- Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he had suggested a carbon tax to the Biden government.
- The idea was rejected because it was “too politically difficult,” he said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
- Musk has advocated a carbon tax since 2015.
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Elon Musk says he suggested a carbon tax to the Biden government, but the idea was dismissed as too divisive.
Appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Thursday, Tesla’s CEO said: “I talked to the Biden management – new management – and they said ‘well, that looks politically too difficult’.”
Musk did not say when he spoke to the Biden government, but he referred to it twice as “incoming”, suggesting that the conversation took place before President Joe Biden took office on January 20.
He added that his space exploration company SpaceX would pay any carbon tax. Bloomberg reported last month that SpaceX was trying to obtain regulatory authorization to drill for natural gas in Texas.
“I think the Biden government should take a firm stand on the situation,” said Musk. “It is at least half the reason they were elected.”
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Biden’s manifesto on climate change never included a carbon tax, although he emphasized environmental policies during his campaign and joined the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day as president.
“The Paris Agreement is just a piece of paper, unless you do something about it,” said Musk, calling it “practically toothless”.
This is not the first time Musk has made noise about a carbon tax. The Tesla billionaire asked for one for the first time during a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris in 2015. In 2017, while acting as a consultant to the Trump administration, Musk also allegedly pushed for a carbon tax.
Musk left the two advisory boards on which he served for the Trump White House in June 2017, after Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement.
In his interview with Rogan, Musk said that CO2 production is currently “externally without prices”, that is, there are no market incentives to avoid the use of fossil fuels. “If we just put a price on it, the market will react sensibly,” he said.
He also called on the oil and gas industries to stop lobbying against a carbon tax and said the “smartest thing” they could do was to support it to escape a bad public image.
Musk’s appearance on Rogan’s podcast came four days after the billionaire released details about a $ 100 million competition he is funding for carbon capture technology.
Musk also received criticism recently about his commitments to climate change, after Tesla announced it would start accepting payments in Bitcoin. The Bitcoin mining process consumes more electricity annually than some nation states, including Argentina.