Let's save the planet, but don't make Elon Musk any richer

A Tesla charging station is seen connected to a vehicle in the Changning district of Shanghai on February 24, 2025. (Picture: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

As we know, lots of people were left without power for days on end. Six weeks, and another hemisphere later, large parts of Australia were being battered by Tropical Cyclone Alfred this month. Obviously they have a different naming system there unless it’s their first storm of 2025 or they’ve exhausted the entire alphabet a mere three months into the year. Entire towns in Queensland and northern New South Wales were flooded. Thousands of households had their power cut off for several days. It seems that, wherever you are in the world, the weather is going totally haywire. We’ve seen biblical levels of flooding in Spain leading to horrendous loss of life, and wild fires raging through Los Angeles. Yet some people still deny that climate change is happening, including the current US Government.

I’m fully aware of the hypocrisy in me getting on my high horse about the environment, after flying all the way out to Australia and back to tell jokes. There are plenty of top class Australian comedians who can entertain the folks Down Under. Of course, quite a lot of them will be making the trip up here to Edinburgh in August. Hardly an essential enough service to justify our carbon footprint. Laughter may be the best medicine, but we’re hardly Medicins Sans Frontieres.

The comedy circuit itself is hardly the cause of global warning. That flight was taking off from Edinburgh whether I was on it or not. We all need to look at the much bigger picture. The irony is that, having travelled 10,000 miles to get there, my day-to-day carbon footprint in Australia was much lower than it would be at home. I made no car journeys, reaching all of my shows on foot or by public transport.

I would hang my washing out on the balcony, and it was dry within half an hour. No need for a tumble dryer, although bizarrely there was one in the apartment. Also, short distance flights are actually worse for the environment than long haul, and there really is no other viable way of reaching the southern hemisphere these days. If anything is likely to dissuade people from taking such huge trips, it’s the journey itself. My flight back from Adelaide on Tuesday took off at 10pm, and we flew west for 14 hours to Doha. We were travelling against the passage of time, so the entire flight was in darkness.

Stuck in a cramped seat for hours of perpetual night, sporadically sleeping and waking, having no idea of the time of day and only distracted by the TV and food being brought to your seat at weird meal times is the perfect preparation for moving into a nursing home. So what can we all do to save the planet? We could start switching over to electric cars of course. But who wants to seen driving a Tesla these days? The worst thing we can do is make Elon Musk any richer. Therein lies global destruction.