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Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 315 | September 22-28, 2023

Can Elon Musk really save the world?

By Peter Vanham | Fortune Magazine | October-November 2023 Issue

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Earth faces an imminent threat, and unless we change our course, human life as we know it will become impossible here. What do we do? Most would say we must do all we can to prevent that bleak scenario by limiting the harmful impact of human activities. “There is no planet B,” environmentalists point out. 

Ask the billionaire Elon Musk, however, and you may get a very different reply. “We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species,” Musk said in 2021 at the launch of a SpaceX rocket into orbit. “We want to be a multi-planet species.” Musk added that he is “highly confident” that SpaceX will land humans on Mars in the near future.

Why is a person whose technology for electric vehicles, solar energy, and energy storage has done so much to advance the green transition so reviled in the environmentalist community? Why do climate activists abandon his social media platform and mock him at their protests? How green is Elon Musk, really? The answer requires a journey across time and into space. 

If your vision for a green future is walkable cities with fewer cars and parking spaces, Tesla is not leading the way to that end. Individual electric cars may not emit as much CO2 as their thermic counterparts, but they are still bulky, dangerous, and inefficient, and their proliferation distracts from the need for a more radical transformation of urban landscapes and mobility.  

Then there’s Musk’s ambition to make humanity a multi-planetary species via his rocket company, SpaceX. There is a “planet B” in Musk’s mind: Musk has said that he truly does want to move to Mars. Of course, Musk’s interstellar ambitions are doing plenty of environmental damage here on Earth: Launching a rocket may be the single worst action anyone could take to pollute Earth’s atmosphere—though their limited number has so far shielded them from regulatory constraints that apply to other modes of transport. 

“Just in terms of environmental impact, it’s hard to think of a more environmentally unfriendly, irresponsible way to act than having a space hobby,” Mike Berners-Lee, author of the book There Is No Planet B, told Fortune. Berners-Lee also scoffed at the idea of decamping to Mars. “You’re better off to live on the bottom of a uranium mine,” he said. “It’s a hideous way of spending time.”

As for finding another livable planet in a galaxy far away, Berners-Lee pointed to research showing that the most likely candidate is at least four light years away. Even in the most optimistic scenario, that would mean about 40 years of space travel, with no guarantee of success. 

In a world that remained stuck for too long in 20th-century technologies, Musk’s arrival has been like a bolt of green lightning.  But whether Musk will be seen as a force for environmental good by those living in the 22nd century or beyond remains an open question.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. Earth faces an imminent threat, and unless we change our course, human life as we know it will become impossible here. What do we do? Most would say we must do all we can to prevent that bleak scenario by limiting the harmful impact of human activities. “There is no planet B,” environmentalists point out. Ask the billionaire Elon Musk, however, and you may get a very different reply. “We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species.”
2. In a world that remained stuck for too long in 20th-century technologies, Musk’s arrival has been like a bolt of green lightning. He altered the energy and mobility status quo, and proved that a greener future is possible, with fewer compromises than anyone previously imagined. But whether Musk will be seen as a force for environmental good by those living in the 22nd century or beyond remains an open question.

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Topics:  Environment, Technology, Space Travel