Are the permits and rejections publicly available? From the article seems that Tesla didn't intend to use the tanks without permission.
Publicly available does not necessarily mean easily accessible: The official way they get published is at the official bulletin board ("Amtstafel") or the official gazette ("Amtsblatt") of the local administrative entity, and usually for a limited amounted of time. Most councils etc. do have electronic versions though.
I realize they still should follow appropriate regulations, but it’s still funny to me.
You should also hear the crazies in that country pushing conspiracy theories about how electric cars in fact pollute more. Oh and not to mention they still use coal.
That confusion may have been why they proceeded.
Generally speaking, I don’t think we should underestimate the degree to which regulatory burdens hold back progress in decarbonization. Getting permits for a solar farm in the US is a long process but planting a field for agriculture is much easier spite of concerns for runoff from fertilizers etc. The status quo bias of strict regulations needs to be considered if we are to decarbonize fast enough. (This is particularly bad in the US for increasing housing density and building public transport infrastructure… these things are stymied by status-quo regulations and NIMBYism, and it makes it essentially impossible for us to decarbonize via densification on a reasonable timescale.)
How long does it take to satisfy all stakeholders to get HSR built in California? What about building multiplexes in places zoned single-family? You run into hall monitor NIMBYism and slow regulatory burdens constantly. Meanwhile, people continue to buy big fossil-fuel guzzling trucks and SUVs, planes keep belching emissions, etc. I think the climate is going to run out of time.
(In most places, a building permit represents the approval of construction plans and entitlements, but does not represent permission to build. An environmental permit grants permission to build and conduct activities on a given site. Anyone with any experience in construction would know that, so it sounds like whoever is in charge at Tesla Germany doesn't have experience in this area.)
It’s always weird how people seem to assume that Tesla has a death wish when it comes to permits and such when back-and-forth between regulators and large companies doing large projects is pretty normal and not evidence of massive environmental destruction. In any large project you will have some level of miscommunication or simply inspector concerns.
Simply building tanks that are not yet permitted to hold chemicals is noteworthy for inspectors but is not necessarily actual wrongdoing, especially if Tesla is in the process of trying to get them properly permitted for actual use.
So yes, it matters that Tesla went ahead and constructed some tanks without having the environmental permit first. It's irrelevant that they aren't going to actually use those tanks, as that's a separate provision of the environmental permit.