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the guardian
Climate Experts Rebuke Musk Over 'Dumbest' Interview With Trump
"Why is Musk doing this?" asked 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. "My only conjecture is that he hopes the world will become barren enough that we simply have to pony up for his big trip to Mars."
Aug 14, 2024
Elon Musk thinks he knows more about climate issues than the entire staff of a major international newspaper, but on Wednesday, experts on the planetary emergency offered the billionaire businessman a reality check.
Responding to a Guardianarticle critical of Monday's glitch- and lie-laden interview of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Musk's X social media platform, Musk proclaimed that "my little fingernail knows more about climate issues than the entire staff of The Guardian."
Bill McKibben, who co-founded the climate action group 350.org, is quoted in that article calling the Musk-Trump interview "the dumbest climate conversation of all time."
Responding to Musk's diss, McKibben said Wednesday on X that he would "be pleased to debate you (or your little fingernail) at any point about why we don't, in fact, have a century to spare in solving this crisis."
Climate scientist Michael Mann, who calls Musk a "climate denier" in the Guardian piece, also weighed in, telling Musk on X that "if you've got a beef, take it up with me."
Some X users noted that once upon a time, Musk—who is the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla—acknowledged the urgency of the climate crisis. In 2018, he said: "Why not go renewable now and avoid [the] increasing risk of climate catastrophe? Betting that science is wrong and oil companies are right, is the dumbest experiment in history, by far."
In an opinion piece published Tuesday by Common Dreams, McKibben noted that after Musk—who endorsed Trump and created a pro-Trump super political action committee—the former president's biggest funder may be fracking billionaire Harold Hamm.
"He took Trump up on his offer that for a billion dollars he'd give the oil industry whatever it wanted, and he's been working the phones ever since," McKibben wrote of Hamm.
Trump returned the favor by calling Hamm "so boring to be with... because all he wants to talk about is oil and gas."
During his first White House run, Trump infamously called climate change "a Chinese hoax." He staffed his administration with climate deniers and rolled back previous administrations' climate policies under the "drill, baby, drill" mantra popularized by former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
"Why is Musk doing this?" McKibben asked. "Who knows? After all, the success of Tesla has been mostly driven by government subsidy that grows out of the effort to slow the growth of carbon in the atmosphere."
"My only conjecture," McKibben added, "is that he hopes the world will become barren enough that we simply have to pony up for his big trip to Mars."
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200 Private Jet Owners Burned as Much CO2 as 40,000 Brits
The planes tracked by a new Guardian report belong to celebrities, billionaires, CEOs, and their families, among them the Murdoch family, Taylor Swift, and the Rolling Stones.
Nov 21, 2023
The private jets of just 200 rich and famous individuals or groups released around 415,518 metric tons of climate-heating carbon dioxide between January 2022 and September 22, 2023, The Guardian revealed Tuesday.
That's equal to the emissions burned by nearly 40,000 British residents in all aspects of their lives, the newspaper calculated.
The planes tracked by the outlet belong to celebrities, billionaires, CEOs, and their families, among them the Murdoch family, Taylor Swift, and the Rolling Stones. All told, the high-flyers made a total of 44,739 trips during the study period for a combined 11 years in the air.
"Pollution for wasteful luxury has to be the first to go, we need a ban on private jets."
Notable emitters included the Blavatnik family, the Murdoch family, and Eric Schmidt, whose flights during the 21-month study period released more than 7,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The Sawiris family emitted around 7,500 metric tons, and Lorenzo Fertitta more than 5,000.
The Rolling Stones' Boeing 767 wide-body aircraft released around 5,046 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is equal to 1,763 economy flights from London to New York. The 39 jets owned by 30 Russian oligarchs released 30,701 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
For comparison, average per capita emissions were 14.44 metric tons in the U.S. for 2022, 13.52 metric tons in Russia in 2021, and 5.2 metric tons in the U.K. the same year.
Taylor Swift was the only celebrity or billionaire in the report whose team responded to a request for comment.
"Before the tour kicked off in March of 2023, Taylor bought more than double the carbon credits needed to offset all tour travel," a spokesperson for the pop star told The Guardian.
Swift appears to have responded to public pressure to reduce private jet use. Her plane averaged 19 flights a month between January and August 2022, when she received criticism after sustainability firm Yard named her the celebrity who used her plane the most. After that point, the plane's average monthly flights dropped to two.
The Guardian's investigation was based on private aircraft registrations compiled by TheAirTraffic Database and flight records from OpenSky. Reporters calculated flight emissions based on model information found in the ADSBExchange Aircraft database and Planespotters.net and emissions per hour per model found in the Conklin & De Decker's CO2 calculator and the Eurocontrol emission calculator.
The report was released the day after an Oxfam study found that the world's richest 1% emitted the same amount as its poorest two-thirds. Given their high carbon footprint and luxury status, private jets have emerged as a rallying point for the climate justice movement.
"It's hugely unfair that rich people can wreck the climate this way, in just one flight polluting more than driving a car 23,000 kilometers," Greenpeace E.U. transport campaigner Thomas Gelin said in March. "Pollution for wasteful luxury has to be the first to go, we need a ban on private jets."
In the U.S., a group of climate campaigners is mobilizing to stop the expansion of Massachusetts' Hanscom Field, the largest private jet field in New England. An October report found that flights from that field between January 1, 2022, and July 15, 2023, released a total of 106,676 tons of carbon emissions.
"While plenty of business is no doubt discussed over golf at Aberdeen, Scotland, or at bird hunting reserves in Argentina (destinations we also documented), this is probably the least defensible form of luxury travel on a warming planet when a Zoom call would often do," Chuck Collins, who co-authored the Hanscom report, wrote for Fortune on November 14.
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Guardian Removes bin Laden Letter to America After Viral Resurgence
The U.K. paper confirmed it had removed the letter because of its sudden surge in popularity on TikTok and other social media sites.
Nov 16, 2023
The Guardian has removed Osama bin Laden's "Letter to the American People," which had been on its website for more than 20 years, after it went viral on TikTok and other social media sites.
"This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden's 'Letter to the American People,' as reported in The Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002," the page previously hosting the letter now reads. "The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023."
In the letter, which is still available via web archive, bin Laden outlines his grievances against the United States, including its support for Israel, its placement of military bases in Islamic countries, and its participation in or support of other military actions or economic sanctions against people in the Islamic world. He justifies his attacks on U.S. civilians by arguing that they have the power to vote for governments that support different policies. Bin Laden also makes homophobic and antisemitic remarks, including blaming Jews as a group for the excesses of U.S. capitalism.
"The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context."
The letter saw a surprising resurgence on TikTok over the past two days, as posters documented their responses to reading it for the first time.
"The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds," journalist Yashar Ali wrote on social media. "Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they'll never see geopolitical matters the same way again. Many of them—and I have watched a lot—say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to a hostile power."
The Wrapsourced the trend to a video posted by Lynnette Adkins that TikTok says is currently unavailable.
"I need everyone to stop doing what they're doing right now and go read 'Letter to America,' I feel like I'm going through an existential crisis right now," Adkins reportedly said.
Ali said he saw thousands of similar videos on TikTok and more on other social media platforms. 404 Mediareported Wednesday that searching for "Letter to America" on TikTok brought up a few dozen results, some with as many as hundreds of thousands of views. Videos using the hashtag #LettertoAmerica have together generated 1.3 million views. However, the outlet noted that some of the videos were "not particularly viral by TikTok standards." The top-liked video had 75,000 likes, but true TikTok phenomenons can bee seen hundreds of millions of times. It also noted that not all of the videos expressed support for bin Laden's views: Some simply explained the letter, the trend, or the 9/11 attacks.
The Guardian confirmed to both The Wrap and 404 Media that it had removed the letter because of its surge in online popularity.
"The transcript published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context," the paper said in the statement. "Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead."
404 Media noted that removing the letter absent major factual errors or danger to life was a "highly unusual move," one that has only prompted more commentary on TikTok and other social media platforms.
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