For Elon Musk’s new Tesla Gigafactory outside Berlin, around 500,000 trees have been felled since construction began in 2020, according to a satellite analysis by the environmental news service Kayrros.
Antione Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros, told the Daily Beast that the amount of trees cut down increased carbon dioxide emissions by 13,000 tons, which the EPA says is equivalent to driving an internal combustion engine car 33 million miles or running 3,000 cars for a year.
Satellite images taken by Kayrros show that 813 hectares of forest were cleared between 2020, when construction began, and May 2023, when it was completed.
“There have been many, many cases of greenwashing in recent years,” Antoine Rostand, president and co-founder of Kayrros, told the Daily Beast in an email. “The public is rightly suspicious of any ‘green’ claims made by large, powerful companies… Only satellite imagery can tell us who is telling the truth.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Tesla for comment but has not received one at the time of publication.
A sustained campaign by environmentalists against the factory ended with nearly 800 protesters storming the plant in May. Residents in Grünheide are also angry and vetoed a planned expansion of the plant in February, albeit only ceremoniously, on the grounds that the plant would use 1.8 million cubic meters of water.
Instead, the local government allowed the plant to be expanded.
The main organization fighting against the Gigafactory, the Grünheide Citizens’ Initiative, agreed with the Ecological Democratic Party’s analysis that Tesla had not received environmental permits to build the site and that the documents submitted “contain formal and technical deficiencies that do not allow for reliable statements about environmental risks and impacts.”
“Too much of the environment has already been destroyed in one of the driest regions in Germany,” said Karolina Drzewo, member of Turn Off Teslas Tap, The GuardianIn its initial objections, the citizens’ initiative had claimed that the site would be “built in a drinking water protection area.”
