Meh, it's a monocultural wood farm not some kind of untouched nature reserve. Tesla also has to replant trees in a different location. Lots of legitimate things to criticize about Tesla, but this is barely worth mentioning.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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It's not a brilliant criticism of Tesla, but it's a fine reminder for anyone who still believe in eternal growth and that we can consume our way out of the climate crisis. You're not doing the world a favour by buying a brand new EV.
It's far better to buy an EV than a combustion car. Yes, walking everywhere would be more environmentally friendly.
Or cycling. Or public transportation. Or buying a used car for when you need it and driving as little as possible.
This idea that everyone should be buying a new car every decade or so is killing us.
Cars have a limited lifespan and new ones are needed and desired.
To a degree, but cars are not designed with disability in mind, and they are pushed on consumers to upgrade much more often than needed. Car lobbyist have successfully pushed towards building societies where everybody needs cars.
It's not natural and it's not necessary.
Of course new cars will still be needed and they should not be running on gasoline. But we need to consume less. Buying a new EV does not give you a low climate footprint.
If I remember correctly, there is a pine monoculture typical of Brandenburg. It's not a forest, it's a plantation that would have been harvested in a few years anyway. The ecological damage is therefore very limited.
It's weird that the article forgot to mention this little fact
Shoddy journalism.
These days I just lump all shoddy journalism and ragebait in with intentional, calculated, psychological warfare. Why give them the benefit of the doubt when they don't respect your energy or attention?
If serious, that is a cynicism verging on the pathological. How much did you pay for journalism this month? And yet you expect it to be professional and ethical and to "respect your attention".
They don't do it for those specific trees though. They do it because clearing trees and building a factory changes the region's water household:
“In one of the driest regions in Germany, too much of the environment has already been destroyed,” she said. “An expansion and thus even more destruction of forests and endangerment of the protected drinking water area must be prevented.”
Halff said the lost trees were equivalent to about 13,000 tonnes of CO2, the annual amount emitted by 2,800 [average internal combustion engine cars]in the US. “So that’s a fraction of the number of the electric cars that Tesla produces and sells every quarter,” he said. “You always have trade-offs, so you need to be aware of what the terms of the trade-off are.”
Don’t you just love it when people “forget” to include construction of the facility and production of those EVs in their CO2 calculations?
Aside from that, EVs aren’t going to save the environment. They will only make cities’ air pollution a little less.
What EVs will do is save us from an ever-approaching energy crisis, by making an alternative to motor fuel, and reducing global dependence on places like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for fuel, which limits those nations' ability to suppress their own populations or export fuckery outside their borders.
Yeah but it seems like public transport is always the skeleton at the ocean floor meme in these discussions. Good public transport would make cities more livable and reduce pollution dramatically and reduce our dependence on petrostates.
Sure, it’s not feasible everywhere but at least here in Germany it’s pretty good for regional transport in towns and cities but always feels kinda disregarded and forgotten by politicians.
Public infrastructure. Public transportation, but also bike infrastructure. Not just thrown in as an afterthought, but as the primary concern. As long as people living in cities still think it's somewhat reasonable to own a car we're failing.
We keep saving us from more crises by manufacturing more shit and consuming more resources for „just a stepping stone” solution. Making more shit sacs rich in the process.
Interesting how that works.
Truth is that humanity will have to face degrowth at some point. It could be gradual and planned now or it will be sudden and chaotic in a rather near future. All those EVs we keep pumping out to keep our 1960’s dream of personal transportation afloat consume a lot of materials and resources we could’ve placed elsewhere or just leave fucking untouched.
What do you envision when you say degrowth?
Because for good or bad, I don't see a future anytime soon where personal vehicles are gone. People need to get around to live and in most places public transit isn't up to the task. To my mind best case we get governments to start building more public transit and as those systems get better it creates a virtuous cycle where more and more people can practically make the change.
In the meantime if we switch from gas to electric cars that is a net positive, even though switching to public transit would be much more of a net positive.
What do you envision when you say degrowth?
Your life in a solarpunk commune. It's July and a sunny day and you're happy. Today you got allocated a four tomatoes as an extra ration. You were looking forward to this moment since you traded 50 g of hard parmesan cheese from a traveling salesman three months ago. Now you finally have the ingredients cook an italian dish for a romantic dinner with one of your polyamorous lovers. You wait for your shared bed to free up once your bunkmate's sleep shift ends. You have enough time to drink your ration of recycled and filtered pisswater. Ah, the taste of degrowth and making the world a better place. Today you feel luxurious and spend some of the water to wash your face and genitals. The soap made from corpse fat stings in your blisters and scabs. The cough that has been bothering your for a while has gotten worse. You cry yourself to sleep in a bed still moist from someone else's sweat.
Sure, we just need to be able to finf an ethically and ecologically responsible source for lithium.
Top 10 largest lithium mines are in Australia, Chile, Argentina and China.
The kicker is CO² emissions for extraction.
Approximately 15 tonnes of CO2 are emitted for every tonne of lithium extracted.
And then the actual production.
Tesla Model 3 holds an 80 kWh lithium-ion battery. CO2 emissions for manufacturing that battery would range between 3120 kg (about 3 tons) and 15,680 kg (about 16 tons). I'm pretty sure this figure includes the extraction emissions.
Is this less than the life cycle emissions for manufacturing fuel and ICE vehicles?
Of course! Does that mean we should just look at that as job done?
No, not in the least. We absolutely have to get clean energy into every step of the process, especially refining.
Is this less than the life cycle emissions for manufacturing fuel and ICE vehicles?
Yes, far more. ICE vehicles are terrible for the environment all around. They also use toxic materials and mined minerals in their production.
I remember when climate activists were storming this factory and Lemmy users berated me for calling out the fact that Tesla factories and electric cars in general are a fucking disaster for the environment. It's pathetic how easily people are convinced that 10 tonnes of e-waste is the solution to the toxic sludge slowly drowning us all
If a car drives more than 60.000 km in its lifetime, a battery powered vehicle will be more environmentally friendly. With every additional kilometer driven, it will be better than combustion vehicles.
Sure, driving less is always better.
Yeah, we need less cars overall. But those cars we build should be BEVs mainly.
Also there is global and local environmental effects. What can have relatively smaller global effects can still have huge local effects, and subsequently indirect global effects, that may not be attributed correctly.
The opposition to the Tesla plant is mainly because of their lavish consumption of ground water in a strongly stressed water resource, intransparency about potential pollution to that water resource region and last but not least political influencing on the local environmental regulatory bodies, to make the factory happen while looking the other way on environmental regulations.
It is perfectly reasonable for people not to want a factory to steal and poison their water while the government deliberately looks away. Tesla could have addressed legitimate concerns proactively and respectfully. Instead they gaslighted the people and picked fights with many local stakeholders like the local water utility.
• Whatever cars we produce, should be battery-electric.
• Eastern Germany is in need of employment opportunities.
• It's a plantation, and Tesla is required to plant trees elsewhere.
• Elon Musk is a terrible human being. But at least in Germany, there is a functional government to oversee this factory.
Which is to say, I have no objections to Tesla building a factory here.
Addendum: Yes, public transportation is better, if you have it. Living in your workplace is even better. For some of us, driving a BEV is a pragmatic compromise. Hydrogen is wasteful and stupid. Fossil fuels, including most hydrogen, is fucking stupid. AfD (aka. "We're definitely not Nazis") thrive where unemployed is high. Those trees are now houses, furniture, and toilet paper. By functional, I don't mean efficient, corruption-free, or anything like that in absolute terms. But compared to Texas, CCP-China, or most other places in the world, it is somewhat functional for the purpose of overseeing industry. Well, apart from those giant holes in the ground where there's coal, and all those emissions scandals. And the German environmental movement is, in large parts, a bunch of unwitting russian sock-puppets. Ripened for the enshittification of the internet by decades of soviet/russian propaganda.
In a water protection area no less.
But who cares, it was planted monoculture anyways.
With that argument you can cut down every single tree in Germany, because we don't have any real forest anymore anyways. But who needs trees, if we have luxury EV's.
The Kellerwald forest and bits of Rügen are primordial. Lots of other patches of forest haven't been touched in a long to long long time, and then let's not forget commercial forests that aren't monoculture but mostly natural. Clear-cutting is about the worst thing you can do to a forest, not just when it comes to ecology but also economy.
IIRC it would take something like 100 years from a total memorandum on cutting down trees and Germany being fully covered in forest, again.
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ELONgated cancer on society.
Sure... What did trees to us anyway. Cut it all down in the name of profit!!!
These tree farms were planted to make a profit in the first place.
True sure. Still they are getting cut down in the name of profit (be it for the tree plantagee or Tesla)
But since they are to be cut down eventually nevertheless, them being cut down now for a construction site isn't as bad as the article makes it seem. Especially since Tesla was obliged to plant trees for an actual forest (i.e. diverse species) as compensation, which wouldn't have happened otherwise. So in the end, cutting down these trees even creates more forest than before.
These tree farm monocultures need to be replaced with more climate suitable and biodiverse mixed forests anyway. They’re dying all over the country because of droughts and Borkenkäfer bugs. Whole forests in the Harz mountains are gone.
Nothing of value was lost by cutting down this forest.