The impact Tesla has on climate change is so small as to be complete negligible. Electric cars are entirely insufficient, and we need to move past this rhetoric to actually get anything done.
How are you defining impact? I think it's reasonable to conclude that Tesla caused the global move away from IC cars to EVs. According to the EPA, 27% of carbon emissions are from transportation [1]. I realize that there's other types of transportation than cars included in that number, that we still need to generate the electricity in a carbon neutral way (Tesla is contributing here as well), and that we also need to address the other 73%.
The only way I can see your comment to be true is if you narrowly look at the number of Tesla cars that are exclusively powered by solar today. But that's a very narrow view that misses the broader picture entirely.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I agree—but that's "caused", past tense. The shift has begun and is continuing, and Tesla no longer has much influence on it. If every one of Musk's companies went belly-up tomorrow, the fight against climate change would not be harmed.
No it's not. EU regulations are arguably more responsible.
They forced all car manufacturers to transition to EVs.
That happened after Tesla had proven the model though, primarily that you can build an EV that has sufficient range and that people find desirable.
Agree, but before Tesla electric cars were quite niche, now they're mainstream. One could probably argue that this is unrelated but there seems to be some correlation at least,
That the cars themselves are negligible is a bit unfair, Electric cars allow you to use renewable energies instead of fossil fuels- its a huge amount of energy consumed by transportation. Demand for EV car infrastructure is higher now and once built benefits everyone.
Is public transport better- undoubtedly, but Americans have infrastructured their way into a corner- they seem to fundamentally require cars for day-to-day operations and continue to make choices that force car dependence.
Space travel (in a similar way) is still needed, not just to get off this planet when we kill it (which I don't agree is a goal based in reality) but because there's absurd amounts of resources in the universe and some of it wizzes by us constantly.
> The president is restoring and strengthening tailpipe emissions regulations from the Obama era and has set a target that half of all vehicles sold in the United States be electric by 2030.
So you would think the press has a favorable opinion of him, at least when it comes to climate change.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/climate/biden-tailpipe-em...
Minimizing how significant Tesla's contribution to reducing CO2 emissions has been relative to other carmakers', and in fact, relative to any other single company, is not an honest way of evaluating its impact on the world, and suggests to me a motivation unrelated to environmentalism behind it.