Bill Maher stands in defense of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter on Friday, as he sees the billionaire through other glasses: as a means to an end of the climate crisis.
On Friday’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” Musk, of course, was a topic of conversation on the roundtable, with both “the left” and “the right” having strong feelings of what one side fears will be (as has already been proven) an onslaught of racist and antisemitic hate speech on Twitter and the other as just plain free speech.
The host-comedian sees the ongoing vitriol but turned the focus on the environment to make a point about the benefit of having Musk in the picture.
“We saw in the paper this week only something like 26 of 193 countries who signed on to do things about the environment have done anything,” Maher said. “The convenience that is brought to us by things that pollute is — I’ve said this to the audience many times — if you could tomorrow give up the TV remote and have it cure global warming, would you do it?”
Maher thinks that most Americans would not. And that’s where Musk comes in.
“I would just say this about Elon Musk,” Maher began. “Do we really want to piss off the geniuses? I mean, considering that this week we learned once again that we’re not going to solve the environment ourselves. We’re not gonna do it by the model we thought we could do it by, which is everybody needs to conserve more and not just do whatever you want because that pollutes. That’s not working. That failed. It looks like we’re gonna have to have a technological response to this.”
He continued: “I don’t know if Elon Musk is the God we want to piss off. I’m like, I want to identify the people who might have a shot at fixing this with technology.”
In January, Musk tweeted that he was “donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology.” Later that month, he announced plans to launch a new initiative to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into rocket fuel to help alleviate climate change.
“SpaceX is starting a programme to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into rocket fuel. Please join if interested,” Musk tweeted, adding that the initiative “will be important for Mars.”
For details about the initiative, click here.
