I’ve stopped using Twitter. And you should too

The Musk and Trump conversation was the final straw for me.

The reasons for leaving Twitter are pretty much self-explanatory at this stage. As researcher and climate writer Ketan Joshi put it in April 2024, “You are the fuel that energises Elon Musk’s hate machine”. In the four months since then, the hatred and the misinformation has become significantly worse.

There’s no shortage of critiques of what’s gone wrong with Twitter since Musk paid US$44 billion for it in October 2022. And now there’s Grok.

Twitter is dead

Joshi argues that Twitter is dead and has been replaced by a “seething, hate-soaked racist right-wing fever swamp”.

Before Musk, Twitter was a useful source of information for me. I would see lots of interesting tweets and people would regularly contact me with articles, research papers, reports, and new pieces of information. That happens far less often these days.

Climate activists, writers, scientists, academics, and journalists posting on Twitter often receive responses from climate deniers. These are often filled with misinformation, nonsense, and outright lies.

Joshi highlights a report by Climate Action Against Disinformation that shows that Twitter has the worst policies for dealing with climate-related lies:

Musk throttles Substack links

REDD-Monitor’s posts haven’t received many responses from climate deniers.

That is, at least in part, because in April 2023, Musk decided he wasn’t going to allow Twitter users to like, share, or comment on any tweet that links to a Substack post. Musk’s decision was in retaliation for Substack launching Notes, which he saw as competition for Twitter.

Sixteen months later, Musk, the so-called champion of free speech, is still throttling any tweets that link to Substack posts.

Predictably, this has had a dramatic effect on the number of people seeing links to REDD-Monitor’s posts on Twitter.

On the left are four tweets from just before Musk started throttling Substack links. And on the right is my penultimate post on Twitter. (The last thing I will post on Twitter will be a link to the post you are currently reading.)

When Musk bought Twitter, REDD-Monitor had just over 7,000 followers. That figure has since fallen to 6,926. (I’ve lost three more followers while writing this post.)

Obviously, it’s frustrating that so few of the people following REDD-Monitor on Twitter actually see my tweets about new posts on Substack.

I do have some sympathy for people who have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, who do not want to leave. George Monbiot, for example, has 578,900 followers. Monbiot argues that he should remain, “Because of this solid political principle: Never let the far right drive you out of any space.”

As journalist Justin Ling argues, the influence that Twitter has largely comes from the influence that journalists and politicians give it. Imagine if Monbiot, and other journalists with large followings, stopped using Twitter apart from to tell his followers that he’s now on BlueSky — where he has 16,800 followers. How many people would follow him over to what is, at least at the moment, a far more pleasant place than Twitter?

Twitterbots

These days Twitter is riddled with bots. In some cases the only engagement I get on Twitter comes from bots. The screenshot below shows just some of the bots that liked one of my recent tweets. (I’ve pixelated part of the numbers in the screenshot below just in case it’s a pig butchering scam.)

Musk and Trump: The final straw for me

As Bill McKibben points out, Elon Musk’s recent conversation with Donald Trump included, “The dumbest climate conversation of all time.” It’s clear that Musk’s previous comments about addressing climate change had more to do with selling Teslas than his concern about the climate crisis.

Here’s a fact check of Musk and Trump talking about the climate.

Sea level rise

Trump dismisses the problem of sea level rise. “The ocean is going to rise one eighth of an inch over the next 400 years,” he says. In fact, according to NASA, sea level has risen by 104.7 millimetres since 1993 (that’s more than four inches in 31 years).

Then Trump says, “You’ll have more oceanfront property.” Which is just stupid.

Drill, baby, drill

“We’re going to drill, baby, drill,” Trump says. His justification for this is to reduce the cost of heating homes. And to provide enough energy for A.I. Trump wants the US to be “competitive with China, because that’s our primary competitor for this, on the A.I.”

Trump suggests the US will need almost twice as much electricity as it currently uses. “Tremendous electricity,” he says.

“Sure,” Musk says. Then he changes the topic to inflation.

Neither of these two clowns have anything to say about what this proposed massive fossil fuel extraction will have on the climate crisis.

Trump talks about drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “Ronald Reagan couldn’t do it,” he says. “Nobody could do it. Everybody tried. Nobody could do it. I got it approved.”

Trump criticises the Biden administration for putting a temporary moratorium in place on oil and gas operation in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Trump calls the moratorium a “disgrace”. He promises to reverse it.

Trump says “It could be bigger than Saudi Arabia.” That’s just not true. The New York Times notes that the Interior Department estimates that the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve could produce about 10 billion barrels of oil. Saudi Arabia has reserves of somewhere around 260 billion barrels of oil.

If we stopped using oil and gas “the economy would collapse”

Musk introduces the climate crisis by saying his views “are actually pretty moderate”.

Then he says that, “If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse.”

As Emily Atkin points out on Heated, this is a straw man argument. No one is arguing that we should stop using oil and gas “right now”. Obviously, a transition is necessary.

The need for a transition away from fossil fuels is not, however, an argument for delaying action. We urgently need to find ways of leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

In 2021, Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, told The Guardian that,

“If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now — from this year.”

Peak oil

Later on in his pointless, stupid, moronic conversation with Trump, Musk says,

“I don’t think it’s right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry. And the world has a certain demand for oil and gas, and it’s probably better if the United States provides that than some other countries. And it would help with prosperity in the US.”

So, according to Musk, if oil corporations are profiting, and the US economy is booming, we don’t even need to think about the climate crisis.

“We do, over time, want to move to a sustainable energy economy,” Musk says, “Because eventually you run out of oil and gas.”

Trump claims that there might be somewhere between 100 and 500 years of fossil fuels left.

Both Trump and Musk are oblivious to the devastating impact that extracting the remaining oil and gas and burning it would have on the climate, as well as the air pollution, water pollution, and destruction associated with extracting fossil fuels.

1,000 ppm CO₂

Musk shows that he really has no idea about climate science by arguing that the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere only becomes a problem at 1,000 parts per million, because then “you start getting headaches and nausea”.

McKibben points out that Musk is basing this on a 2020 paper that argues if CO₂ levels inside buildings reach 1,400 ppm that, “may cut our basic decision-making ability by 25 percent, and complex strategic thinking by around 50 percent”.

McKibben notes that, “There is not a serious climate scientist on planet earth who has ever contemplated a thousand parts per million with anything less than panic and horror.”

But Musk’s interest is not in science. It is to delay action on the climate crisis. “It’s not like the house is on fire,” Musk says. An increase of 2 ppm per year gives us almost 300 years, according to Musk’s insane calculation.

“We don’t need to . . . prevent people from having steaks”

“We don’t need to rush,” Musk says, “and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming, or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.”

Trump, obviously, agrees. “How crazy is that?” he says. “You have farmers that are not allowed to farm any more and have to get rid of their cattle.”

Clearly, neither Musk nor Trump has ever considered going vegan. (Trump can’t even pronounce the word “vegan”.)

On The Vegan Dispatch, Michael Corthell points out that Musk’s claim that we can continue eating stake is “dangerously out of touch with the facts . . . the meat industry is one of the leading drivers of global warming”.

Musk vs. public transport

Musk, utterly predictably, uses the conversation with Trump to promote Tesla.

“We don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re, you know, sexy.”

Obviously, neither Trump nor Musk mention the fact that replacing petrol driven vehicles with electric vehicles on its own will not address the climate crisis. We need to completely rethink the way we travel, the way we build, and the way towns and cities are planned.

As Alexandre Milovanoff of the University of Toronto points out, “There are three ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from passenger transport: avoid the need to travel, shift the transportation modes or improve the technologies.”

Tesla looks only at the third option. “Governments need to massively invest in public transit, cycling and walking infrastructure to make them larger, safer and more reliable,” Milovanoff says.

Musk has described public transport as “painful”. He said, “It sucks.” And, “It’s a pain in the ass.” The reality, of course, is that Musk’s business model involves selling cars. That’s why he’s opposed to public transport.

The planet’s temperature is increasing

Trump argues that temperatures in some places on the planet are going up, while other are “going the opposite direction”. But the reality is that the average temperature has been increasing for a long time. And few areas of the planet are actually cooling. 2023 was the hottest year on record.

“Nuclear warming”

“The one thing that I don’t understand,” Trump says, “is that people talk about global warming, or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming.”

This needs a little unpacking.

First, the thought that there’s just one thing that Donald Trump doesn’t understand about the climate crisis would be hilarious if he wasn’t running for election as US president.

Brian Klaas, author and Associate Professor of Global Politics at University College London, has an explanation for billionaires’ arrogance in his essay, “Billionaires and the Evolution of Overconfidence”.

Klaas notes that billionaires are “off the charts” when it comes to the Lake Wobegon Effect.¹ That’s the belief that they are above average “in intelligence, sense of humour, driving ability, and similar traits”. Klaas’s essay is well worth a read for an explanation of a great deal of the gibberish that Musk and Trump say in their conversation.

Second, Trump mentions “global warming” and “climate change” as if no one has ever called this “climate breakdown”, or “climate crisis”, or “climate emergency”.

Third, Trump has invented “nuclear warming”. It’s true that nuclear war would be a disaster. But as usual, Trump is confused. Firestorms following a nuclear war would lead to nuclear winter, not “nuclear warming”.

During a conversation about nuclear safety, Musk goes as far as playing down the impact of the two nuclear weapons that the US dropped on Japan during World War II:

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they’re like full cities again. So it’s really not something that, you know, it’s not as scary as people think, basically.”

Trump says, “Right, that’s great, that’s great.”

Listening to these two nincompoops dismissing the horror of nuclear war, after dismissing the seriousness of the climate crisis, is terrifying.

On 6 August 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima that devastated the city. Three days later, it bombed Nagasaki. About 210,000 people were killed.

Of course, 80 years later both cities have been rebuilt.

I wonder whether Musk will try telling the survivors of the atomic bombs, the Hibakusha, that it was “not as scary as people think”.

So, I’m going to stop using my REDD-Monitor account on Twitter. The account will remain active (at least for the time-being — I may delete it in the future). I will delete my 33,400 tweets. My only post on Twitter will be a link to this post.

In future, I’ll focus mainly on Substack Notes and BlueSky.

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1. In Garrison Kiellor’s radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion”, Lake Wobegon was “a place where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”.