Before the Flood
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (2)
Transcript
0:01Elon MuskI mean, the fossil fuel industry is the biggest industry in the world. They have more money and more influence than any other sector. So I mean, the more that there can be sort of popular uprising against that, the better.
0:14Elon MuskBut I think the scientific fact of the matter is we are unavoidably headed towards some level of harm. So the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result.
0:30Leonardo DiCaprioWow. Holy crap, that's a good robot. Whoa. What is your grand vision for all of this?
0:38Elon MuskThe point of the Gigafactory is to get the cost of batteries down to the point where it's affordable.
0:43Leonardo DiCaprioRight.
0:44Elon MuskBatteries are critical to a sustainable energy future. The sun doesn't shine all the time, so got to store it in a battery.
0:52Leonardo DiCaprioHow is this going to help developing nations that have massive populations that need to have power?
0:58Elon MuskSo the advantage of solar and batteries is that you can avoid building electricity plants at all. So you could be a remote village and have solar panels that charge a battery pack that then supplies power to the whole village without ever having to run thousands of miles of high voltage cable all over the place.
1:16Elon MuskIt's like what happened with landline phones versus cellular phones in a lot of developed countries. They just didn't do the landline phones, they just went straight to cellulose. We actually did the calculation to say, like, what would it take to transition the whole world to its sustainable energy?
1:32Elon MuskWhat kind of throughput would you actually need? And you need 100 gigafactories.
1:38Leonardo DiCaprioA hundred of these?
1:39Elon Musk100 of these, yes.
1:40Leonardo DiCaprioThat would make the United States.
1:42Elon MuskNo, the whole world.
1:43Leonardo DiCaprioThe whole world.
1:44Elon MuskThe whole world. All energy.
1:46Leonardo DiCaprioThat's it.
1:48Elon MuskYeah.
1:49Leonardo DiCaprioThat sounds knowledgeable. That sounds manageable.
1:52Elon MuskYeah. The Gigafactory, when it's complete, I'll have the largest footprint of any building in the world. Counting multiple levels, it could be as much as 15 million square feet.
2:06Elon MuskSo Tesla can't build 100 gigafactories. The thing that's really going to make difference is if companies that are much bigger than Tesla do the same thing. If the big industrial companies in China and the US and Europe, the big car companies, if they also do this, then collectively we can accelerate the transition to sustainable energy.
2:26Elon MuskAnd if government sets the rules to favor sustainable energy, we can get there really quickly. But it's really fundamental. Unless there's a price put on carbon,
2:36Leonardo DiCapriowe're never going to be able to make the transition that we need to in time. Correct? Yeah.
2:40Elon MuskAnd the only way to do that is basically with a carbon tax.