Former climate hero gets permit for 41 gas turbines in Mississippi

According to CNBCElon Musk’s xAI, a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX, pulled off a coup on Tuesday when local environmental authorities allowed it to power AI data centers by building 41 natural gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi.

No one talks about climate change anymore, but let’s be embarrassed for a moment. Elon Musk is not what you might call a “climate change denier” (a term I haven’t seemed to hear in a hundred years). He was once mistakenly considered a climate hero. In 2008, the Guardian put him on a list of people who “could save the planet.”

Musk has repeatedly supported a carbon tax over the years as a mechanism to steer the market toward renewable energy (and electric cars). He assumed this position more than a decade ago and now He reiterated it well into his right-wing phase.

To put it another way, Elon Musk has articulated—extensively—the ways in which the ubiquity of fossil fuels presents a danger to the world. He has used words of concern, but he never seemed distressed. In 2014, he provided the following quotes in an interview with Chris Hayes. which is worth reading in the current context:

I think the biggest concern I have is the enormous size of the industrial base based on gasoline, diesel or some type of fossil fuel.

(…) I mean the number of factories that have to be built to produce batteries and electrical hours to produce solar panels, it is enormous, you know? If you think about all the oil and gas fields and refineries. And when you’re replacing, you’re trying to replace that infrastructure, which costs trillions of dollars. Therefore, it would be difficult for us to move too quickly.

(…) The biggest problem we have now is that we have a collapse of the market system.

(…) since there is no price for carbon emissions, things that produce carbon are very rewarding, because the true price is not paid. So if you are a petrochemical engineer, you can earn a huge amount of money, but you shouldn’t actually earn that huge amount of money.

During the 2024 election, Musk spent an estimated quarter of a billion dollars get Donald Trump successfully elected. No one in the world is a bigger obstacle to carbon taxes than Donald Trump, who (needless to say) has turned the US carbon tax into a political failure while in office. But he also has He spent his second administration using economic threats to also block an international carbon tax on shipping..

Critics have accused Trump of “climate nihilism.” But Trump is an old-fashioned denier. He still—in 2026!—Does that famous conservative grandpa thing when you see a news report about a blizzard and act like it refutes global warming.

Perhaps “climate nihilism” should be understood as considering climate change as a fact, but simply dismissing the costs (things like devastation and death on an unprecedented scale) as irrelevant. To truly be a climate nihilist, it seems to me that you would have to have a granular understanding of the morality of being, say, one of the five most powerful people in the world, and still doing everything you can to make climate change worse.