8 ms·

Tesla uses new Texas law to avoid Austin's environmental regulations

76 points by asne11 2y ago

fallingknife 2y ago
Don't bother reading the article. It doesn't have any discussion of what the regulations in question are or what the actual impact of this factory not being bound by them will be. Basically there is almost no actual information content and you have read 90% of it from just the headline.
- blamazon 2y ago
  Additionally, on my mobile the page was almost unusable. Here is a key bit: > The company's ability to deannex from the city comes after Senate Bill 2038 passed last year.
jeffbee 2y ago
As a yimby, I am required by consistency and good taste to applaud this outcome. Cities with their own local environmental rules is a recipe for disaster. It is the reason why American construction is paralyzed. You can say that these environmental regulations included air and water rules, but mainly what they've been used to do is to stop the construction of housing. The fact that Austin was able to enforce its development regulations outside of its own city limits is pretty ridiculous honestly.
- tstrimple 2y ago
  This is a false dichotomy. You don't have to enable building factories with environmental externalities next to suburbs to increase the supply of housing. Surely your argument isn't that we can't have enough housing unless Tesla is allowed to dump waste in the Colorado river is it?
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    No, my argument is that the state is the right level of government at which to regulate the environment. As we see here, most states have the power to abrogate city regulations, to dissolve and combine cities, and so forth. If the state of Texas permits Tesla's battery factory to dump waste into rivers, the state should fix that in state law. There is not an analogy here between states of the nation and cities of the states. In the federal system, states have all the powers. Within the state, states also have all the powers.
    - Retric 2y ago
      The states are a terrible choice for managing the environment. Pollution trivially crosses state borders, but often the impact is very local. IE the smell from a paper mill or sewage treatment plant doesn't spread across 1,000 miles. So local control makes sense for local issues, and federal control makes sense for widespread issues like runoff.
      - dpkirchner 2y ago
        I remember way back when the right wing was all about local control and individual responsibility. What ever happened to that? (I ask rhetorically. We all know those were lies all along, of course.)
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  > The fact that Austin was able to enforce its development regulations outside of its own city limits is pretty ridiculous honestly. Is it really that ridiculous? Texas has ETJs (extra territorial jurisdiction), which is what let Austin have some control over unincorporated land around it. This doesn’t seem that strange to me - functionally it’s not very different from a county imposing laws. More info on that in this article about Tesla avoiding environmental rules (https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/tesla-skirts-austins-environmental-rules-at-texas-gigafactory/ https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/tesla-skirts-austins-environm...). On the other hand I can see how people who want to live under less control may dislike that. > Cities with their own local environmental rules is a recipe for disaster. I disagree with this. As an example, Seattle has historically protected trees and the environment with lots of city level regulations. Those requirements have been significantly undone by the development (construction) lobby in the last 10 years, mostly by amplifying this notion that there is a housing “crisis”. But the city’s old regulations were what made the city attractive in the first place. Now there is an absurd situation where there are different rules that apply to everyday homeowners, who face lots of restrictions on their land, versus developers who can cut down old trees and “replace” them by planting a new (young) tree somewhere else (which is obviously not the same). I’ve already seen this erosion of city regulations result in numerous neighborhoods losing trees and green spaces that were previously protected for decades, and it’s really sad.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    You have aptly, if inadvertently, perfectly illustrated the absurdity of local environmental regulations. The no-growth ordinances of Seattle are undoubtedly responsible for destroying millions of trees outside the city of Seattle.
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      That’s like saying the US should have no environmental regulations because there are other countries with less protection. Also, calling the previous set of regulations in Seattle “no growth” is (factually incorrect) editorialization. I’ve seen this type of misinformation from the “yimby” crowd frequently, as a political tactic. Why stretch the truth? It makes it harder to find common ground. The surrounding cities also had similar rules for what it’s worth. But stepping back, I don’t get the point of trying to concentrate density in a small area and creating problems for the environment and quality of life. In the end you get a concrete landscape of big apartment blocks with all the habitats for small animals, birds, fish destroyed. That’s not a great place to live. It seems healthier to make use of our country’s land and have development that fits in with its area, and it would mean better living conditions for people as well.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- badrequest 2y ago
  What about YIMBYism obligates you to cheer for anything unrelated to increasing housing supply?
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    As I mentioned, the Austin ETJ has mainly been used to stop housing projects.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  Yeah, we wouldn't want local communities to make decisions about how to protect themselves and their environment. That's madness! They'd probably decide to interfere with some business' god-given right to plunder the commons.
  - Analemma_ 2y ago
    Correct, we do not. We tried giving local communities the ability to "make decisions about how to protect themselves" and it has been an unmitigated disaster, with spiraling housing costs that are now an existential threat to the country re: cratering birth rates because nobody can buy a house to have a family in. "Local communities" had a privilege and couldn't use it responsibly, so it's being taken away.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      We have differing opinions on so much! Fair enough. We simply disagree. I don't think that the spiraling housing costs across the country can be attributed to local environmental laws. I don't think that the decreased birth rate can be largely attributed to the housing issue. I don't think that the decreased birth rate is anything like an existential crisis for the US. I think that when it comes to laws that address harms your neighbors might inflict on you, the more local those laws are decided, the better (generally speaking).
- foreverobama 2y ago
  [dead]
- swozey 2y ago
  Ironically the Governor of Texas hates Austin because he (knowingly, he was AG at the time) chopped down a row of Austins very coveted pecan/cedar/heritage trees which is a huge deal to Austinites who love and value the ecosystem of their city, and was sued. And he has been trying to get the ordinance repealed for years. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2017/06/13/gov-greg-abbotts-bone-to-pick-with-austins-tree-ordinance-is-personal/10048750007/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2017/06/13/gov-greg-abb... Austin also has to protect its Aquafier, which has been under constant attack for decades. https://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/10/drought-abbott-keeps-his-lawn-green-drilling/ https://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/10/drought-abbott-keeps... Austin has been under attack by out-of-city politicians for its entire existence. It goes back to the 1800s. Anything Austin does, the State tries to negate. > In January 2015, a few weeks before taking office as governor and four months before selling his Central Austin home, Abbott blasted tree ordinances as part of the “patchwork quilt” of local bans hurting the state. > “Texas is being Californianized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott told a 2015 conference hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential think tank. “It’s being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans. We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”
brandonagr2 2y ago
Giga Texas isn't located in Austin... just next door, they will still be under Travis County regulations, it's not like there is now a free for all with no rules.
chrisjj 2y ago
> Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/tesla-avoids-texas-law-concerns/269-19de0eff-73c8-4231-891c-0b0a78b9dcf8 http://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/tesla-avoids-texas-la..." on this server. Reference #18.c0ed655f.1714574126.1c69cc https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.c0ed655f.1714574126.1c69cc https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.c0ed655f.1714574126.1c69cc
- vel0city 2y ago
  A lot of local news websites try to avoid GDPR regulations by trying to geo-block EU users. I imagine that's what happened here. They probably have their CDN set to issue "access denied" to any non-US users.
exabrial 2y ago
This is a pretty loaded headline… states absolutely have the right to pre-empt local authority. Get these things changed at the state level.
- ShrimpHawk 2y ago
  If they didn't want to be subject to Austin city regulations they could have not built in Austin city limits
  - polski-g 2y ago
    Cities in Texas can annex surrounding land, unlike say in NY where boundaries are fixed. It makes sense that the land owners can choose to be de-annexed if they want.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I hate Elon Musk and I think that the Tesla corporation is overvalued, and I am generally for environmental regulations, but it's not like "state laws preempting city laws" is unique to Texas. This is true of pretty much every state, just like federal laws preempting state laws. I can't really blame a for-profit corporation for using the laws as they are written. I blame Texas for having the loophole.
    - fallingknife 2y ago
      It's actually not just like federal laws preempting state laws. It's much stronger. States actually have a degree of sovereignty that can protect them from preemption in some cases. Local governments have none and are completely subordinated to the state governments.
    - BobaFloutist 2y ago
      >I can't really blame a for-profit corporation for using the laws as they are written. It's funny how whenever a corporation behaves hostilely toward its community, or its customers, or its competitors the rallying cry is "Well it's for profit, they might as well do whatever is mathematically correct", but whenever people turn around and try to make the behavior mathematically incorrect by, say, regulating the corporation or refusing to do business with them or protesting and blocking the factory site they're all of a sudden being unfair and disrupting legitimate business operations.
stalfosknight 2y ago
Under a unitary state government, counties and cities have no rights or powers that the state legislature doesn't give them. There's nothing to see here.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

76 points by asne11 2y ago

Don't bother reading the article. It doesn't have any discussion of what the regulations in question are or what the actual impact of this factory not being bound by them will be. Basically there is almost no actual information content and you have read 90% of it from just the headline.

blamazon 2y ago
Additionally, on my mobile the page was almost unusable. Here is a key bit: > The company's ability to deannex from the city comes after Senate Bill 2038 passed last year.

jeffbee 2y ago

As a yimby, I am required by consistency and good taste to applaud this outcome. Cities with their own local environmental rules is a recipe for disaster. It is the reason why American construction is paralyzed. You can say that these environmental regulations included air and water rules, but mainly what they've been used to do is to stop the construction of housing. The fact that Austin was able to enforce its development regulations outside of its own city limits is pretty ridiculous honestly.

tstrimple 2y ago
This is a false dichotomy. You don't have to enable building factories with environmental externalities next to suburbs to increase the supply of housing. Surely your argument isn't that we can't have enough housing unless Tesla is allowed to dump waste in the Colorado river is it?
- jeffbee 2y ago
  No, my argument is that the state is the right level of government at which to regulate the environment. As we see here, most states have the power to abrogate city regulations, to dissolve and combine cities, and so forth. If the state of Texas permits Tesla's battery factory to dump waste into rivers, the state should fix that in state law. There is not an analogy here between states of the nation and cities of the states. In the federal system, states have all the powers. Within the state, states also have all the powers.
  - Retric 2y ago
    The states are a terrible choice for managing the environment. Pollution trivially crosses state borders, but often the impact is very local. IE the smell from a paper mill or sewage treatment plant doesn't spread across 1,000 miles. So local control makes sense for local issues, and federal control makes sense for widespread issues like runoff.
    - dpkirchner 2y ago
      I remember way back when the right wing was all about local control and individual responsibility. What ever happened to that? (I ask rhetorically. We all know those were lies all along, of course.)
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
> The fact that Austin was able to enforce its development regulations outside of its own city limits is pretty ridiculous honestly. Is it really that ridiculous? Texas has ETJs (extra territorial jurisdiction), which is what let Austin have some control over unincorporated land around it. This doesn’t seem that strange to me - functionally it’s not very different from a county imposing laws. More info on that in this article about Tesla avoiding environmental rules (https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/tesla-skirts-austins-environmental-rules-at-texas-gigafactory/ https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/tesla-skirts-austins-environm...). On the other hand I can see how people who want to live under less control may dislike that. > Cities with their own local environmental rules is a recipe for disaster. I disagree with this. As an example, Seattle has historically protected trees and the environment with lots of city level regulations. Those requirements have been significantly undone by the development (construction) lobby in the last 10 years, mostly by amplifying this notion that there is a housing “crisis”. But the city’s old regulations were what made the city attractive in the first place. Now there is an absurd situation where there are different rules that apply to everyday homeowners, who face lots of restrictions on their land, versus developers who can cut down old trees and “replace” them by planting a new (young) tree somewhere else (which is obviously not the same). I’ve already seen this erosion of city regulations result in numerous neighborhoods losing trees and green spaces that were previously protected for decades, and it’s really sad.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  You have aptly, if inadvertently, perfectly illustrated the absurdity of local environmental regulations. The no-growth ordinances of Seattle are undoubtedly responsible for destroying millions of trees outside the city of Seattle.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    That’s like saying the US should have no environmental regulations because there are other countries with less protection. Also, calling the previous set of regulations in Seattle “no growth” is (factually incorrect) editorialization. I’ve seen this type of misinformation from the “yimby” crowd frequently, as a political tactic. Why stretch the truth? It makes it harder to find common ground. The surrounding cities also had similar rules for what it’s worth. But stepping back, I don’t get the point of trying to concentrate density in a small area and creating problems for the environment and quality of life. In the end you get a concrete landscape of big apartment blocks with all the habitats for small animals, birds, fish destroyed. That’s not a great place to live. It seems healthier to make use of our country’s land and have development that fits in with its area, and it would mean better living conditions for people as well.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
badrequest 2y ago
What about YIMBYism obligates you to cheer for anything unrelated to increasing housing supply?
- jeffbee 2y ago
  As I mentioned, the Austin ETJ has mainly been used to stop housing projects.
JohnFen 2y ago
Yeah, we wouldn't want local communities to make decisions about how to protect themselves and their environment. That's madness! They'd probably decide to interfere with some business' god-given right to plunder the commons.
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  Correct, we do not. We tried giving local communities the ability to "make decisions about how to protect themselves" and it has been an unmitigated disaster, with spiraling housing costs that are now an existential threat to the country re: cratering birth rates because nobody can buy a house to have a family in. "Local communities" had a privilege and couldn't use it responsibly, so it's being taken away.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    We have differing opinions on so much! Fair enough. We simply disagree. I don't think that the spiraling housing costs across the country can be attributed to local environmental laws. I don't think that the decreased birth rate can be largely attributed to the housing issue. I don't think that the decreased birth rate is anything like an existential crisis for the US. I think that when it comes to laws that address harms your neighbors might inflict on you, the more local those laws are decided, the better (generally speaking).
foreverobama 2y ago
[dead]
swozey 2y ago
Ironically the Governor of Texas hates Austin because he (knowingly, he was AG at the time) chopped down a row of Austins very coveted pecan/cedar/heritage trees which is a huge deal to Austinites who love and value the ecosystem of their city, and was sued. And he has been trying to get the ordinance repealed for years. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2017/06/13/gov-greg-abbotts-bone-to-pick-with-austins-tree-ordinance-is-personal/10048750007/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2017/06/13/gov-greg-abb... Austin also has to protect its Aquafier, which has been under constant attack for decades. https://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/10/drought-abbott-keeps-his-lawn-green-drilling/ https://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/10/drought-abbott-keeps... Austin has been under attack by out-of-city politicians for its entire existence. It goes back to the 1800s. Anything Austin does, the State tries to negate. > In January 2015, a few weeks before taking office as governor and four months before selling his Central Austin home, Abbott blasted tree ordinances as part of the “patchwork quilt” of local bans hurting the state. > “Texas is being Californianized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott told a 2015 conference hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential think tank. “It’s being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans. We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”

brandonagr2 2y ago

Giga Texas isn't located in Austin... just next door, they will still be under Travis County regulations, it's not like there is now a free for all with no rules.

chrisjj 2y ago

> Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/tesla-avoids-texas-law-concerns/269-19de0eff-73c8-4231-891c-0b0a78b9dcf8 http://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/tesla-avoids-texas-la..." on this server. Reference #18.c0ed655f.1714574126.1c69cc https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.c0ed655f.1714574126.1c69cc https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.c0ed655f.1714574126.1c69cc

vel0city 2y ago
A lot of local news websites try to avoid GDPR regulations by trying to geo-block EU users. I imagine that's what happened here. They probably have their CDN set to issue "access denied" to any non-US users.

exabrial 2y ago

This is a pretty loaded headline… states absolutely have the right to pre-empt local authority. Get these things changed at the state level.

ShrimpHawk 2y ago
If they didn't want to be subject to Austin city regulations they could have not built in Austin city limits
- polski-g 2y ago
  Cities in Texas can annex surrounding land, unlike say in NY where boundaries are fixed. It makes sense that the land owners can choose to be de-annexed if they want.
- tombert 2y ago
  I hate Elon Musk and I think that the Tesla corporation is overvalued, and I am generally for environmental regulations, but it's not like "state laws preempting city laws" is unique to Texas. This is true of pretty much every state, just like federal laws preempting state laws. I can't really blame a for-profit corporation for using the laws as they are written. I blame Texas for having the loophole.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    It's actually not just like federal laws preempting state laws. It's much stronger. States actually have a degree of sovereignty that can protect them from preemption in some cases. Local governments have none and are completely subordinated to the state governments.
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    >I can't really blame a for-profit corporation for using the laws as they are written. It's funny how whenever a corporation behaves hostilely toward its community, or its customers, or its competitors the rallying cry is "Well it's for profit, they might as well do whatever is mathematically correct", but whenever people turn around and try to make the behavior mathematically incorrect by, say, regulating the corporation or refusing to do business with them or protesting and blocking the factory site they're all of a sudden being unfair and disrupting legitimate business operations.

stalfosknight 2y ago

Under a unitary state government, counties and cities have no rights or powers that the state legislature doesn't give them. There's nothing to see here.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]