Invitation to Elon Musk to educate his BFF Trump about how to make the earth better again

Echo editorial publihed in the Houston Chronicle

https://www.chappatte.com/en/images/elon-and-donald-bromance

Editorial: Hey, dude ❗— hope you’re enjoying Mar-A-Lago.  Yeah, a

nd congrats on backing the winner. We have no doubt spending at least 💲119 million to ensure that Donald Trump returns to the White House will pay off handsomely for you.

We hear you’ve seized a Rasputin-esque role as the “First Buddy” on the transition team, floating potential Cabinet appointees and threatening to fund a primary to any senator who stands in their way. There are rumors that even more taxpayer dollars will flow to SpaceX to boost your colony-on-Mars ambitions. We imagine you’re whispering sweet nothings in Trump’s ear about eliminating the tax credits that benefit Tesla’s competitors in the electric vehicle market. Surely, you’re also going to leverage your role as the co-leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency to snip the red tape that constrains your efforts to create self-driving cars and brain implants.

All of that self-serving enrichment is going to be easy, right? Maybe too easy, even. We know how much you hunger for challenges — to do big things that the world believes are impossible. So we have a dare for you: We bet you can't get your buddy Trump to save the planet.

Remember back in 2016, when nearly 200 countries agreed that, to avoid calamity, average global temperatures must rise no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels? Well, we blew past that threshold a year ago. Human civilization has never experienced a climate this warm in recorded history, which means that droughts, extreme weather, collapse of massive ice sheets and sea level rise could wipe out some of our international neighbors. 

But guess what else❓ It also means that Texas, your new home state, will experience many more years of blistering heat that'll make 2023, — the hottest year on record here — feel like a cool breeze.

Remember your idealistic youth❓ According to one of your biographers, your chief concern was global warming; you also worried that the planet might run out of fossil fuels. Since then, your Teslas have showed the world what electric vehicles can do. And you've pioneered battery storage, crucial for capturing the energy generated by wind farms and solar arrays. "Green Tony Stark," people called you — or at least, they used to call you that, before you crossed over into the MAGA-verse.

Sometimes we see glimmers of that superhero still in you. On Saturday, for instance, you looked cool in that meme you tweeted, showing yourself hovering high above skyscrapers, in an Iron Man suit. You joked then that you're "Irony Man." But c'mon: Secretly, wouldn't you actually, earnestly like to save Earth❓🌎

Elon, we need you. As Trump’s BFF, you're in a unique position to nudge the president of the U.S. — the world's most powerful man — toward a clean energy future. Trump sees you, the richest man on the planet, as a fellow Master of the Universe, a corporate exec with a knack for bending federal regulations to his whim. If there’s anyone who can match Trump’s “dragon energy,” it’s you.

Plus, except for you, Trump is surrounded by people whose grasp of science is shaky at best. (We'd love to catch up sometime and hear what you really think about people like your DoGE partner Vivek Ramaswamy, who doesn't think climate change is a big deal.)

Trump listens to you, Elon: After you endorsed him, we noticed how his rhetoric about electric vehicles changed. He went from railing against “stupid” and “gutless” automakers ramping up EV production to praising EVs as “incredible.”

Can you work that same magic and save President Joe Biden's efforts to jumpstart domestic solar manufacturing? It’s cheaper in the short-term to get solar panels from China, but that's no way to make America first.

Play to his ego, Elon. Frame it as: Only you can save the world, Donald. 🌏😒😟😦

And so, we suspect, do you. So please, Elon, surprise everyone. Throw off your supervillain disguise and assume your mantle as a Climate Hero. Show that you're actually a force for good in the world. You once said you cared more about “the reality of goodness than the perception of it.” Now is your chance to prove it.

Only you can save the world,🌍 Elon. We're counting on you.Remaining in the Paris Accords would be Donald J. Trump's big, bold, surprising idea! Who would expect Trump, of all people, to pull the U.S. away from coal and into cool, futuristic forms of energy? To lead the world out of danger? To save us, just in the nick of time, from fires, floods and certain doom?

It'd be a great plot twist, right? Something that no one expects?

Trump loves a plot twist. And so do we.