It's a rounding error next to the savings from the electric cars.
Let's just stop claiming he actually cares about the environment and that he just wants wealth and power and he saw a business opportunity taking over Tesla.
He's a car salesman doing what a billionaire car salesman does.
For me personally, things like this make me question the value of the businesses rather than the environment. Like, I'm not sure if it's true this year, but in several recent years you could correctly say Musk personally made more money selling Tesla shares than Tesla made lifetime net profit, and likewise could correctly say that if all government subsidies and artificial markets were removed Tesla would not have made a profit at all.
Carbon trading is the "free market" solution to getting businesses to price-in what would otherwise be a free externality.
I won't praise Musk for it (at best praise goes to the governments setting up the rules), so we're probably on the same page, but it did feel like you were painting him as a villain for taking part in something that at least solves one of the common criticisms of carbon emitting industries.
It may feel like that because it takes away Musks "at least he built the Autobahn" (even though the statement is of course also inaccurate for the original). But I consider it very dishonest to assign CO2 savings from electric cars to him, without also mentioning him profiting off of those emissions in other places.
Tesla isn't afraid of Chinese competition. They compete directly with BYD in China and win. Model Y outsells any BYD model. All other US automakers, on the other hand, are terrified. And for good reason.
Meanwhile, Tesla is still making a $25,000 EV. It's just not designed for personal ownership. Tesla is betting on autonomous fleets as the future of cars. But they're still electric. Shared fleets would be way more efficient than personal car ownership, so this is even better for the climate, actually.
And they're doing Semi and Megapack and Superchargers (open to all EVs) too. They're doing their own battery R&D at their own battery factory, their own lithium refining, their own solar cell production. Honestly ridiculous that you would try to paint Tesla as some kind of climate traitor.
BYD's sales are split across multiple brands and models. BYD sells more EVs than Tesla. Why is Tesla being outsold by BYD?
BYD is one of the global top ten automakers by sales. Why isn't Tesla in the top ten?
Why isn't Tesla selling 20 million cars per year like they said they would?
Why has the Cybertruck been such a sales flop?
BYD and Geely cars can charge 10 to 70% in 5 minutes on 1.5+ megawatt chargers. Does Tesla offer anything like that capability?
Cybertruck is a flop, no argument there.
The reason Tesla hasn't scaled further is that a few years ago they pivoted in strategy and are no longer heavily pursuing the consumer market with new models for personal ownership. For better or worse they are all in on autonomous fleet vehicles and Optimus. The pivot was probably a few years too early. Many think it'll never work and I'm sure you're among them, but time will tell.
Porsche's got wireless charging on their cars now. Does Tesla?
Any answer on why Tesla is so far behind on the hardware?