The Muskman in action.
Elon Musk and others of his ilk have always ridden high on the idea that having a lot of money allows them to “disrupt” the economic landscape through innovation. In practice the only real innovations are technical ones done by others, and what people like Musk have been adept at doing is repackaging risky investment opportunities into sounding like something cutting edge. Disruption mostly means finding alternative investment packaging for start-up businesses.
On Tuesday, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) held a meeting to discuss plans with the public that would allow Elon Musk’s The Boring Company a new permit for its planned Bastrop County facility. That permit would allow the billionaire’s infrastructure tunnel-building company the right to dump “more than 140,000 gallons of treated wastewater a day into the nearby Colorado River.” Right here.
As you might imagine, Texans who live nearby aren’t too keen on letting a billionaire dump his private trash into a very public waterway. Yahoo reports that at least 400 residents showed up to the meeting. According to HuffPost, one resident, farmer Steve Hipe, had questions for the Boring Company’s environmental consultant. “Am I going to be able to use pond water and not kill my trees? We’re not a big company like y’all. We’re a family-owned farm.”
Proponents of the permit, like Ron Whipple, treasurer for the Bastrop County Water Control and Improvement District, relied on platitudes like, “We can’t stop progress.” But there is one glaring problem with Musk’s company and its supposed desperation for an anti-environmental solution to their wastewater problem: They spent the last two years not planning for it.
RELATED STORY: Of course, Elon Musk is building a fiefdom in Texas where he can rule over his residents/employees
When the Boring Company bought 73 acres of land in northwest Bastrop, Texas, back in May 2021, and began construction, Musk and his company had to know that they needed a real plan for the waste they would be creating. This is the same area of purchase that included the promise of a worker’s town called Snailbrook that Musk could rule over like a fiefdom. The main issue is that the city of Bastrop has also been building a city plant that treats wastewater since 2021. That plant isn’t the Colorado River. Musk and his Boring Company know this, and also know they need a pipeline to be built that will take potential wastewater to the city plant.
Mayor of Bastrop Connie Schroder voiced this concern at the meeting: "The City of Bastrop, like all municipalities, would prefer wastewater to be treated at state-of-the-art treatment plants and it just so happens the City of Bastrop has one under construction.” Resident Chap Ambrose, who lives very close to where the facility is being built, says there are safety concerns "We have a well and we take baths and we drink that water every day. So, if there's a problem, I need to know quickly."
Musk’s Boring Company promises to create low-cost infrastructure for transportation in the way of tunnels. It is, like everything else people like Musk do, a rebranding of the privatization of work that should be done with our tax dollars and owned by us, the taxpayer. Instead, like he did with the Hyperloop and with the tunnel project his Boring Company did in Las Vegas that should have been a municipally controlled train, Musk takes money and focus away from public works projects in order to produce his personalized version of infrastructure.
The promises people like Musk make are the same as the charter schools before them: We can do a thing that can be done by the state better, faster, and for a tiny price. The results so far have also been pretty much the same: mostly projects that are not completed, results that are no better and sometimes worse than what the state would do, and richer CEOs because the real “innovation” is exploiting workers the way 19th century industrialists used to do.
Oh, and by the way, a Musk representative announced at the meeting that the Boring Company and Tesla’s SpaceX program planned on using this permit to dump wastewater, saying: "This is just a short term solution. And ultimately, we hope to not even utilize the full capacity of what's been authorized. We also do want to stress that this is an extremely common method of handling water after it's been treated.”
Will residents be successful in slowing down this version of progress? Ambrose doesn’t have high hopes. "Their compliance history does not give me a lot of confidence. They move as fast as money will buy—unfortunately, they're not careful."
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