People are Running “The Dumbest Experiment in History” Says Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, chairman of SolarCity and CEO of Tesla Motors, had some interesting things to say in an interview about fossil fuels and about how humanity is taking a huge risk by continuing to use them for its energy needs. To be more specific, Musk stated that people are running “the dumbest experiment in history” by continuing to burn fossil fuels, and he may actually have a point. According to Musk, the biggest problem is not necessarily that we’ll run out of fossil fuels someday but that we’ll be forced to stop extracting them at some point because we’ll simply do too much damage to the planet. Current data from oil and gas giant BP suggests that we’ll run out of coal by 2121 at current extraction rates, while natural gas reserves will be depleted by 2069. Oil will run out by 2067, and even though we might find new sources of oil deep under the ocean or in tar sands, extracting it will be too costly.

As far as the Earth’s atmosphere is concerned, some researchers believe that we’ve already reached the point where there’s enough carbon in the atmosphere to create a serious impact on human life. Tesla aims to convince humanity that cars can run perfectly fine without oil, but then there’s the problem of producing electricity using clean sources. Viable alternatives would be geothermal power, wind power, hydroelectric solutions and solar power. Even nuclear power is much cleaner than coal.

During the interview, Elon Musk stated the following:

“The greater the change to the chemical composition of the physical, chemical makeup of the oceans and atmosphere [due to increased carbon emissions], the greater the long-term effect will be. Given that at some point they’ll run out anyway, why run this crazy experiment to see how bad it’ll be? We know it’s at least some bad, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it’ll be really bad.”

Below you will find a chart that explains our situation at the moment. The main idea is that the sooner we move on to sustainable energy, the better it will be for us and our planet.

Thank you TechInsider for providing us with this information.