Does anybody out there know the •details• of how the Tesla carbon credit scheme works? I understand the basic idea:
- Regulatory standards say carmakers have to either cut emissions or buy “carbon credits.”
- Tesla can sell carbon credits because it makes EVs.
- Tesla makes more money selling carbon credits than it makes from selling cars…apparently? somehow?!
1/2
My question: how can we knock out this income source as a part of #TeslaTakedown? Specifically:
- Does Tesla’s ability to sell carbon credits depend on units sold? or units manufactured? or something else? (i.e. do falling sales also cut into carbon credit revenue?)
- To what extent does this scheme depend on CA •state• regulations? (i.e. is this something we could lobby the CA gov to fix?)
- Does this regulation expire?
- Is there any apetite in congress for unrolling the carbon credits? Is that a good idea?
2/2
@inthehands I had no idea that Tesla was selling carbon credits. Carbon credits are a scam for corporations to avoid reducing greenhouse gas #GHG emissions. That’s it. So yes, this idea should go away. However, if a company can demonstrate that they are in fact sequestering significant amounts of GHG, then this should be rewarded in some way, but not at the expense of greater emissions by some other company. The book, “Ministry of the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson has some good ideas along this line and lots of others too.
And here’s my trademark 3/2 post:
- Who’s done serious auditing of Tesla’s carbon credits? Are we sure they’re not miscounting, double-counting, fraud-ridden? Who can look into that?
3/2
@meltedcheese
This is not a carbon sequestration scheme, nor is it one of these “pay us not to cut down Amazon rainforest nobody was going to cut down anyway” schemes. Probably still a scam, but AIUI this is a different kind of carbon credit. Thus my questions.
@inthehands I understand that. Carbon credits are not about sequestration anywhere AFIK because the technology doesn’t exist to do it at a level of maturity and scale that is needed.
link to article: https://carboncredits.com/teslas-carbon-credit-revenue-soars-to-2-76-billion-amid-profit-drop/
also the carboncredits website looks like it has at least some partial answers to the questions you are asking
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If I understand correctly; there is an additional potential cost to Tesla:
If it sells fewer cars, it gets fewer carbon credits. Then it may end up paying a penalty to the other car manufacturers it had arranged to sell them to.
Some of this happens under EU rules: https://futurism.com/tesla-sales-carbon-credits-europe .
@inthehands
It's definitely fraud-ridden, because fraud-ridden is the baseline of the entire carbon credit market and they're definitely not doing *better than most* there.