Tesla's German factory does seem to be encountering more than its fair share of regulatory snags and delays, even by German standards. You have to wonder if perhaps some of Germany's incumbent automakers are pulling the strings of friendly politicians, ensuring that progress does not go too smoothly or quickly for Tesla?
Are you saying in Germany there are enough rich greedy German businessesmen who will further enrich themselves so obviously on taxpayer money with the help of German politicians feigning corruption as incompetence? In Germany, the most efficient country in Europe? Nein, I can't believe that! Everyone knows only South/Eastern Europe is corrupt, never Germany. /s
At higher levels I'd actually say incompetence and corruption are basically synonymous in Germany. Even when people casually mention incompetence (e.g. Andreas "Andi" Scheuer), they know and mean corruption, just not proven (yet).
Germany somehow manages to have the reputation that there isn't "low level corruption", though there is plenty of that to go around.
Having worked closely with a lot of C levels in Automotive, Banking and now Energy in Germany, I can easily say this is the most corrupt place I've ever worked. Morally and Financially..
By German standards they're actually doing remarkably well so far. I imagine we'll screw it up very shortly though, one does not simply bypass the central bureaucracy and expect to get away with it.
I give it a 50/50 that they'll have to pull out of Germany, losing all the money they put in so far.
The politicians don't control the process, though, or at least in a well-ordered state they shouldn't. There are rules, which are adjudicated by the civil service and ultimately the courts, not the local politicians.
I mean, let's compare this to the rather celebrated South Korean court decision to force Google/Apple into giving up control over in-app payments: Great for the customers and for competition and for developers, but it's also no accident it happened in a country where Samsung has every business interest in the outcome.
It's difficult not get conspiratorial when it comes to incumbents protecting their empires. But Tesla did try to rush the process so this is fairly expected. However you would really think that the environmental ministry could fast-track this considering how much (Net) positive impact it will have.
My understanding of the situation is that German permitting is pretty complicated, so normally companies wait before diving in so everything is cleared up first. You can imagine that kind of restraint isn't Tesla's style, so rather than clearing hurdles from the track ahead of time, they're just running into each one. I'm not familiar enough to know if there are more or worse hurdles in this specific instance, but it definitely makes for a juicier headline when Tesla slams into a hurdle than when another company deals with it before they've broken ground.
Technocrats love to imagine that their laws are infallible unfortunately laws must always be challenged regularly or else you will end up with too much regulation over time as political momentum encourages new laws to constantly be added while old laws are rarely reexamined. That's why you've got places where anal is still illegal.
I'm not sure what you'd want to change, honestly. The regulations are, presumably, there for a reason, and shouldn't have a "but if you're Elon Musk, that's okay" get-out clause.
If I did nothing and twiddled my thumbs I'd have a more positive net impact on the world than the son of an Emerald miner in Apartheid South America exploiting workers, busting unions and polluting the world with make believe computer money and phallic objects shot into the sky for no particular reason
In real life SpaceX is a company that gets paid by other companies and organizations to launch rockets into space. They also have the first reusable rocket which is a clear and direct technological improvement for the human race. It is also likely to ensure we won't go extinct from one rock hitting our planet.
The fact that you can't get over yourself for two seconds to comprehend this kind of shows you have no clue what you're even talking about.
That Tesla's way of operating has lots of potential to clash with German bureaucracy/culture is certainly true to some degree but in this case, an administrative process was changed with possibly not enough time in advance for everyone to notice or react. Since the office is unsure how the change would hold up in court, they are re-doing it out of an abundance of caution. (At least this is how I read the article.)
Personally, I find it more likely that some executives thought they could skirt some regulations because they are creating jobs and local officials will look the other way or make some exception. At least that is the impression one often gets when looking how things get done in the US.
The playbook in the US is to argue that a factory will create US jobs. State and local governments are willing to play ball with the expectation of increased activity and taxes.
Building a plant on the US-Mexico border will not be seen as kindly if it's perceived that they are not using US labor.
Yes, but it may not bring enough goodwill for regulators to ignore other things they are doing which may be illegal which was the suggestion up-thread.
Yes, for now, because that's all they need, but when they start looking for low/middle skilled workers I wouldn't be surprised if the mast majority of them will be Polish workers
The article that you linked mentions Polish _construction_ workers. I honestly doubt the areas next to the border would get you enough workforce to get you a mostly Polish staff - the border is 50min away and the closest cities are relatively tiny.
Or maybe the math somehow works out, but I doubt it.
The math works very well when you know Polish wages, just like people living close to Switzerland (ie <2h commute) still go there en masse, doubling or tripling your salary is very attractive for most people.
From what I've seen Tesla is trying to push through this factory from land acquisition to first production at an extraordinarily fast pace.
These projects usually take many years and Tesla tried to basically do it in one and is annoyed that it is stretching out to two.
In the big picture 2-3 years to get a new large auto factory online is pretty normal. There are definitely some parallels to SpaceX in Boca Chica, TX. They both are hitting regulatory delays, but stepping back it seems they are the result of intentionally trying to "move fast and break things" with their development timelines.
That is definitely the case in Boca Chica, TX and there may even be a conflict of interests with the environmental assessment being used instead of the full environmental study. SpaceX is going way beyond what was originally permitted by the FAA.
What is "way beyond"? They're permitted for a 27 engine kerosene rocket, they want to switch to a 33 engine methane rocket. A kerosene spill is much worse locally than a methane spill since methane evaporates.
They're hoping to add a 250MW power plant which would be a major change but that would be part of a different environmental assessment.
Citation needed -- and that silly TechCrunch article isn't a citation.
They raised a howl because the plans say they will start on a power plant, whose impact is considered -- but 'oh my goodness, where will the gas come from? A well? Trucks? Oh my!'
Well -- that literally may not be known yet, as is when and whether they'd get close to running it at anything like capacity.
And that's not a problem; Texas has power plant regulators, and pipelines have their own paperwork and process.
The FAA regulating this is a bit funny anyway. :) Eventually that'll change, but right now they're doing a good job handling these weird corners of their responsibility with grace.
A big immediate cause of problems seems to be hundreds of official protests from local citizens and (not necessarily local) environmentalist groups. Whether or not German car companies have something to do with that is anyone's guess (no sarcasm).
Incidentally the conservative chancellor candidate that took a media opportunity with Musk to demonstrate his otherwise non-existent interest in renewable energy not only lost the election but also displayed so much incompetence over the last year that his party saw him as radioactive enough to replace him in all of his positions.
It's possible the problem isn't so much that regulators are trying to play dirty against Musk but so inept at trying to cut corners to win this "prestige project" that they actually cause overhead by being caught and having to do things again properly.
I'd say generally speaking Tesla's perception in Germany is positive and politicians are more inclined to bend rules in Tesla's favors rather than against. There are just limitations to what you can get away with.
> Incidentally the conservative chancellor candidate that took a media opportunity with Musk to demonstrate his otherwise non-existent interest in renewable energy not only lost the election but also displayed so much incompetence over the last year that his party saw him as radioactive enough to replace him in all of his positions.
That said, the major angel for the Tesla project is the local state government of Brandenburg, which is led by the SPD, the party that emerged strongest in the national election. The CDU is also in Brandenburg's gov coalition, but I don't think Laschet's (national CDU candidate) Musk election campaign media stunt had much relation to anything.
Sure, my point was more that for many politicians and public officials this is an easy prestige project. "E-mobility" is a big talking point in German politics.
We also have a proud history of industrial corruption in Germany (we call it "Klüngel" because that sounds nicer), especially when it comes to public construction projects.
I find it a lot more likely that the failures are the result of a mix of public officials being overly hasty in trying to pave the road (so to speak) and making promises they couldn't deliver on, than that this is entirely down to traditional car manufacturers using their political leverage against Tesla. Especially given the location of the factory.
As a German: I feel the opposite is the case. This project has received enormous local (and even national) political support (as in, government straight saying "we want this" and leaning on the apparatus to expedite), and has coasted extremely far on temporary permits, sometimes fashioned rather shadily, to become "too big to fail". Some of those permits happened even after Tesla proactively violated rules by just building things without asking, as I understand, factoring penalties into business plans and relying on lenient interpretation. Germany's incumbent automakers are probably rather incensed about Tesla getting to build a major factory on Easy Mode here and having to put little effort into understanding the process or the culture.
I don't have any particular opinion on whether this is good or bad at the moment, but it's certainly fascinating to follow ...
You are no doubt referring to the Brandenburg state premier who entered into totally democratic secret negotiations with Tesla and then presented the imminent construction of the factory as fait accompli to his surprised electorate?
It's difficult not get conspiratorial when it comes to incumbents protecting their empires; it's a lot easier call-in a favour with a politician than to build better electric cars ... But Tesla did try to rush the process so this is fairly expected. However you would really think that the environmental ministry could fast-track this considering how much (Net) positive impact it will have.
The location is a bit weird also. Ingolstadt or similar they’d at least be able to find a lot of staff, I think it may be tricky around Berlin.. Time will tell I guess.
For context: Berlin is one (or the) central for IT jobs and startups, but for car manufacturing Ingolstadt, Stuttgart or Wolfsburg would be more „traditional“ choices, since that’s where the big car makers are. Oh, and the Ruhrarea ofc.
OTOH, unemployment is average in the region and wages and salaries are below average (maybe not in IT anymore). Traditional car industry regions have low unemployment and high wages and salaries - IG Metall, the traditional union of the car industry, is very strong. It will be interesting to see how Tesla deals with the unions. Wal-Mart had its troubles with that.
Wolfsburg is a 1h 7min train ride away. Quite a few commute from Berlin. Berlin has three large universities and some smaller ones. Still, the real automotive hotspots like Stuttgart area would have been more attractive but there was certainly headwind from incumbents.
Due to being partly surrounded by a big wall until 30 years ago and being governed by its own state legislature, Berlin's urban sprawl is still pretty limited and land is aplenty in the surrounding state called "Brandenburg". So it's much cheaper to buy land there compared to (South)Western German areas.
In Bavaria they would have been one of many major companies. In Brandenburg they are the exciting thing happening in terms of industry, giving them a lot of political support. Also lower wages, both because Brandenburg has low wages and because it's close to the Polish border.
Also "Gigafactory Berlin" is only a slight stretch of the truth and has a much nicer ring to it than "Gigafactory Ingolstadt". Being big and flashy is important to Tesla (hence "Gigafactory", not "factory"), and Berlin is just much more recognizable than the alternatives.
A few years ago, Tesla bought a german supplier of automation equipment, Grohmann Engineering [0]. They should be familiar with the way things work here by now, so they hopefully factored all that into their decision already.
Germany has a lot of high end car manufacturers and other industry, which means that there are a lot of experienced engineers in the country that they can hire. Most people also speak English well enough, which makes it easier to collaborate with US engineers (compared to eg. Spain, where many people really struggle with English).
All of the established domestic car manufacturers have significantly expanded their operations in Berlin in the last 5 years (though mainly R&D, especially software). Germany has relatively high immigration, and it's a lot easier to draw highly qualified immigrants to Berlin than to the Southern German countryside due to the youthful appeal and lower CoL of the city. The US, OTOH, has become more hostile to immigration over time. From a "competition for global talent" PoV, Berlin is a decent stake in the ground in many ways. Tesla also has plans to build an R&D site on the land of the recently shuttered Tegel inner city airport.
Building in Poland would be too on the nose and building in Germany brings prestige while still being close enough to the Polish border to benefit from cheap labor with minimal labor protection laws. I guess it's a trade-off.
I'm confused by your statement. That cheap labor you're referring to is cheap while it's in Poland, but being in Germany, you're now under German contractual union agreements regardless of your nationality, so labor no longer cheap and you're also under German labor law, not Polish. So what gives? Or do you thing German worker's rights don't apply to workers from Poland?
They don't if you outsource the labor to a Polish staffing company and feign ignorance about their handling of labor issues. This is how most large industry companies handle cheap foreign labor in the country. Employing most of your industrial work force directly is so pre-Agenda-2010.
This practice actually became somewhat infamous during the pandemic when an outbreak in a meat factory shined light on Eastern European workers' working and living conditions. The company went on to hire thousands of workers directly in an attempt to salvage some of its reputation but previously had outsourced the work to a network of such staffing companies it claimed to have no insight into while actually having funded (and likely owned) several of them.
Why would building in Poland be on the nose? I don’t really understand the prestige thing either, anyone who has lived for any amount of time in Germany is presumably as equally baffled as I am by this image. I still can’t pay by card in my favourite restaurant in berlin, until very recently you need a paper ticket on the bahn in the capital (although these days you can have a pdf emailed to you (!!))
Oh, I'm German by birth and residence, I have no illusions about the country. But "manufactured in Germany" still somehow evokes a level of quality whereas "manufactured in Poland" sounds like you're saying the quiet part out loud.
Berlin is special in many ways. It has a national reputation for being dysfunctional and ramshackle (but also quirky and sexy and vibrant). This is often broadcasted dismissively, but of course has complex historical reasons. Just from the top of my head:
- During the West/East divide, West Germany was financially kept alive through major subsidy from the outside, which created political and organizational structures not designed for self-sufficiency. After the unification those subsidies from the national state were all but halted, plunging the city into debt
- A ruthless debt management approach has kept the city from spending ever since, which has resulted in a lot of administrative functions stagnating or slowly deteriorating by e.g. not hiring
Things are improving now, slowly, due to the Capital City effect and the startup boom, but it's important that Berlin is special within in Germany in many ways. In most European countries, if you make a GDP-per-person stat, it falls considerably if you remove the capital city from the equation (say almost 20% in France). Germany is perhaps the only industrial country in the world where it goes up instead.
Note: The Tesla factory, despite being called "Giga Berlin" by Tesla, is being built in the state of Brandenburg, which is not the state of Berlin. Brandenburg has a different complex situation.
> In his two-year battle to get production running at the site, Musk has expressed irritation at German laws and processes, arguing complex planning requirements were at odds with the urgency needed to fight climate change.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is going to build a 250MW gas power station in Boca Chica to be run 24/7…
Regarding the credibility of said statement, also mind that – depending on estimates and your local mix of energy production – the rather high CO2 footprint of long-range battery production is only offset after 3.5 – 15 years of average use [0]. Where average use is US millage, with millages being typically lower in Europe. So Tesla Europe will not be saving the world. What it really does, is relocating the source of emissions.
The latest numbers I've heard are 6-18 months. The numbers are dropping rapidly. This makes intuitive sense because costs are dropping rapidly. It used to cost $1200/KWh to build an automotive battery, and now it's close to $100/KWh. Costs and CO2 emissions are highly correlated -- a more efficient production process uses less energy.
The other big factor is the source of the electricity used to power the car. But that's a chicken and egg problem. To decarbonize transporation you need to both electrify the car and decarbonize the electricity. In other words both steps are necessary -- doing only one of the two is a huge step towards both steps getting done, but it doesn't show in the final numbers until both steps are done. It takes about 20 years to turn over the car inventory and even longer to turn over power plants, so we need to start aggressively doing both now.
Mind that not all EVs are built the same. Maybe, EVs with smaller (possibly swappable) batteries, which are also lighter and smaller are a better fit for the specific environment. The solution offered by Tesla is very much linked to the US, the wide distances, its suburbia and the implications thereof. There's a certain possibility that it may not represent the optimum for a European scenario.
The average car on the road in the US is 12 years old [1]. With Teslas battery degradation seems to be a non-issue [2], with the battery still having ~90% capacity after 200k miles.
So except for maybe the very upper end of your range I don't see how that's evidence against electric cars reducing CO2 emissions.
As noted, millages are typically lower in Europe. Infrastructure is less extensive, ways shorter, there's more public transport and serves a notable quantity of daily commute, and there's less need for long-range. So calculations are different for a European scenario. (Tesla cars are really built for an US environment, which is rather atypical for everywhere else.)
SpaceX said they wanted to run production 24/7 and this is meant to power production (not fuel processing).
Regarding emissions:
> SpaceX estimates that it would produce 47,522 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year once the entire Starship base kicks into high gear. The power plant alone will contribute 9,858 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per year. However, as per the tabulation by ESG Hound, the emissions from this power plant are likely to exceed 1 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year.
What are they supposed to do? The local grid is ill equipped for industrial power requirements, and they need to desalinate huge amounts of water for their sound suppression system. You can't launch rockets in densely populated areas, where power might be more plentiful.
Its not great, but making humans an interplanetary species is more important, especially considering that we are already de-carbonizing cars, partly thanks due to Tesla.
The German NGOs are mostly being unreasonable. What they defend is a not an organic forrest, but basically an artificial wood factory with hardly any environmental value. Water consumption is apparently another issue, but its not like you use it and then its gone forever - its being cleaned.
Regarding water and the Tesla plant, mind that the plant is located in a dedicated protected area, serving an area with about 100K inhabitants. So concerns are not totally unreasonable.
Agree this has potentially some merit, but I gave up looking at all the issues in depth after it turned out most of them were unreasonable. Which is sad, really.
Musk: "complex planning requirements [are] at odds with the urgency needed to fight climate change"—IOW "get out of my way already, I'm important".
If we want to fight climate change and reduce emissions, we'd better not switch from fossil fuel SUVs to luxury EVs, but rather turn to alternatives like living more locally, and using trains a lot more. But that step is not what is being promoted, surprise, and it's also not a step that many people are ready to do. They fiercely identify with their vehicles and can become quite aggressive whenever one threatens to make owning a car more expensive. At least, should climate change 'happen one day' (/s), they'll have a car to drive somewhere else (again, /s).
Vegas doesn't have the population to support a subway, so the tunnel is properly sized.
If Vegas did have a subway, it wouldn't have enough population to run every few minutes, so you'd have to wait a long time for the train. With the small cars you don't have to wait, and you get the equivalent of an express train every time.
But the big advantage is the cost -- subways cost hundreds of millions per mile.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadGermany somehow manages to have the reputation that there isn't "low level corruption", though there is plenty of that to go around.
Out of curiosity, what are your other points of comparison?
I give it a 50/50 that they'll have to pull out of Germany, losing all the money they put in so far.
German automakers are well known for their lobbying
But there is a high likelihood that they will be getting this one as well - at least according to the latest information I could find...
I mean, let's compare this to the rather celebrated South Korean court decision to force Google/Apple into giving up control over in-app payments: Great for the customers and for competition and for developers, but it's also no accident it happened in a country where Samsung has every business interest in the outcome.
The fact that you can't get over yourself for two seconds to comprehend this kind of shows you have no clue what you're even talking about.
Change in the way the German government operates? I hope not, but I also doubt it.
As I understand they'll mostly be filled by the polish workforce, they didn't built it so close to the border for no reason.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/building-delays-at-tesla-...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market#%22Four...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Single_Market#Free_mo...
Building a plant on the US-Mexico border will not be seen as kindly if it's perceived that they are not using US labor.
Or maybe the math somehow works out, but I doubt it.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/digpub/eumove/bloc-2c.ht...
> In 2019, the largest number of cross-border workers among the Member States were for those living in Poland and working in Germany (122 000 people)
These projects usually take many years and Tesla tried to basically do it in one and is annoyed that it is stretching out to two.
In the big picture 2-3 years to get a new large auto factory online is pretty normal. There are definitely some parallels to SpaceX in Boca Chica, TX. They both are hitting regulatory delays, but stepping back it seems they are the result of intentionally trying to "move fast and break things" with their development timelines.
Edit: Citation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bdkcoiFaN0
They're hoping to add a 250MW power plant which would be a major change but that would be part of a different environmental assessment.
They raised a howl because the plans say they will start on a power plant, whose impact is considered -- but 'oh my goodness, where will the gas come from? A well? Trucks? Oh my!'
Well -- that literally may not be known yet, as is when and whether they'd get close to running it at anything like capacity.
And that's not a problem; Texas has power plant regulators, and pipelines have their own paperwork and process.
The FAA regulating this is a bit funny anyway. :) Eventually that'll change, but right now they're doing a good job handling these weird corners of their responsibility with grace.
It's possible the problem isn't so much that regulators are trying to play dirty against Musk but so inept at trying to cut corners to win this "prestige project" that they actually cause overhead by being caught and having to do things again properly.
I'd say generally speaking Tesla's perception in Germany is positive and politicians are more inclined to bend rules in Tesla's favors rather than against. There are just limitations to what you can get away with.
That said, the major angel for the Tesla project is the local state government of Brandenburg, which is led by the SPD, the party that emerged strongest in the national election. The CDU is also in Brandenburg's gov coalition, but I don't think Laschet's (national CDU candidate) Musk election campaign media stunt had much relation to anything.
We also have a proud history of industrial corruption in Germany (we call it "Klüngel" because that sounds nicer), especially when it comes to public construction projects.
I find it a lot more likely that the failures are the result of a mix of public officials being overly hasty in trying to pave the road (so to speak) and making promises they couldn't deliver on, than that this is entirely down to traditional car manufacturers using their political leverage against Tesla. Especially given the location of the factory.
> Authorities decided to repeat the process after
> environmental groups disputed in a separate case
It's environmental NGOs who cause this trouble for Tesla.
I don't have any particular opinion on whether this is good or bad at the moment, but it's certainly fascinating to follow ...
You are no doubt referring to the Brandenburg state premier who entered into totally democratic secret negotiations with Tesla and then presented the imminent construction of the factory as fait accompli to his surprised electorate?
[1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/372-000-liter-pro-stu...
Water use is a bit of a misnomer though. It's not like agriculture where the water gets "fed" to plants and mostly evaporates.
Tesla plans to recycle/reuse most of the water at the Giga Berlin plant: https://insideevs.com/news/526187/tesla-minimizes-water-use-...
And yes, the positive impact of electric cars even considering all raw materials and water is unequivocal.
Also "Gigafactory Berlin" is only a slight stretch of the truth and has a much nicer ring to it than "Gigafactory Ingolstadt". Being big and flashy is important to Tesla (hence "Gigafactory", not "factory"), and Berlin is just much more recognizable than the alternatives.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Grohmann_Automation
I'm confused by your statement. That cheap labor you're referring to is cheap while it's in Poland, but being in Germany, you're now under German contractual union agreements regardless of your nationality, so labor no longer cheap and you're also under German labor law, not Polish. So what gives? Or do you thing German worker's rights don't apply to workers from Poland?
This practice actually became somewhat infamous during the pandemic when an outbreak in a meat factory shined light on Eastern European workers' working and living conditions. The company went on to hire thousands of workers directly in an attempt to salvage some of its reputation but previously had outsourced the work to a network of such staffing companies it claimed to have no insight into while actually having funded (and likely owned) several of them.
- During the West/East divide, West Germany was financially kept alive through major subsidy from the outside, which created political and organizational structures not designed for self-sufficiency. After the unification those subsidies from the national state were all but halted, plunging the city into debt
- A ruthless debt management approach has kept the city from spending ever since, which has resulted in a lot of administrative functions stagnating or slowly deteriorating by e.g. not hiring
Things are improving now, slowly, due to the Capital City effect and the startup boom, but it's important that Berlin is special within in Germany in many ways. In most European countries, if you make a GDP-per-person stat, it falls considerably if you remove the capital city from the equation (say almost 20% in France). Germany is perhaps the only industrial country in the world where it goes up instead.
Note: The Tesla factory, despite being called "Giga Berlin" by Tesla, is being built in the state of Brandenburg, which is not the state of Berlin. Brandenburg has a different complex situation.
Meanwhile, SpaceX is going to build a 250MW gas power station in Boca Chica to be run 24/7…
[0] Compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM and studies referred to in the description.
The other big factor is the source of the electricity used to power the car. But that's a chicken and egg problem. To decarbonize transporation you need to both electrify the car and decarbonize the electricity. In other words both steps are necessary -- doing only one of the two is a huge step towards both steps getting done, but it doesn't show in the final numbers until both steps are done. It takes about 20 years to turn over the car inventory and even longer to turn over power plants, so we need to start aggressively doing both now.
So except for maybe the very upper end of your range I don't see how that's evidence against electric cars reducing CO2 emissions.
1: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a33457915/average-age-vehi...
2: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/tesla-battery-life-replac...
Regarding emissions:
> SpaceX estimates that it would produce 47,522 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year once the entire Starship base kicks into high gear. The power plant alone will contribute 9,858 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per year. However, as per the tabulation by ESG Hound, the emissions from this power plant are likely to exceed 1 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year.
[0] https://wccftech.com/as-spacex-gears-up-to-build-natural-gas...
Its not great, but making humans an interplanetary species is more important, especially considering that we are already de-carbonizing cars, partly thanks due to Tesla.
The German NGOs are mostly being unreasonable. What they defend is a not an organic forrest, but basically an artificial wood factory with hardly any environmental value. Water consumption is apparently another issue, but its not like you use it and then its gone forever - its being cleaned.
If we want to fight climate change and reduce emissions, we'd better not switch from fossil fuel SUVs to luxury EVs, but rather turn to alternatives like living more locally, and using trains a lot more. But that step is not what is being promoted, surprise, and it's also not a step that many people are ready to do. They fiercely identify with their vehicles and can become quite aggressive whenever one threatens to make owning a car more expensive. At least, should climate change 'happen one day' (/s), they'll have a car to drive somewhere else (again, /s).
If Vegas did have a subway, it wouldn't have enough population to run every few minutes, so you'd have to wait a long time for the train. With the small cars you don't have to wait, and you get the equivalent of an express train every time.
But the big advantage is the cost -- subways cost hundreds of millions per mile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvK2i9Jxy5c
https://www.youtube.com/c/AdamSomething/videos