Liars Like Elon Musk and Donald Trump Exacerbate Climate Breakdown
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
We are standing on the precipice of a radical change in our shared reality. Threats both real and fake are on the cusp of fundamentally altering how Americans interact with the world. Both have existed for some time, but they are entering a new, more dangerous phase, compounding each other’s effects.
First, the real. Climate change is creating warmer oceans which make hurricanes much more dangerous. Fox 35 Orlando meteorologist Noah Bergen said that Hurricane Milton, which is looking bad in every possible way, is “nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth’s atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.” NBC 6’s John Morales even got choked up on air describing its surreal power.
➡️ NOW: An emotional hurricane #Milton update from @JohnMoralesTV as the storm hits Cat. 5 status.
Take this seriously.
We have you covered here on @nbc6 pic.twitter.com/QEe3E25JGX
— CHRIS HUSH (@ChrisHushNBC) October 7, 2024
This is what the initial goal of a 1.5 degrees maximum increase in global temperature looks like.
We are on track for much more.
There will be many more disasters. More fires. More floods. More deadly heat waves. More historic droughts. More sea level rise. More hurricanes nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth’s atmosphere over this ocean water can produce. More death and destruction.
And this will all be exacerbated by misinformation merchants like Elon Musk. History will remember him as the guy who lit $44 billion on fire and potentially leveraged his golden goose against it, all in a bid to spread as much bad information as far and wide as possible. Twitter once was invaluable during disasters, but X is the opposite. Elon effectively put a megaphone in front of InfoWars and now he’s wondering why all his advertisers are fleeing.
You can see the future right now in North Carolina. Raleigh’s News & Observer noted that porn forum enthusiast and Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson posted conspiracy theories in “widely viewed posts on the social media site X” that attacked state and federal governments over their response to the immense flooding destroying towns across western North Carolina. Like with JD Vance’s admitted lie about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, this is another example of how the right-wing has completely vacated any semblance of shared reality for their own aggrieved fairy tale that may or may not be funded by Russian intelligence.
Things have become so hysteric on the right that Kevin Corbin, a Republican from Macon County, pleaded with the public “to help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods in WNC.” Republican Senator Thom Tillis dismissed the rabid hysteria whipped up by grifters like Trump and Musk, telling CBS News that these falsehoods complicate recovery operations.
When the world’s richest man is personally invested in these falsehoods, both from obviously getting way too high on his own supply and designing a website that incentivizes people to create viral falsehoods to get a share of X’s ad revenue however they can, pleas like the ones from Corbin and Tillis feel as helpless as standing in the way of Hurricane Melton, begging it to stop. Given that Elon Musk is mankind’s least well-adjusted human going through a sad, isolated and drug-fueled midlife crisis, demanding that a hurricane cease its rotation is probably a better use of one’s time than asking Musk to become anyone other than the profoundly small boy he has proven himself to be.
WBTV reports that North Carolina Emergency Management is “working to dispel rumors as false information about Helene response efforts continues to spread on social media,” particularly the lie about how there are supposedly no helicopters rescuing people, which was elevated by Donald Trump at a rally last week. This is patently untrue, but posts with real information like this on X are designed to go a fraction of the distance that obvious lies do.
SCOOP: An unprecedented number of airplanes, helicopters, and drones swooping in to help with Hurricane Helene recovery efforts are now posing a safety hazard.
There were 30 near-mid-air collisions last Saturday, a federal source tells me. pic.twitter.com/cAA4krNeg0
— Pete Muntean (@petemuntean) October 4, 2024
Top officials in North Carolina and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are now being subjected to antisemitic attacks that as The Washington Post reports, “include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, [and] are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X.”
These attacks are causing these officials to fear for their safety, all as a hurricane nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth’s atmosphere over this ocean water can produce bears down on most of Florida.
We are so fucked.
Our mainstream media is mostly a failure of journalism, as their job is primarily to protect America’s imperial interests, of which the planet-poisoning oil companies are a central force. Climate change has never been a big priority in the media, and it has created a vast informational vacuum that bad actors are more than happy to step into. Add in the fact that each climate disaster is seemingly more unprecedented than the previous one, and our fundamentally broken informational environment leads to Reps. like Marjorie Taylor Greene earnestly defending the implication that the government created these hurricanes that hard science is increasingly shocked by.
There is no coming back from this.
We are in a brand-new world that is only moving in one direction. The disintegration of our shared reality is accelerating at a faster pace than climate breakdown, compounding its deadly impacts. Now not only must we deal with unfathomably large hurricanes creating untold levels of destruction, but also the misinformational assault on people in the wake of these disasters that helps lead them to their deaths. We are in a dark place, and there is nothing to suggest that any of this will get better any time soon. Climate breakdown is here, and societal leeches like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are determined to make it worse.