Elon Musk is a Climate Fraud
Saving the planet, Elon Musk style: a car and lots of concrete
There are many reasons I dislike Elon Musk.
As per my recent post about the future vision of transport, he’s a climate fraud.
This is what he says:
We're really playing a crazy game here with the atmosphere and the oceans. We're taking vast amounts of carbon from deep underground and putting this in the atmosphere — this is crazy. We should not do this. It's very dangerous.
And this is what he does:
Promotes car travel, which requires every traveller to have their own vehicle manufactured and powered. An electric Tesla may have only 40% of the carbon impact of a conventional car, but it’s still over 100g of CO2 per km. A typical bus or train ride is less than half this
Undermines mass transit by promoting car tunnels as a rival to trains and trams
Ummm - fires rockets powered by kerosene into space. Amazingly, he justifies this carbon horrorshow by saying he needs to build a colony on Mars so that we can escape the impact of climate change
But the latest news takes the biscuit.
It transpired on Monday that Telsa has bought $1.5bn of Bitcoin.
Now, Bitcoin is a climate catastrophe.
One third of Bitcoins are mined in Xinjiang, a region of China where most electricity is generated from coal
For those who’ve not been following Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is the invention of a mysterious, pseudonymous genius called Satoshi Nakamoto. No-one has ever discovered who Mr Nakamoto is, but his brilliantly simple idea is for a currency with no central bank.
Unlike Sterling (which is issued by the Bank of England) or dollars (Federal Reserve), Bitcoins are issued by being ‘mined’. Mining is the process by which computers solve complex mathematical equations. When they solve the puzzle, they are rewarded with a new Bitcoin. Ownership of the Bitcoin is then logged on the “Blockchain”, which is a “distributed ledger” (i.e. the same thing is simultaneously recorded on computers all around the world, making it impossible to forge). All fine so far. The climate-killing nature of Bitcoin is how it proxies the role of central banks in preventing inflation by controlling the supply of money.
To prevent endless Bitcoins being mined and the value of Bitcoin collapsing, the algorithm that sets the puzzles is programmed to set harder and harder puzzles as more and more Bitcoin are mined. This stops too many Bitcoin hitting the market at once, but it means fantastic amounts of computer power needing to be deployed to solve the puzzles and earn a Bitcoin.
What I about to tell you sounds barely believable but it is absolutely true.
The computers to mine Bitcoins now produce 36.95 megatons of CO2 annually. That is more than produced by the entirety of Greater London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham combined.
Just think what that means: we could eliminate all carbon emissions from our major cities (transport, industry, offices, heating, housing, everything) and we still wouldn’t have compensated for the carbon emissions generated by a cryptocurrency that didn’t even exist at the time of the Kyoto Protocol.
And this is the currency that Elon Musk chooses to invest his car company’s cash reserves into.
Elon Musk is a con man. He’s done an incredible job. He’s become the richest man on earth on the back of a company roughly the size of Sainsbury’s.
He’s achieved this alchemy because he tells us that he’s not selling cars, he’s saving the world.
He’s lying.
