Tesla is Killing the Planet

The corporation's emissions are responsible for 50,000 future deaths from global warming per year.

An homage to Picasso’s anti-war painting, Guernica, Travis London’s Guernica Pass is also an anti-war painting. The war depicted in Guernica Pass is industrial civilization’s war against the natural world, a war industrial civilization is currently winning. We see an agonized Mother Earth holding her dead sagebrush child; the injured and suffering pronghorn antelope; coyote as witness to the violence and obliterated innocence. More.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass.

If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication, our mentorship program, and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

The first time I experienced greenwashing was on April 22nd, 2004 — Earth Day — and it came about because of a teenage crush.

I was 16 and her name was Shelby. We met at community college. She was funny, intelligent, and lovely, so when she invited me to join her environmental group on a trip to Olympia to encourage legislators to protect forests, I was thrilled.

After a short audience with congressional staff, we walked out of the capitol building and into the plaza, where an environmental fair was taking place. We wandered through booths hawking solar panels and encouraging forest protection and salmon restoration before we spotted something bright yellow hulking on the side of the street. It was a Hummer H2 – the civilian version of the military M998 Humvee. A friendly man stood next to it with a sign reading ‘biodiesel fueled.’

“Want a test ride?” he asked. Of course we said yes.

The Hummer H2, produced from 2002-2009. Photo by A. Prevot, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Engine on, we pulled out and cruised down the street, burning a gallon of (bio)diesel every 9 miles. I was feeling profoundly uncomfortable. The truth, which I couldn’t articulate at the time, was eating at my stomach: what’s under the hood of a Hummer matters far less than the fact that it exists.

Just over a year earlier, the United States had launched an illegal invasion of Iraq. That spring, the Iraqi insurgency roared back to life and the First Battle of Fallujah raged. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the third year of occupation saw the nation engulfed in violence.

The events of April 22, 2004 were typical.

Insurgents detonated a bomb on a truck carrying fuel for the U.S. military, wounding three. An improvised explosive was detonated near the Kandahar airport as a U.N. convoy passed, but no one was injured. And two soldiers — one from the U.S. Army and one from the Afghan National Army were killed (and two more U.S. military soldiers wounded) in a friendly fire incident. The dead U.S. Army soldier, Pat Tillman, was a former NFL football player who enlisted after 9/11. But Tillman had grown disillusioned, telling a friend in 2003, “This war is fucking— illegal.” The Department of Defense covered up the friendly fire incident until after Tillman was buried — lying to both journalists and his family that he was killed in an ambush by insurgents.

Tillman was just one of nearly one million dead in these wars, the vast majority of them civilians, and his story just one of nearly one million lies told in those days.

The environmental impacts of the wars were catastrophic, too. An Abrams Tank burns more than a gallon of fuel per mile, part of why the US military uses more than 14.7 million gallons of fuel each day. The U.S. used more oil per year for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than the entire nation of Bangladesh, home to 175 million people, uses. Depleted uranium and toxic chemicals have left a legacy of birth defects and dead children. And the biotic crusts that kept the region’s sandy soils from blowing away in blinding sandstorms were destroyed, crushed under the wheels of American Hummers.

And there I was, riding in a supposedly “environmentally friendly” 8,000-pound military-inspired status symbol, with a sinking feeling in my stomach.¹ As Shelby and I walked away, we both felt sick. The idea that a Hummer can be “green” was a lie, and we knew it.

Enter the climate profiteers

General Motors EV Hummer, 2024 model. Photo: Lithium Americas.

My relationship with Shelby never progressed, but the same cannot be said of greenwashing; it has thrived. In 2004, a biodiesel Hummer was a curio; little did I know that twenty years later, I would be defending Thacker Pass from a lithium mine that will supply General Motors factories with raw materials to build their electric vehicles — including the new EV version of the Hummer.

If you can greenwash a Hummer, you can greenwash anything.

Chris Hedges

writes in his brilliant and devastating book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, “Most societies never recover from the self-inflicted wounds made to their own culture during wartime.” What does this mean for the United States, which has existed for 248 years and has been at war for 230 of them?

Lies become normal. Civilian deaths become “collateral damage.” Torture becomes “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Drone assassinations become “targeted killings.” Enemies are inflated into bogeymen, and if they don’t exist, they’re conjured from thin air.

The war on ecology is no different. Greenwashing language and policy is part of the policy platform of many political parties, and is a key element in marketing for the world’s biggest corporations. Blowing up mountains is now “securing a critical mineral supply chain.”

For many businesses, the climate crisis is not the biggest disaster in human history; first and foremost, it’s a chance for profit. As I have aruged before, climate profiteers are the new war profiteers. According to the International Energy Agency:

"If the world gets on track for net zero emissions by 2050, then the cumulative market opportunity for manufacturers of wind turbines, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, electrolysers and fuel cells amounts to USD 27 trillion. These five elements alone in 2050 would be larger than today’s oil industry and its associated revenues."

Why Tesla is a climate disaster

And now at last, we turn to Tesla, the world’s most valuable automaker. The facile mainstream environmental movement believes that Tesla (and all electric car manufacturers) is helping to reduce carbon pollution, stop global warming, and save the planet.

This is wrong. It’s important to understand why, because unless we expose the greenwashing we have no chance of actually halting the climate crisis. I’ve written here previously about the destructive mining and exploitative international supply chains underlying green technology (and non-green technology, for that matter). But here, I want to focus on climate in particular.

In their 2023 impact report, Tesla features the following slide which says that by driving electric cars, their customers avoided releasing more than 20 million metric tons of CO2e greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that would have been released had they been driving internal combustion engine cars.²

Tesla’s carbon footprint

To get a better sense of Tesla’s full climate impact, we have to look at other data — most especially, the amount of greenhouse gases that were released by Tesla Corporation and its suppliers for things like:

• Extracting and processing raw materials like steel, composites, plastics, magnesium, nickel, glass, silicon, lead, cadmium, etc.;

• Transporting raw materials from mines and chemical plants to manufacturing facilities;

• Manufacturing parts such as seats, computer chips, wiring, display screens, cameras, radar arrays, nylon seatbelts, rubber tires, headlights, sound systems, electric motors, battery packs, and so on;

• Transporting these parts to Tesla facilities for final assembly.

• Ancillary emissions from activities like building and maintaining Tesla facilities and charging stations, charging the EVs, powering lights and machinery, workers driving to and from work at Tesla facilities, etc.

The same report lists these numbers. Tesla doesn’t do the math for us, likely for reasons of “avoiding negative publicity through obscurity.” But it’s not very complicated, so I did it myself.

Tesla was responsible for more than 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)³ emissions in the year 2023. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined emissions of Ghana and Sudan, home to 85 million people. Here’s the relevant pages from the report.

Scope 1 and 2 emissions from Tesla’s 2023 impact report.

Scope 3 emissions, listed on the following page. If you do the math, the total is 50,031,000 mtCO2e.

The climate doesn’t give a damn about your math

I’m no mathematician, but this is pretty damn easy:

\(50,000,000 - 20,000,000 = 30,000,000\)

Tesla’s net carbon emissions impact was 30 million metric tons of CO2e in 2023.

Needless to say, that’s a lot.

But it’s actually worse than you think, because Tesla and related activities actually released 50 million metric tons of CO2e into the atmosphere. That is a physical fact. The argument that they avoided emitting an additional 20 million metric tons is theoretical. It’s math with imaginary numbers. And it doesn’t change the fact that there are now 50 million metric tons more CO2e in the atmosphere than there were before.

This is why, even as EVs are proliferating and more solar and wind power are being added to the grid than ever before, emissions are at all-time record highs. You can’t cheat physics.

Carbon emissions kill

Cars don’t magically come into being, the fruit of the Elon tree. They’re made of minerals mined from the Earth by fossil fuel powered machines, shipped around the world, smelted at high temperatures, and assembled in factories. In this sense, EVs are no different from internal combustion engine cars.

When we quantify the numbers, creating the average EV releases more carbon emissions that creating the average gasoline car. This difference is quickly wiped out, since EVs don’t release emissions during driving. But it doesn’t change the fact that both are highly polluting and rely on destructive mining and exploitative international supply chains.

Meanwhile, the climate catastrophe is spiraling out of control. According to research out of Cornell University, 1.6 billion people may become refugees due to global warming by 2060. By 2100, one billion deaths may be attributable to the climate crisis.

We’ve already passed 1.5℃ of warming, which means irreversible tipping points in the Earth’s climate — like the collapse of the Amazon Rainforest ecosystem and the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets — are probably unavoidable.

And on top of all this, meta-analysis of climate science has found that “New scientific findings are… more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is ‘worse than previously expected,’ rather than ‘not as bad as previously expected.’”

Here’s where Tesla comes in. Scientists have done the math to tell us the human death toll associated with emissions. This study estimates that for each 1000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, one person will die from global warming. If 1000 tons CO2 = one dead person, then 30 million metric tons means 30,000 dead people. Fifty million tons of emissions means 50,000 people dead. Per year.

So, according to their own data, Tesla is responsible for human deaths equivalent to the 2023-25 Palestinian genocide or the atomic bombing of Nagasaki every 16 months or so.

And of course, this is not to even get into the non-human death toll associated with producing and operating cars, which is catastrophic (for more on this, read my book).

The importance of thinking clearly

My point is not that Tesla is any worse than other car manufacturers or that Tesla cars are worse than gas-powered cars. It's clear that the opposite is true. Over their entire operational duration, electric car release less greenhouse gas emissions than gas or diesel-powered cars. But that's not the point. The point is that if we look beyond a relative comparison, both types of cars are climate and ecological disasters.

I’m reminded of a brilliant headline ran by The Onion in the aftermath of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, reminding us that oil not spilling is a disaster in its own right.

Sometimes satire says it best.

Some people misinterpret my critiques of green technology as meaning that these technologies are more harmful than fossil fuels. This is a misreading of my work.

The danger of electric vehicles and “green energy” is more insidious than a direct comparison implies. And this is why I'm so strident in my opposition to green energy, green technology, and EVs: because these technologies are being used as excuses to not fight fossil fuels. They’re the vape of the cigarette addict, the beer of the hard-liquor alcoholic. They differ neither in form nor in substance, and they’re being used as a way to maintain the status quo rather than engage in true transformation, as the moment demands.

Global warming is a crisis, and it’s mainly driven by fossil fuels, which is why I’ve been involved in fighting coal trains and coal export terminals on the west coast, oil and fracked gas pipelines in Canada, and tar sands mining in Utah. Stopping fossil fuels is critical. But like the Hummer, don’t believe for a second that changing out what fuels the vehicle solves the environmental problem.

Climate scientist James Hansen knows better than most of us the importance of tackling the climate crisis. He minces no words when discussing about “lesser evils”:

"This [climate change] is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill. On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%.”

There are many reasons to question the economic system we live under today, not least among them the neocolonialism, unequal exchange, and legalized corruption its built upon. But regardless, many people believe that, if there are certain prices that must be paid, so be it. These people argue the greater good represented by electric vehicles makes the sacrifice worth it.

But even on its own terms, this argument is dead wrong. We are being presented with a false choice: fossil fueled vehicles vs. EVs. Would you rather our transportation system be responsible for 50,000 deaths per year, or an even greater number?

But here’s the thing: cars are not necessary for human life, joy, or flourishing. They are luxury goods, and the mobility they bring does not justify killing people for them. There are 8.1 billion people in the world today, and roughly 1.47 billion cars. That’s about four cars for every 23 people, which means less than 17% of people on earth own a car (the number is actually less, since that doesn’t include people who own multiple cars).

If we break down car ownership by region, the picture of cars as a luxury good becomes much clearer:

1. North America: 710 vehicles per 1,000 people (71%)

2. Europe: 520 vehicles per 1,000 people (52%)

3. South America: 210 vehicles per 1,000 people (21%)

4. Middle East: 190 vehicles per 1,000 people (19%)

5. Asia: 140 vehicles per 1,000 people (14%)

6. Africa: 58 vehicles per 1,000 people (5.8%)

A few generations ago, nobody had cars. If someone had told us then that accepting cars into our lives would mean condemning millions of people to death in the future, would we have accepted this technology? I’m guessing not.

I think we’d have done as the great thinker Lewis Mumford proposed: “Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends. Restore human legs as a means of travel.”

1. Interestingly, drivers of Hummers apparently get five times as many traffic tickets as the national average.

2. Of course, there’s an unstated assumption here. This assumes that everyone who drives a Tesla would have driven an internal combustion engine car had they not gotten a Tesla. Maybe they would have biked, walked, or taken public transit. Maybe they wouldn’t have driven at all. But given the car culture we live in and the wealthy demographic that purchases Teslas, their numbers are probably more or less correct. And twenty million metric tons is a lot of carbon dioxide — more than many small countries produce.

3. For those who aren’t aware, when calculating greenhouse gas emissions, different gases have different levels of warming impact on the climate. Carbon dioxide, the most common anthropogenic greenhouse gas, is used as the default for measuring climate impact. Other gases are converted in a “carbon dioxide equivalent,” which makes calculations of total climate impact, and comparisons between different cases with unique mixes of specific greenhouse gas emissions, easier.