Billionaire visionary Elon Musk painted a bleak picture of the future on Wednesday when he said the current refugee crisis is just a glimpse of what we can expect if nothing is done to address climate change.
“Today’s refugee problem is perhaps a small indication of what the future will be like if we do not take action with respect to climate change,” Musk said during his opening remarks at a business seminar organized by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in Berlin on Thursday.
“Today the challenge is based on millions of people, but in the future, based on what the scientific consensus is the problem will be hundreds of millions and much more severe,” he said.
Musk drove his point home by asking “In 20, 30, 40 years in the future what do you say to your kids or your grandkids?...When they ask ‘Why didn’t you do anything?’ What will you tell them?”
The SpaceX and Tesla CEO is no stranger to speaking about the effects that carbon dioxide emissions are having on the earth.
Musk said earlier this year that burning fossil fuels is the “dumbest experiment in history.” He hit on this point again during his speech in Berlin.
“There are a lot of things that a are happening in the world today that are important, and that deserve our attention, but I think it is also important to ask ‘what is the most important in the long-term? What are the actions that if we don’t take them today they will result in a terrible future?’” he said.
“It’s very important that we take action today and recognize that we are making a very significant change to chemical constituency of atmosphere and the ocean and one that is impossible to reverse. And I think when we look back on these days in the future, we want to be able to say that we did the actions that were right.”
Musk also weighed in on the Volkswagen controversy saying that cheating diesel emissions was "obviously bad," but he added that the world should be focused on getting rid of carbon emissions completely.
You can watch the full interview with Musk on the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy's website.
