HOW GREEN IS ELON MUSK REALLY?

Despite his success with electric vehicles, the billionaire has not won over environmentalists.

- PETER VANHAM

Earth faces an imminent threat, and unless we change our course, human life as we know it will become impossible here. What do we do?

Most would say we must do all we can to prevent that bleak scenario by limiting the harmful impact of human activities. "There is no planet B," environmentalists point out.

Ask the billionaire Elon Musk, however, and you may get a very different reply. "We don't want to be one of those single-planet species," Musk said in 2021 at the launch of a SpaceX rocket into orbit. "We want to be a multi-planet species." Musk added that he is "highly confident" that SpaceX will land humans on Mars in the near future.

It's a mindset akin to that of the Krypton scientist Jor-El, father of DC Comics' Superman: As your planet explodes, send your offspring away in a space pod to ensure the survival of your species elsewhere in the galaxy. And indeed, Musk doesn't seem to have let go of his childhood fascination with dashing, planet-hopping superheroes.