcomes, and you know, to be careful and and and and really to monitor what's happening and make sure the public is aware of what's happening.

into Tesla, Sol City and SpaceX and and even then we only narrowly survived. So you know too that in two thousand and eight for Tesla, we actually closed the financing round on Christmas Eve, two thousand and eight. It was the last hour of the last day that it was possible. And you know, this is one of the tricky things with with something like a car company, is like there are good times and bad times, and when the economy goes south, then that's when things get really

really tricky for a manufacturing company. So yeah, I mean in the US, for example, like the only two car companies that haven't gone bankrupt in history or forward in Tesla, that's it. Everybody else is bankrupt or went bankrupt at some point, you know, General Motives, Chrysler and others. So so I think we just made it by the skin

of our teeth. These days. Last few years, it's really really I'd say, you know, the last two years is when Tesla's achieved a level where it's not facing imminent death. I mean even as recently as early twenty thirteen, we were operating with maybe one to two weeks of money. Hi.

to fundamentally make a sustainable energy available. I mean, on on the plus side, that there's actually an enormous amount of sustainable energy. The energy from the sun pers per square kilometer is a giga white. So if you just had a one kilometer by one kilometer array of solar panels generating, well, it would be receiving a gigawatt of solar energy. Then at a twenty percent efficiency, you would

be generating two hundred megawahtes. So we can actually generate way more energy, like probably a hundred times more energy than we actually need to operate civilization just with solar panels. So we just need to fix the stata structure of the world to make sure that that companies are incentive towards sustainable versus unsustainable technology. This is fundamentally the problem. Hello.

when they have a financial interest. So I was thinking perhaps your own I mean, perhaps we could have lobbyists ourselves, so that would be perhaps an efficient way to to have those rules put into you know, so these rules

the carbon tax would be applied. So that's my first question because also you know, France is one of the main import of nuclear energy, so you know, trying to ask them for a tax carbon tax when themselves are the people who are making the most money from importing you know, nuclear energy from power plants.

the right thing. And many of the countries are so it's it's really just, you know, we just don't want to encourage as many governments as possible to change the rules to insent a good future. That this is fundamentally what what what has to happen or we will substantially lay the transition away from carbon so and and yeah, so that that's that's what has to happen. And and and you know, Tesla and Soulial study that my companies

are very tiny, like we're tiny, tiny companies. So the in order for there to be a big move towards sustainability, the giant companies have to know that that that that is what the governments demanding for the future, and that's what the people are demanding for the future. So at the end of the day, if you know, the governments respond to to flood to popular pressure, Like if you tell politicians that that you will vote depends on them doing the right thing with climate change, that that makes

a difference. So if they're having sort of a fundraising event or a dentive party or whatever, and at every fundraising event, every dynive party, somebody's asking them, hey, what are you doing about the climate, then they will take action. So I think you have tremendous power. You have the power to make the change. We can't. We can't. Let me tell you, we definitely can't beat the oil and gas industry on lobbyists. Okay, this is that that would

be a losing battle. You know, the you know, uh, Exon makes more profit in a year than the value of the entire solar industry in the United States. So it's like if you take every solar company the United States, it's less than excellent profit in one year. There's no way you can win on money. It's impossible. Good evening. So I've just one small question, very actual. Do you think the coup twenty one will be a success?

in global warming as a result of that one. Unfortunately, in the case of the Paris talks, I think there will be some positive movement, and it's a question of what degree. And I think we need to send a clear message to the negotiating teams and to the politicians that this time there needs to be significant change. At this time, something needs to happen. There's a question all the way up on them.

future is going to hold and lead by example. So even countries that that are quite dependent on on fossil fuels, if they just change their tax structure, they can they can move away from that in in a way that's not super disruptive to the economy. It's really just a question of collecting like the same amount of taxes, but but weighted towards uh things that that's that people believe are most likely to be bad instead of things that

are most likely to be good. And we do this already in you know, in in in our tax code, we we tax alcohol and cigarettes much more than we tax fruits and vegetables. It's just sort of the sensible things, the sensible thing to do, and nobody you know, you don't and you don't here, you know countries saying well, we make lots of fruits, you know, we make lots of fruits and vegetables, so like we we want lower taxes, or we make lots of alcoholics, background we want, you know,

lower taxes. Like that's a silly debate that it's gone. And I think the same thing applies to to carbon emissions. Just just adjust the tax code and the right thing

will happen over time. And if you if you're graduated over time and you know it starts so small and becomes significant in the future, then even if you're heavily dependent on corbon today, the that that that that message of seeing what's going to happen in the future will have a huge impact on UH, on the way that that any given country's economy works, so so so they will then become not dependent on carbon because of the

incentive structure. So I really don't think they have anything to lose here, and anything to lose by taking action, and a lot to lose by not taking action.

then you recycle them forever. So I think that the it's really a negligible impact for for for batteries on the environment. And uh yeah, and as compared to carbon producing, mining and verting billions of tons of carbon every year, which which effectively permanently from from a pumous standpoint affects the carbon the carbon content of the ocean's and atmosphere.

So yeah, it's it's really we're talking orders of magnitude difference between uh, fossil fuels and batteries, like you're not not even on the same scale.

vehicles and having electric planes. But as I said that this is this is going to be quite a very slow transition because the instead of structure is so biased against sustainable energy. So in fact, even I think even if there's quite a strong action by government as a result of of the climate talks in Paris, I think it's still going to be a transition that's measured in decades. So it will be it will be a slow, slow transition. And and and the fundamental question is how do we

accelerate that transition? That that's the real question here, what actions can we take that would accelerate a transition to a good future. And that's why I'm so so harping on this notion of a revenue neutral and tax i. Think that's something that that every country can implement, and it can be graduated and faced and over time, and this is this will be by far the most effective thing for accelerating that transition to a good future.