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LOL: Elon Musk on Sharks, Whales and Government Over-Regulation
Oct 20, 2024
A hilarious true story told by Elon Musk about how government over-regulation strangles innovation in America. His story is about how SpaceX was forced to do studies on whether Starship could potentially hit sharks and/or whales when landing in the ocean.
Elon Musk plans a ‘bonfire of nonsense regulations’
By Timothy Cama | 10/22/2024 01:40 PM EDT
With tales of sharks, whales and water dumping, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is targeting environmental agencies and rules.
Elon Musk at a town hall in support of former President Donald Trump in Folsom, Pennsylvania, last week. He is seeking big cuts to federal regulations. Matt Rourke/AP
Elon Musk is starting to lay out his plans for slashing the federal government’s regulations in his signature provocative ways.
The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has started providing some details for what to expect in his role as government efficiency czar, which former President Donald Trump has promised him should he win, in a series of town hall events in battleground Pennsylvania.
He’s also using the events to air his grievances about environmental agencies his businesses have dealt with as a way of underscoring his point.
In one case, he complained about being fined for dumping water to cool a launching pad. In another, he said he was asked to protect sharks and whales from falling rockets.
Musk, the world’s richest man, has given $75 million to his own pro-Trump super political action committee. And he is making it clear that he has little regard for potential downsides of his deregulatory spree.
“There’s something like 428 federal agencies. That’s almost two agencies per year since the founding of the country, and more being created,” Musk said at one event last week in Folsom, Pennsylvania. “I call this strangulation by overregulation. This is crazy.”
If Trump beats Vice President Kamala Harris and is reelected, “We’ll have a real opportunity to reduce the size of government, to have sensible regulation and really free the American people to do what they want to do.”
Later in the event, one attendee asked Musk if he could at some point make a stack of the regulations Trump is rolling back and take a flamethrower to it, streamed live on his social media service, X.
Musk laughed and called it a “great idea.”
“I think a bonfire of nonsense regulations would be epic, yeah,” he continued. But he then offered something of a caveat.
“Sometimes people are concerned, like, ‘What if there’s some regulation that’s actually really important and we get rid of that?’ I say, ‘You know what? We’ll put it right back.’ Problem solved.”
Both the regulatory and deregulatory processes take months and have multiple steps including analysis and public comment, as governed by the Administrative Procedure Act and other laws, and they usually take months to complete. The actions are then subject to potential litigation.
Trump has promised that he would eliminate at least 10 regulations in office for each one new regulation, a steep escalation from his last stint in office, when it was two for one.
In energy and the environment, those rollbacks will include most, if not all, of President Joe Biden’s agenda, including pollution limits for greenhouse gases and other emissions from power plants and greenhouse gas rules for cars.
Citing personal experience
Musk’s town hall events have frequently touched on his businesses’ travails dealing with federal agencies and regulations.SpaceX, for instance, was fined $140,000 by EPA, Musk said, allegedly for dumping water at its Texas launch site to cool a launchpad. The company used drinking water to ensure it was clean, but that wasn’t enough for EPA, he said.
“We didn’t know there was a permit needed for that,” Musk continued. “Water falls from the sky all the time. Starbase is in a tropical thunderstorm area. It rains so much that the roads get flooded. Why are we getting fined for a tiny amount of water on the ground?”
EPA reached a proposed consent decree with SpaceX, announced in September, in which the company would pay $148,378 for various alleged violations of water pollution standards, including dumping liquid oxygen and a total of more than 200,000 gallons of wastewater into wetlands connected to the Rio Grande over eight occasions. “The water discharges are in direct contact with rocket exhaust and have been identified as industrial process wastewater,” an EPA spokesperson said of SpaceX’s activities, declining to comment further.
Musk provided few details on another issue, in which the Boring Co., his tunnel construction concern, has been waiting more than two years for a permit for a “simple tunnel” under a river. He did not say which agency the company applied to.
He recounted another frustrating issue with NOAA Fisheries, which required SpaceX to analyze the potential impact on sharks from its spacecraft slashing down in the Pacific Ocean. But the agency initially refused to provide the data it had on shark concentrations, he said.
“I’m like, ‘Am I in a comedy sketch here?’ Like, they’re worried about the shark density data, like the people who hunt sharks for shark fins somehow getting their hands on this shark data,” Musk recalled.
SpaceX ended up getting the data. “We could run the analysis and say, ‘Yeah, the sharks are going to be fine.’ But they wouldn’t let us proceed with launch until we did this crazy shark data,” he said.
“So we thought, ‘OK, now we’re done.’ And they said, ‘Well, what about whales?’”
On X, the social media platform he owns, Musk promised to tell a tale about how SpaceX was “forced by the government to kidnap seals, put earphones on them and play sonic boom sounds to see if they seemed upset.” While he did not tell that story at any recent event, he has previously relayed the tale regarding rocket launches in California.
He said federal officials were concerned that the sonic booms from the launches would negatively impact seal procreation. To test that, he said, seals were strapped to a board and forced to wear headphones. “The amazing part was how calm the seal was,” he said.
“I don’t think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on,” he told an interviewer. “Frickin’ seals with frickin’ headphones!”
NOAA Fisheries did not respond to requests to confirm Musk’s claims.
‘Your freedoms have just been eroded’
At a Sunday town hall in Pittsburgh, Musk declared that killing regulations would benefit everyone.“Your freedoms have just been eroded year after year with more and more government laws and regulations and regulatory authorities,” Musk continued. “It’s essential for us to unwind that process and restore your personal freedom. And with that will come great prosperity and personal happiness, I believe.”
Musk’s allegiance with the Republican Party has grown in recent years and peaked after his July endorsement of Trump. In addition to the $75 million super PAC contribution, Musk is working to increase voter registration and turnout, giving $1 million a day to a random Pennsylvania voter who signs a petition on his website and running a voter turnout effort for Trump’s campaign.
The political moves contrast with Musk’s longtime reliance on government for his businesses. Tesla, for example, has long backed strict EPA auto emissions rules, which incentivize electric vehicles and have allowed the company to sell compliance credits to other companies. SpaceX is a major government contractor.
Elon Musk plans a ‘bonfire of nonsense regulations’
With tales of sharks, whales and water dumping, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is targeting environmental agencies and rules.
www.eenews.net
