Elon Musk on Twitter: "Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil & gas output immediately. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures." / Twitter
Elon is on record saying even if he could turn off all fossil fuel use tomorrow, he would not do so because the World needs the energy right now. But that isn't the issue, it's the speed of the inevitable transition to renewable energy. “
By putting a price on carbon, we are fixing a pricing error in the market”
Elon said in Paris in 2016.
“If countries decide to do a carbon tax or cap and trade, and it is real and not watered-down and weak, I think we can see a transition that is in the 15 to 20 years time frame as supposed to 40 to 50 years time frame."
To go beyond words, let's look at whether Elon has '
walked the walk' on carbon pricing in the past 5 years. As you may know, Elon
recently donated $100M dollars to the Carbon X Prize society ($50M to the winner) for competing tech to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Let's price carbon at $50/ton (a commonly-selected carbon price around the world). $50M buys about 1M tons of carbon removal (equivalent to buying $50M in carbon offsets), plus carbon-removal tech advancement as a bonus.
Now let's look at SpaceX emissions. Each Falcon9 uses about 400 tons of propellant, so emits 400 tons of C02 per launch. How many launches are covered by $50M in carbon offsets. About 2,500 launches. How many Falcon 9 launches have their been so far? About 100. So clearly Elon is '
walking the walk' just not crowing about it (and
oddly, neither is BLOOMBERG covering this). In effect, Elon personally has paid to make F9 carbon neutral, and has made a substantial pre-payment on future launches (this also covers Elon's private jet travel, and likely much of Tesla, but I don't have a simple way to estimate Tesla's manufacturing carbon intensity)
I do note that future Starship and Superheavy will use methalox propellants, which should further reduce the carbon intensity of rocket launches, when rated on tons of carbon emitted per tons of cargo delivered to low Earth orbit (LEO).
As usual, Elon has done his homework, reached the correct decision, and is acting with the courage of his convictions. What more could we ask of our CEO?
Why don't we get this from our Politicians?
Cheers!
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