Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is pushing carbon tax to “solve climate change.” “The only action needed to solve climate change is is a carbon tax,” Musk wrote on Twitter (“X”) Saturday evening. “We should not, for example, impose draconian laws on farmers or make citizens uncomfortable by limiting air-conditioner usage!”“Keep tax revenue constant, but shift it to tax what is probably bad (CO2), just like alcohol & cigarettes are taxed more than fruits & vegetables,” he added. Alongside his post, Musk included an eight-minute promotional video where he explains the horrors of carbon and the benefits of increasing carbon taxation. He expressed the need to “address the climate crisis,” and actions that “will accelerate the transition out of the fossil fuel era.” “There's a certain amount of carbon that is circulating through the environment, so it's going into the air, getting absorbed by plants and animals, and then going back into the air,” he said. “And this carbon is just circulating on the surface, and this is fine, and it's been doing that for hundreds of millions of years — the thing that's changed is that we've added something to the mix.”.“But we’ve added all this extra carbon to the carbon cycle, and the net result is that the carbon in the ocean's atmosphere is growing over time,” he continued. “It's much more than can be absorbed by the ecosystem.”“We're taking billions of tons of carbon that's been buried for hundreds of millions of years,” Musk said. “The result is that a steady increase in the carbon in the atmosphere and in the ocean.” “This is a very unusual and a very extreme threat,” he said. “The sensitivity of climate is extremely high.”“It is inevitable that we will exit the fossil fuel era, because at a certain point we will simply run out of carbon to mine and burn,” Musk said. “The new goal is to move to a sustainable energy future, and we want to use things like hydro, solar, wind.” “We have to have sustainable energy or we'll simply run out of the other one,” he added. .Musk likened not having a carbon tax to not paying for garbage removal in society. “So you have basically unreasonable profit, and a forcing function to do carbon-emitting activity, because this cost to society is not being paid," he said. “This is analogous to not paying for garbage collection.”“We need to move away from this and have a carbon tax," Musk asserted. "We need to have a carbon tax, and to make it something which is neither a left nor a right issue, we should make it a revenue neutral carbon tax.”“There needs to be a clear message from government in this regard, because the fundamental problem is the rules today incentivize people to create carbon, and this is madness," he declared, urging viewers, "whenever you have the opportunity talk to your politicians, ask them to enact a carbon tax.”
