According to CNBC, Elon Musk’s xAI, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX, achieved a coup on Tuesday when it was permitted by the local environmental authorities to power AI data centers by constructing 41 natural gas-burning turbines in Southaven, Mississippi.
No one talks about climate change anymore, but let’s be cringe for a moment. Elon Musk is not what you might call a “climate change denier” (a term it feels like I haven’t heard in a hundred years). He was once mistakenly thought of as a climate hero. In 2008, the Guardian put him on a list of people who “could save the planet.”
Musk has repeatedly supported a carbon tax over the years as a mechanism for steering the market toward renewables (and electric cars). He took this position over a decade ago, and he’s reiterated it well into his right-wing phase.
To put it another way, Elon Musk has articulated—extensively—the ways in which the ubiquity of fossil fuels presents a danger to the world. He’s used words of concern, but never seemed distressed. In 2014, he provided the following quotes in an interview with Chris Hayes that are worth reading in the present context:
I think that the biggest concern I have is the sheer size of the industrial base that is based on gasoline or diesel or sort of fossil fuels.
[…] I mean the number of factories that have to be built to produce batteries and electric hours produce solar panels, it’s enormous, you know? If you think of all the oil fields and the gas fields and the refineries. And when you’re replacing—you’re trying to replace that infrastructure, which is trillions of dollars. So it would be difficult for us to move too fast.
[…] The the biggest problem that we have right now is that is that we have a breakdown of the market system.
[…] because there’s no price on carbon emissions it makes things that are carbon-producing very rewarding, because the true price is not being paid. So if you’re a petrochemical engineer you can earn a tremendous amount of money, but you shouldn’t really be earning that huge amount of money.
During the 2024 election, Musk spent an estimated quarter of a billion dollars successfully getting Donald Trump elected. No one in the world is a bigger obstacle to carbon taxation than Donald Trump, who has—it should go without saying—made a U.S. carbon tax a political nonstarter while in office. But he has also spent his second administration using economic threats to block an international carbon tax on shipping as well.
Critics have accused Trump of “climate nihilism.” But Trump is an old fashioned denier. He still—in 2026!—does the famous conservative grandpa thing where you see a news report about a blizzard and act like it disproves global warming.
Perhaps “climate nihilism,” should be understood as seeing climate change as a fact, but simply dismissing the costs—things like devastation and death on an unprecedented scale—as irrelevant. To really be a climate nihilist, it seems to me you would have to have a granular understanding of the morality of being, say, one of the five or so most powerful people in the world, and still going out of your way to make climate change worse.
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