German environmental groups file objection against Tesla gigafactory permit | Hacker News Reader

German environmental groups file objection against Tesla gigafactory permit

reuters.com

28 pointsmikesabbagh90 comments

Environmental groups file objections against every single major project in Germany. That's probably one of the reasons why major infrastructure projects in Germany never finish on time.

I'm all for environment, but sometimes these complaints are just for complaint's sake.

Not just against the major ones... it's part of the ambience, like background radiation or typos in commit messages. I probably like it better this way than how the alternative would turn out, but it sure comes at a price.

> The objection is based on the claim that Tesla has not sufficiently clarified what precautions it will take to prevent highly poisonous gas from escaping from the factory, the objection document showed.

This seems like a pretty reasonable objection and not just "complaints are just for complaint's sake".

Sorry the word sufficiently implies they did provide details for how they are going to take precautions… as the other person said I believe this is the definition of “complaints just for complaints sake” at least IMO

What evidence is there that it is a serious problem?

Lol.

On one end of the spectrum we have environmental groups making objections against every tiny detail.

On the other end we have - “Highly poisonous gas escaping the factory into the environment? What evidence is there that it is a serious problem?”. A very Nestle approach

TBF we have a claim that highly poisonous gas might escape.

I have no idea if thats true, how big the risks are or if things already have been cleared in the normal procedures.

This isn't the first factory in Germany and one would hope they know how to build them safely but who really knows.

Environmental activists and other groups opposed to major construction projects in Germany have a tendency to latch on to even the most minor potential issue and complain and sue. The strategy, as far as I can infer it, is to delay the project and drive costs in the hope that it will have to be abandoned. It rarely works, but in combination with long and arduous processes for building permits, major construction projects can be held up in the planning phase for 10 to 20 years these days.

The Tesla factory is a huge exception, mostly because Tesla went ahead using temporary permits and took the risk that the final permits may be denied. The project has a lot of political support, which also helped the process along.

Environmental groups file objections against every single major project in democratic countries, where it's their right to do so. Occasionally, the objection is worthwhile.

And, every time, the objections drive up costs and delay results.

and many people are realizing that the environment should be considered over costs and deadlines

Until the frivolous complaints get them an image of obstructionism and people start to ignore them. Boy who cried wolf, after all.

sure it's possible both the public and the government officials making the decisions might get alarm fatigue but from what we are seeing, more and more people are caring about environmental impact (even when it comes to electric cars) and think that we aren't doing enough to prevent it. The scrutiny of all major construction projects will probably only continue to increase as public perception continues to shift.

> more and more people are caring about environmental impact

1) It's hard to avoid the suspicion that ever more of those people are only performatively "caring" about environmental impacts; and

2) I'm getting ever more certain that quite a lot of those people who "are caring" lack enough information to care about environmental impact in a sensible way. If you're ill-informed enough, you will naively advocate "solutions" that are worse for the environment than what you're protesting against.

Are we considering the environment when we delay the mass production of environmentally friendlier electric cars?

I don't think it's fair to compare the specific, fairly measurable consequences of not fully considering how to "prevent highly poisonous gas from escaping from the factory" vs. the more vague and complex environmental impact of a delay in car production.

But lets put that aside and let me ask you this:

What amount of delay would you be ok with in addressing environmental concerns?

As little delay as reasonably possible.

"reasonable" is pretty much meaningless. How do you determine what is "reasonable"? Who determines that?

So does not destroying the environment.

Sometimes, we do not want to keep costs and delays down.

"The boy who cried wolf." They need to be more selective if they want to be taken seriously. Maybe this one is serious, but how are we to know if they fight everything?

We are not the ones reading these petitions, so it’s arguably irrelevant what we think about them. I suspect many environmental groups do limit themselves to reasonable exceptions, but when any group can do something some will object to everything.

As such it’s not about environmental groups doing this but rather specific groups.

> As such it’s not about environmental groups doing this but rather specific groups.

After a while, you get to the point where it's up to the "environmental groups" to police themselves: If The Reasonably Lush Greens don't want all environmental concerns to be written off as Luddite obscurantism, then The Reasonably Lush Greens should regularly put out press releases like "One-in-a-trillion Risk Of Poison Gas Discharge, While Technically Existant, Is Negligible -- The Fanatical Neon Greens Are Spreading BS".

Really, honestly. Until they can do that, I'm not going to take either seriously. Why should anyone? Isn't that like accepting some rather-ultra-right movement because "But hey, they're not actually advocating gassing all the Jews... They just refuse to condemn the ones who DO advocate it." ?

Except these aren’t meaningless issues, any construction has negative environmental impacts they just not have negative impacts in everything.

Group A wants to protect wetlands, group B wants to protect deserts. Collectively their going to object to more projects than they do individually. It’s not group A’s job to police group B, and they are definitely not talking to you.

> Except these aren’t meaningless issues

Has anyone said they are, or are you just tilting at windmills?

> It’s not group A’s job to police group B

At the moment, that is (obviously, judging from your comment) how most people see it. What I'm saying is it should be their job.

> and they are definitely not talking to you.

Oh? Funny, here I thought groups with a political agenda are actually talking to everybody, in an effort to get wide-spread support for their agenda (environmental or whatever it may be). And if they're not talking to me, then whom are they talking to? If not me, as one of the general electorate, then apparently not to anybody else in that general group either, but only to some rarefied few? The particular "stakeholders" in each particular issue, perhaps? Then WTF is the use of making their letter to those administrators an "open" letter, for everyone else to see?

But OK, great, if they're not talking to us, the great unwashed public, then we are of course free to ignore whatever they have to say. It's not us they're talking to, after all. (Are you quite sure you had thought that through all the way to its logical conclusion, and that you're speaking for them all in this?)

It’s not that they are ignoring you because they don’t care. Talking to the general public is expensive, only some groups have funding for meaningful outreach.

Filling out some paperwork is dramatically less expensive, thus individual groups allocate their funds based on their objectives. And of course anyone can call themselves an environmental group, many of them care more about NIMBY than the environment.

Honestly, I simply view this as a free speech issue. Anyone can object to anything for any reason and that’s OK. It’s only going to be obstructionist when they have a point.

> I simply view this as a free speech issue. Anyone can object to anything for any reason and that’s OK.

As long as they do so by just generally exercising their free speech, sure. I got the impression the problem with the German Greens is that they go beyond this.

> It’s only going to be obstructionist when they have a point.

No, it's far more obstructionist when they don't have a point, and still protest not only in a general participating-in-the-debate fashion but by lodging formal complaints in various municipal and regional environmental-protection processes, over shit they know (or should have known) is irrelevant / insignificant / impossible. "Gumming up the works" for no real reason. And that's the impression I got from comments up-threads of what (at least many of) the German Greens are doing.

Hustlers gotta hustle.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if the competition (VW and the likes) were nudging these groups. They often end up being shills and proxies.

That would actually create an equal playing field, given how easy German companies get finned in the USA.

This just shows how big protectionisms is that domestic companies enjoys in every country. We all talk about free competition, but somehow Monsanto needs to pay huge fines in the USA as soon as it became a German company, while VW enjoys full protection in Germany and Europe, while being heavily punished in the USA.

Well building a battery factory in EUs worst CO2 polluter kinda makes no sense from an environmental viewpoint. Better to build it in Sweden or France which have a heavy Nuclear/Hydro mix in their grid.

Is CO2 considered as pollution?

Since when is it not?

Ever, AFAIK.

Contributing to the greenhouse effect, yes, but that's never been considered exactly "pollution". (Unless the darn kids have fucked up language again. Geroffmyfuckinglawn.)

That is a bit of a strawman argument as then you should also argue for stopping all industry in Germany that has a heavy use of electricity (which battery manufacturing doesn't really compared to other things like aluminium smeltering).

Germany is moving to more renewable sources of energy and Tesla also plans to put solar panels on the rooves of its buildings.

Germany have not took any steps to increase their clean non-intermittent energy sources. Until they do they will be stuck with gas.

Just because you have a battery factory in one country doesn't mean you have to charge all the batteries with electricity from that country, does it?

(Also: "EUs worst CO2 polluter" according to what measure and which source?)

Meanwhile, in the name of enviroment, germany gets away of cleaner energy alternatives like Nuclear and increases its dependencies of outside sources of natural gas to keep the country going.

I feel that most environmental groups today are more like a religion with dogmas then people trying to do whats best for environment .

In that case the objections seem reasonable.

Here in Belgium there is a growing controversy surrounding a chemical plant in Antwerp leaking PFOS [1] in the environment. Due to this, scientists from the University of Antwerp now advise local residents against eating eggs laid within 15km of the plant [2].

Of course there seem to be no plan to hold the responsible company accountable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanesulfonic_acid

[2] https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/173456/3...

Does Tesla use PFOS in any of it's processes?

Aside from that I can't find any sources that list any of the chemicals that the complaint is objecting about. Any links would be handy.

It’s difficult to strike a balance between hysteria and justified skepticism. Especially with topics like electric cars.

However, I believe this isn’t really about the environment. It’s about corruption, real or imaginary. People are afraid that companies, especially big companies, have it all too easy with the bureaucratic process, while individuals or small companies are stonewalled at every turn.

If it makes municipality money, anything goes. Otherwise, not so much.

Funnily it is because of these objections and the other bureaucratic stuff that Tesla is able to pull this of (building pre permit etc.) and has the publicity to „make it work“ because if the project fails it would shed a bad light on Germany for other investments. Smaller projects don‘t have that privilege. Kind of a Cobra Effect situation

From first hand experience I know that these „environmental“ groups are also big in blocking smaller projects like wind turbines. In the end they are ultra conservative but can paint themselves in a modern, green way

are you referring to specific groups involved with the Tesla gigafactory?

That's actually pretty funny. The same people who want "green energy" end up opposing wind turbines, nuclear, solar and hydro energy.

And what is left? Of course dirty coal and gas?

And which gas? Of course fracked gas imported from the friends from the other side of the planet instead of natural gas imported from the enemy nearby.

Some of them are CDU members that want to stop the Energiewende.

They usually come up with empty claims that make no sense. For example, there was a commercial forest for paper/cardboard production and it would have to be chopped early to make room for the Tesla plant. Suddenly people started fighting to protect a privately owned commercial forest that was nothing but a monoculture of the same tree species.

Of course if the complaint is about chemical waste leaking from a factory that's serious and should be addressed but all the bullshit claims make it harder to actually protect the environment.

The news is a little bit short, but the objection to the first tests of their machines is, that in a case of emergency the current safety concept lacks measures to prevent the escaping of hydrogen fluoride (see the open letter in German by the Grüne Liga Brandenburg here: https://www.grueneliga-brandenburg.de/index.php?cat=2&pageID...). They claim that changes to this safety concept will require changes to the factory itself and this changes need to be implemented first, before Tesla can start with it's tests.

Good luck setting up in Germany a manufactury alternative to Daimler, BMW, Audi, or VW. It's literally a threat to their existence and they'll react accordingly. Sometimes it shows how disconnected Americans are from the local European realities. Even if Tesla will succeed they'll have to fly workers from Ukraine, Branderburg is a demographical desert. Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania are desperate to subcontract for automotive, they'll literally suck every dick and rubberstamp every papper to have it on their soil.

The issue could be rather that Musk might have mistakenly thought that he could get away with "move fast and flout rules" here in Germany and now he's coming back to Earth with a bang. See how "Musk blames bureaucracy" instead of blaming Tesla for not doing their homework properly the first time?

https://auto.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/passenger-veh...

And who was the investor of BER that had to be put back to Earth with a bang?

Musk should just build the plant in Romania instead. Beautiful country, and we will accept the business and tax revenue with open arms ;)

If you want to keep your country beautiful, you might want to consider enforcing some rules so that it stays like that. That's exactly what German groups are trying here. You do not get nice countries by lowering the standards there.

Just south of this manufactury in Lausitz there are the largest open-pit mines of brown coal in Europe. Somehow this is not a problem, or vast open-pit mines are an asset to the countryside and the environment?

These are huge problems, not just there but also in western Germany, and they are seeing opposition as well. As far as I am concerned, I would have shut down coal plants and coal mines ages ago (while keeping nuclear power plants running longer instead).

Ahhh yes, the country where those automotive groups kept the world and their country pristine and pure by… checks notes intentionally lying about emissions in their vehicles that are sold all over the place!

These manufacturers flouted the rules and were eventually caught as well. If we hadn't had the rules, they could have gone on with that unopposed, so this is basically making my point?

They got away with it for a long time and at a huge scale and barely got a slap on the wrist. Your point is not proven. If anything it is harmed by this reality because it suggests environmental concerns are not actually that high up on Germany’s priorities and it seems like a concern-troll for them to cite environmental concerns now lol. They’re afraid of American muscle challenging their brands.

Anyway, a Gigafactory in Romania would have many awesome loyal workers and it’d be a beautiful facility in a beautiful country. :)

Just keep in mind that you do not want to end up in a "race to the bottom".

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom if you are unfamiliar with the term.

It actually isn't a threat to their existence if German car makers respond early enough. It's a bigger threat to their existence if there is nobody to wake them up before they die.

If this means less Audi/BMW/Mercedes cars blinding me with their headlights and tailing 2m behind me, let them sleep.

You do realise that that is driver behaviour don't you?

The arseholes that do that in Audi/BMW/Mercedes will just switch to do the same thing in another brand if these companies cease to exist.

Still I never appreciated some of Audi's marketing that seemed to encourage this sort of bad behaviour.

It's marketing and sales techniques of these premium brands emphasizing on arrogance, vanity, competitivenes, jealousity. At this point I really don't care because I'm starting to have Pavlov reflexes on seeing their front grills and logos.

> The arseholes that do that in Audi/BMW/Mercedes will just switch to do the same thing in another brand if these companies cease to exist.

If this is such a global phenomenon, maybe there exists a solution?

There is no demographical desert, it's well in commute reach of Berlin. Maybe lacks S-Bahn, but they could bring them in by bus, like the FAANGS do/did theirs from SF to Silicon Valley.

edit: I just looked it up on Openstreetmap with the traffic overlay, next stop for the S-Bahn is about 5km away, wouldn't even need to bus them in over long distance, just a tiny shuttle service from either 'Erkner', or 'Grünheide, Fangschleuse, Bahnhof' as can be seen here:

https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=13&lat=52.42458&lon...

Dude, these are not FAANG dream jobs. Qualified workers will earn gross 3.5k EUR/month, unqualified 2.7k EUR/month [1]. These salaries barely pay the rent in Berlin. Tesla is already trying to search in western Poland apparently unaware it's a similar wasteland.

[1] https://gazetalubuska.pl/tesla-gigafactory-kusi-zarobkami-i-...

And what is the average salary of a developer in Berlin? Because I happen to know it's about that range. And it does pay the rent, and there isn't much better option. So, dude, this apparently are very good salaries for Berlin.

This is a salary in Berlin for an inexperienced bootcamp graduate. For new arrivals the rents in the city have reached at least 1-1.5k EUR per month long time ago.

Dude, maybe someone living on Hartz IV/ALG II in Marzahn, or something similar would enjoy it? Berlin isn't just Kreuzberg/Neukölln/Friedrichshain, you know?

Yes they might be the target demographics, now only 40000 of them is needed. Arbeitsamt is printing the letters probably ;)

Think of the poor people in their cages here https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesagentur_f%C3%BCr_Arbeit#...

They need work too!

"Arbeit, Arbeit, über alles, für das deutsche Sklavenland! Arbeit, Arbeit, über alles, Bürokratie ohne jeden Sachverstand." (lall)

edit: or them https://media04.lokalkompass.de/imagepost/2020/06/06/0/46791...

The Morgenthau plan to turn Germany into an agrarian nation is finally being implemented by Green/Left.

more info https://www-grueneliga--brandenburg-de.translate.goog/index.... (google translate link)

and the previous entry: https://www.grueneliga-brandenburg.de/index.php?cat=9&pageID... (not google translated)

Elon should be happy that on Mars, there will be neither a regulatory body nor environmental groups.

Maybe they should just cheat like VW did? /S I see some objections here saying the level of "green" should be more related to the cars itself, not production. I find this is a bit like enjoying the sausage but looking away from how they are made, because it is rather nasty.

Tesla has a way of presenting a " clean" product , but plays very dirty on all other fronts, like pricing lies , fsd promises which never materialize etc

I think the whole supply chain , including production do contribute to how green a product is.

Everyone wants a green future as long as it's manufacturer in Africa or Asia

Lol I don't think any environmental group would argument that. More like there will be no green future with personal vehicles, electric or not.

The problem is that there are groups that, given ~A => B, would argue both against A and against B.

I think you are straw-manning environmental groups here. It seems reasonable to have personal vehicles without climate change or other environmental damage.

> It seems reasonable to have personal vehicles without climate change or other environmental damage.

If you sell it like that sure...

afaik no one has found the solution to that equation, and lithium powered 2 tonnes metal cages transporting 1.4 person (on average) doesn't seem like a good fit to solve it. Sounds like a very inefficient way to do it actually.

It's much more complex than "electric -> green -> good"

Instead of trying to achieve a perfect ideal you should first find a solution that can get everyone on board. Replacing ICEs with EVs is just one step of many but it's the most agreeable solution over the short term. It's already difficult enough to get people to care about the environment at all.

I'll be honest. Nobody cares about Africa (or South America). Everyone only cares about the starving children there. So we send them food and clothes to clear our conscience. Problem solved.

Goes to show how "green" Tesla is outside of the brainwashed choir.

The details are important, and we should make a distinction between the environment-friendliness of Tesla products and their manufacturing sites.

I think it is preferable to centralize the environmental impact so that it is easier to monitor and deal with.

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