Elon Musk: CO2 saint or sinner? | FT Film
[Music] overall would i say that elon musk is good for the environment on balance i just don't know i have no idea what he has done to popularize the electric car you can't take that away from him that's massive at the same time you can't ignore the fact that elon musk has done a lot to make clean energy sexy and exciting but on the other side it is very clear that he's making sketchy and difficult trade-offs when it comes to the recent investments that he has made i love the idea that so many more people can access space you hate the idea that so many more people can access space he's also fighting for carbon capture and storage he's also building this renewable energy infrastructure that's always the problem with musk is balancing out the good and the not so good because of all these different things that he does if we're talking about his biggest contribution to the environment the disruption of the auto industry and the popularization of the electric car has to be has to be the number one tailpipe emissions represent a large part of the carbon emissions that are warming the earth faster than we needed to be warming so the fact that he has made the electric car viable and popular means a lot we've had electric cars before tesla and they were never popular they were always little bugs that you'd see pottering around the street and they went 100 miles and it was it was undesirable object something that doesn't look good isn't fast it doesn't have high performance it has low range we wanted to break the mould of all of that high acceleration incredible handling tons of capability lots of room and better than any gasoline car that's what we sought to achieve that has had a profound shift on how people think about the space and it's impossible to discount at what cost is another question if you look at some of the suppliers that tesla uses for the materials needed for its batteries you know nickel and cobalt and the mining operations there there are massive environmental concerns you know elon musk has addressed them himself saying he will give a huge contract to whatever miner can can mine nickel more sustainably or in a more environmentally friendly way the vehicles themselves are very large they they require all of those exotic materials in the battery packs and so forth plus they're not all that efficient i mean the typical tesla s could be 2 200 kilos that's a lot of car that means that most of the battery is being spent moving the battery is an electrified traditional muscle car that's not a great deal of progress for me look there's a good argument to be made that everyone should be driving less cars full stop and really if you wanted to change the environmental structure of america lobbying for high-speed rail would be a pretty good way to start that not building high-end electric cars for rich californians it may begin with a fancy sports car but that's not where the story ends these new technologies they always start off expensive but where we win where we really move the needle is by making it something accessible and desirable for everyday people and that's what elon musk has done for the world he started right at the top of the market and then he rode the technology down into the mainstream and he said look all that technology all that style now you can get it too and i've managed to get the price down to 35 40 000 he opens the door to people's imagination of what it'll be like to have a completely fossil fuel free society it'll be better than what we have today this is a future you can feel really excited and optimistic about i think it really matters that's why tesla's valued at what it's valued it's not worth more than toyota because it sells more cars than toyota it's worth more than toyota because investors have determined in their heads that he is going to revolutionize the world and they think you know he's going to let us keep doing what we want to do all the time we don't need to worry about it because elon's got it that's a really compelling idea technology will save us it will arrive in the future and make our problems go away but critics would argue that it's not really realistic just getting there painlessly we have to really think very hard about how we want to live our lives and and really kind of rain back on that high consumption lifestyle all the evidence points to this whether that means flying less eating less meat driving your personal car less you name it individuals will need to change their behavior there's not just some magic silver bullet that will arrive and make all these problems disappear so in january elon musk announced the x prize for for carbon capture they're going to offer 100 million dollars to whoever wins this and the goal is to try to pull carbon out of the atmosphere [Music] the technology that exists right now is expensive no one has cracked the code to developing carbon capture technology that works at scale at a price where it would be feasible to really play a big part in the fight against climate change so the prize says we'll select 15 teams each of the 15 teams gets a million dollars to try and figure something out and then at the end of the process in five years the winner gets 50 million there's runners-up etc it's the largest private incentivized competition ever launched and the level of interest is very high and it has created a whole new buzz in the climate industry frankly with the goal that by 2050 we have to be able to remove 10 gigatonne of co2 from the atmosphere and nothing indicated that the industry will be able to achieve that without a nudge and the xprize carbon competition is that nudge all we want to see is show us how you do it and we'll show you the money but it is also a way of taking away part of the responsibility from ourselves knowing that there is money pumped into large-scale technologies that potentially will save us from disaster we have to cut emissions and all of these you know big picture sort of sci-fi initiatives they get a lot of blow back from the climate science community some people have even told me what we're doing is slowing down progress of those industries to make it change but i always say when your house is on fire you can just sit there and watch it burn down with the hopes that someone will come out and put out the fires we've been waiting for that to happen for too long and if we don't make this move now it will be too late we need to consume less first and foremost that's absolutely a truth but climate change is too overwhelming of a problem we have to give average everyday people a sense of the possible it's frightening and people want to believe that there is a techno king as he has deemed himself savior that's going to come in and keep us all from you know suffering as we will under global warming what's really important for people to understand is that humans are going to still need to move themselves and their products around through technology and so we need electricity we're in vertical climb on co2 levels um and we need to do everything we possibly can to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy elon musk's greatest contribution is in showing what's possible to generate that electricity without fossil fuels tesla also owned solarcity which is one of the biggest residential solar panel owners in the u.s and tesla also has a sizable battery business of course and energy storage is the main bottleneck in making the transition to a fully renewable energy system if we're going to switch to renewables we need a way to use wind and solar power when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing and to do that you need some way to store that energy some of the current projects are using basically car batteries at a very large scale we are literally shutting down dirty old fossil fuel power plants and replacing them with solar energy paired with energy storage so the moss landing project in california is one of the most picturesque examples energy storage is also modular and it can fit into small nooks and crannies of our built environment so it can fit behind the meter at customer sites whether that's a hospital or a home or a school and locating energy at the point where people use it helps us get to that clean energy future we want to get to it consists of a really appealing solar roof um then combined that with with storage and with electric cars so it's a three it's an obvious three-part solution yeah three-part solution this is an interesting vision have you ever looked at it from my own house you know um i've got an electric car i'm thinking you know put my panels up on the roof in an ideal world i would have domestic battery storage so that when the sun wasn't shining i could charge my car from my own electricity over time there's been a real trend especially in the american west of making that happen through putting batteries inside people's homes and those batteries when added together already today actually outshine what we're doing at the utility scale level we have approximately 50 000 batteries that are connected to our energy grid here in california they total somewhere around a gigawatt of energy capacity so the market and the business community has been around for a very long time what i think elon musk did is he communicated directly to the masses in ways that other businesses hadn't yet been able to do he's worked this groove between the products we desire like electric cars but on the other hand you know the vision the you know we can solve big problems kind of idea and he is one of the only just about the only person who's managing to work that groove right now i believe in a renewable energy future i believe that humanity must become a multi-planetary space bearing civilization those seem like exciting goals don't they it's like he's a k-pop band it's it's crazy and he's able to use that in many ways you know he can move markets with a single tweet whether it's something he says about tesla whether it's something he says about bitcoin whether it's something he says about dogecoin elon musk is effectively the governor of the central bank of crypto you know his whims are exactly the sorts of announcements that you need to be looking at to determine what bitcoin is going to do next which is kind of fine if you think you have a good sense of what elon musk is going to do next but i'm not convinced that anyone does to be honest in early february tesla announced that it would invest 1.5 billion dollars into bitcoin that's about 11 of the company's cash yet three months later he reversed course and in a single tweet he said we're not going to buy any more bitcoin we're not going to sell bitcoin either because we decided that this is bad for the climate i've decided it's bad for climate which of course everybody already knew with 70 of global bitcoin production being positioned in china where the grid is very much relying on doherty coal the production of bitcoins in itself produces as much co2 as a small country and compare it for example to visa each bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power as 436 000 visa transactions so it's hardly environmentally friendly since this announcement in february the tesla was loading up on bitcoin the shares have fallen about 20 and in part that's because for a lot of investors that i speak to this bitcoin moment was a bridge too far ultimately when you're buying 1.5 billion dollars worth of bitcoin you're not really concerned with the environmental footprint that goes with it because the numbers are just so stark you're much more looking at profit you know people suspect maybe that's what he's in it for is he just talking prices up and down is this just one big market manipulation on the other hand of course you can imagine him thinking well this is this is part of the long term future i'm building more efficient scalable fast working and decentralized transactions the idea that money could simply be turned into bits on computers and not anybody's computer not not some central bank's computer but our computers that it's a completely decentralized thing that's a bit of shared code between anybody who wants to use it is an incredibly revolutionary and liberating idea for someone like mask so it might just be about you know speculation and making a lot of money but it could also be an indication that that is how he sees the world moving and not just this world you know he really does believe that humans will be on mars and when they get there they certainly won't be taking their earthbound currencies with them they won't be taking any of the institutions with them three two one ignition we have liftoff i think it's important for the long term preservation and and ultimately expansion and extension of this the scope and scale of consciousness and the long-term uh probability of survival of humanity and life as we know we must become a multi-planet species one of the most curious things about elon musk's vision for the future is that he really believes humans will come to colonize space it may be that he is more interested in the sustainability of humankind than the sustainability of the earth which is why he's creating this lifeboat but i think an easier way to sustain human life is to sustain the planet we are on executing plan b will compromise plan a because already the footprint is not going to be environmentally friendly if you look at for example the rockets how great is that for the actually quite fragile coastal regions where these rockets take off from and not infrequently explode the challenge is that rockets burn a lot of fuel emitting co2 and lots of other things high into the atmosphere and that's a problem when you see these things take off you often see a gray or a white plume in the lower atmosphere that's because it collects water typically so it's it's wider but then there's this middle region where it's fairly dry and there's not a lot of oxygen of course up high and then that's where you probably get a lot of unburned things or you deal with the formation of things which we call black carbon the soot particles can collect and accumulate in the stratosphere and there are a lot of questions about you know as they absorb the sunlight then to what extent do they contribute to warming this minor player this one or two percent is a hundred thousand to a million times more absorptive to solar energy than the carbon dioxide itself and we can't tell you what the impact is they're only beginning to do those studies partly because we don't launch that many rockets you know every year there's a lot and they're growing fast but ultimately compared to a lot of other sectors the sector is relatively small in terms of actual carbon emissions but what we're living through is a is the opening of a space and it's very hard to exaggerate the impact of spacex in creating what we think of today is the commercial space industry lower cost means more launches between 2010 and 2019 there were on average about 260 satellites launched a year well on average over the next decade euroconsult expects us to see about 1250 satellites launched a year people haven't really thought about the impact of all of these rocket launches to get the satellites up into into orbit or indeed about the re-entry of the dead satellites as they come to the end of their life they fall back into the earth's atmosphere and burn up you know this isn't too dissimilar from the way we've treated our own planet you know let's do something that's convenient and then we'll think about cleaning it up later that kind of premise is the idea that's actually driven a lot of natural destruction and a lot of environmental degradation throughout history uh the last thing i want to see is for people to be scared that environmental analysis of rockets is going to somehow shut down commercial rocketry i mean that has its own negative effects when you look at space technology i think people just think we have so much problem here on earth why are we even doing anything in space what they forget is so many technologies around us is because of the fact that we wanted to explore space what we've accomplished as humans in my lifetime is unbelievable i've been at cape canaveral watching a space shuttle take off this is hope and this is beauty and our job here isn't to stop things from happening our job is to make it better there's a lot we don't know but also this new space rush that we have now is hugely beneficial to us in terms of tracking the impact on the climate of carbon emissions of deforestation of lots of things that are going on on the planet that we had no idea were happening before so this is exactly the type of issue that is going to drive a wedge you know between masks fans and enemies if you like everyone he certainly if nothing else has faith in innovation he embodies the silicon valley mindset that we can disrupt our way to a better future for them it's a silver bullet towards everything is finding a technology solution with in itself at the end is only part of it with new technology there's always a kind of love-hate relationship you can't escape the fact that musk is a very divisive character but if you don't have creative destruction you never move forward there's a lot of problems in the world but if we don't have things that inspire us what's the point of living he doesn't just invent things for the sake of disruption it has a purpose and this purpose has been to create a more sustainable lifespan for humanity if you're talking about taking emissions to nearly zero you need wealthy billionaires and millionaires to splurge on fancy electric vehicles just like you need federal governments to spend on better infrastructure for public transportation it's all useful and i think that probably outweighs some of his more questionable environmental choices at least for now
2021-06-21 23:02
