For years, Elon Musk’s defenders pointed to his mission to save the planet with electric vehicles as a reason to dismiss all criticism. Even if Musk messed up, it was supposedly all with the goal of protecting the environment with cleaner cars. We’ve known that was bullshit for years, but a new Wall Street Journal article on Tesla’s dirty factories only further drives home the point:
Elon Musk made big promises to Wall Street about Tesla’s new Model Y SUV in 2022, and the company was ramping up its production in Austin, Texas, when environmental problems threatened to derail his plans.
The door to the plant’s giant casting furnace, which melts metal to be molded into the Model Y’s parts, wouldn’t shut, spewing toxins into the air and raising temperatures for workers on the floor to as high as 100 degrees. Hazardous wastewater from production—containing paint, oil and other chemicals—was also flowing untreated into the city’s sewer, in violation of state guidelines.
Tesla left the costly problems largely unaddressed during the critical ramp-up. As a result, the company’s 10 million-plus square foot plant—among the largest car factories in the world—dumped toxic pollutants into the environment near Austin for months.
Back in April, we reported that Tesla was using a recently passed law to remove itself from Austin’s jurisdiction and get away with polluting the Colorado River, so this news is far from surprising. At the same time, the details of just how big of a polluter Tesla is were previously unreported. The Wall Street Journal used public records requests to view emails between Tesla and regulators in Texas. They also interviewed former employees and obtained other documents, including a letter a whistleblower sent the Environmental Protection Agency.
Their investigation found that not only were corporate bosses aware the Texas factory was polluting outside of regulations and that employees expressed fear they would lose their jobs if they reported environmental issues. Senior managers had reportedly made it clear they didn’t care about those problems while Musk tweeted complaints about stifling regulations. Don’t assume these problems are limited to the Texas factory, either, because this kind of stuff has been happening in California for years:
Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., facility has accumulated more warnings for violations of air pollution rules over the past five years than almost any other company’s plant in California, according to a Journal analysis of informal enforcement actions in the EPA’s compliance database. It is second only to a refinery owned by oil-and-gas behemoth Chevron, which is in nearby Richmond.
This year, California regulators said Tesla violated air-pollution permits at its Fremont factory 112 times over the past five years and alleged it repeatedly failed to fix equipment designed to reduce emissions, releasing thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals in excess of permissible limits into the surrounding communities. “Even after extensive discussion,” Tesla’s efforts “have not been enough to stem the violations,” the abatement order from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District read. Tesla denied the allegations in the state proceeding. Since the order was filed, the regulator has issued 75 additional notices of violations to Tesla, according to a spokesperson.
Nothing says “green car company” quite like being worse for air quality than every company in the state of California except for Chevron. Then again, considering Musk’s view of regulations, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising. “Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls,” one environmental-compliance staffer in Texas wrote in a memo obtained by the Journal. As for how the factory passed inspections with a furnace door that wouldn’t close and caused a “constant haze” on the factory floor, the memo claims the company resorted to an “elaborate ruse” to fool the inspectors.
As you can imagine, hiding the furnace’s problems was far from the only thing Tesla reportedly did wrong. It also dumped toxins into the Colorado River:
But behind the scenes, some environmental engineers and others at Tesla were fretting about a roughly six-acre, triangular-shaped “evaporation” pond Tesla built to hold wastewater from construction, chemical spills and its paint shop.
The pond was filled with toxins, including sulfuric and nitric acids, and the algae-colored water had begun to smell of rotten eggs, former employees said. At one point, employees found a dead deer in the water, they said. For a time, Tesla discharged untreated pond water directly into the sewer system without permission from Austin Water, the water utility for the city, according to former employees and emails from regulators.
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Sometimes during rainstorms, Tesla discharged a sludgy mix of mud and chemicals from occasional spills outside the plant, turning a ¾ mile stretch of the Colorado River into a mucky brown slick, according to pictures and videos viewed by the Journal.
A top civil engineer at Tesla “repeatedly committed to fixing the storm sewer system” in 2022 but “never directed any serious repairs,” a former staffer wrote in the memo to the EPA outlining the issue. Instead, Tesla periodically cleaned the storm sewer with pressurized water and vacuum trucks, according to the memo reviewed by the Journal.
There’s a lot more to the Wall Street Journal’s investigation, so head on over to the original article to give the whole thing a read.