“If we don’t find a solution to burning oil for transport, when we then run out of oil, the economy will collapse and society will come to an end,” Musk said this week during a conversation with astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson.
“If we know we have to get off oil no matter what, we know that is an inescapable outcome, why run this crazy experiment of changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans by adding enormous amounts of CO2 that have been buried since the Precambrian Era?” he added. “That’s crazy. That’s the dumbest experiment in history, by far.”
Tyson sounded surprised: “Can you think of a dumber experiment?” he asked Musk.
“I honestly cannot. What good could possibly come of [staying on oil],” Musk said.
Elon Musk: Burning Fossil Fuels Is the ‘Dumbest Experiment in History, By Far’ | Motherboard
The implication of his statement is that modern civilization exists because of oil. Musk believes that keeping billions of people alive and preventing a collapse of the economy was/is a “dumb experiment” – because we have added 0.0001 mole fraction CO2 to the atmosphere, which he describes as a “huge amount.”
In other words, he wants to make $billions by scaring people into buying electric cars.
As far as his foray into geology goes – plants didn’t even evolve until much later than the Precambrian. Most oil and coal is extracted from Carboniferous Era formations.
We have vast amounts of oil and gas remaining. On days when alarmists aren’t crying about peak oil, they are crying about vast reserves of shale oil, coal and methane hydrates.