World View of Elon Musk

Elon Musk: Put a Price on Carbon to Expedite Transition to Renewables

From an Article by Cole Mellino, EcoWatch.com, December 4, 2015

Speaking to students at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Elon Musk said we need a price on carbon similar to the one abolished in Australia to halve the time it will take to transition to renewable energy—a crucial step in addressing climate change.

We have to “remove the effective subsidy of not pricing the damage done by carbon pollution,” Musk said. “By putting a price on carbon, we are fixing a pricing error in the market,” he said. “Any price will be better than the close to zero we have right now.”

Musk has advocated for a price on carbon to drive investments in renewables for years. He told students that governments need to “set the rules of the game” to help start-ups grow into mid-size companies and eliminating the $3.5 trillion “hidden carbon subsidy” is a good place to start.

“To make it neither a left nor right issue we should make it a revenue-neutral carbon tax—increasing carbon tax and reducing tax in other areas like consumption taxes or VAT [value-added tax] and in order to give companies time to react it should be a phased-in approach,” said Musk.

“If countries agree to a carbon tax and it’s real and it’s not super watered-down and weak, we could see a transition [to clean energy] that has a 15- to 20-year time frame as opposed to a 40- or 50-year time frame,” the Tesla CEO said. “We could probably cut it in half and that would have a huge impact on the … welfare of the world … It really matters whether we do this transition sooner or later.”

“For developing economies they could leapfrog the fossil fuel situation with power lines, you could have remote villages with solar panels and a battery pack, just like mobile phones, a lot of countries just didn’t do the landlines, they skipped right over landlines,” said Musk.

The billionaire businessman also expressed his concern over fracking. “Fracking has elevated my concern about the carbon problem dramatically … I always thought the scarcity of oil would drive up the price … Unfortunately some smart inventors, I wish they could have invented something else … the net result is the accessible oil and gas reserves are dramatically higher, maybe by a factor of 10, and that is crazy for the climate,” he said.

Though Musk struck a note of optimism when he said, “we are going to exit the fossil fuel era. It is inevitable.” He added that it’s not a matter of if, but when, and world leaders meeting at the COP21 climate talks in Paris right now could expedite the process.

See also:

Bill McKibben: ‘Paris Summit is Missing One of the Great World Leaders on Climate’ Because He’s in Prison

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary, UN Climate Change Framework

Climate change deal will not include global carbon price: says UN climate chief

From an Article by Nina Chestney, Reuters News Service, October 28, 2015

Christiana Figueres is the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

A climate change deal to be agreed in Paris in December will not be able to come up with a global carbon price, the United Nations’ climate chief, Christiana Figueres, said on Tuesday.

Big multinational companies and investors, and most recently oil majors, have called for a global carbon price to help spur investments in low-carbon energy.

A global carbon price would help to create an incentive for operators of power plants and factories to switch to cleaner fuels such as gas or to buy more energy-efficient equipment.

When the European Union launched a carbon trading scheme in 2005 there were expectations this would eventually lead to a global carbon scheme by 2020 worth around $2 trillion.

But the difficulties of bringing together different carbon schemes from countries around the world means the goal of a global carbon price remains elusive.

“(Many have said) we need a carbon price and (investment) would be so much easier with a carbon price, but life is much more complex than that,” Figueres told a climate investor event in London.

“I agree it would be more simple … but it’s not quite what we will have,” she said, adding that the world would move towards that in the future.

Figueres said 60 jurisdictions around the world already have a carbon price or carbon pricing mechanism such as a tax. “I would argue we already have a strong carbon price signal,” she said.

Countries are due to meet in Paris from November 30 to December 11 to agree on a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions and tackle climate change.

This month, the leaders of 10 companies that produce 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas recognized that current greenhouse gas levels were inconsistent with a goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times. But they stopped short of outlining goals to cut their own emissions.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net