Replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric ones helping combat climate change is "highly debatable"?

Replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles is potentially part of combating climate change, but this depends a lot on the specifics of manufacturing etc. [1]

Regardless, "helping combat climate change" is at best an incomplete description of Tesla, in the same way that Nestle is not perfectly captured by "Good food, good life" ; these are potential side-effects, rather than inarguable core missions.

We should be wary of accepting the slogans of profit-driven organisations as the truth. Wendy's is focused a lot more on selling than locating beef, for example.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timabansal/2021/05/13/how-green...

It's a very significant part of combating climate change, without which there is no hope of achieving zero carbon, and no company has done more to make that happen than Tesla.

One can praise Tesla while still acknowledging that it should not be blinded trusted to always work in the public interest, and also while recognizing Tesla's contributions alone are not enough for human civilization to get to zero carbon.

Minimizing how significant Tesla's contribution has been relative to other carmakers', and in fact, the vast majority if not all other companies in general, is not an honest way of addressing these inadequancies and challenges you highlight, and suggests to me a motivation unrelated to environmentalism behind it.

Replacing a gas powered car with an EV in an area served by coal power is definitely not helping either air pollution or climate change. It's only moving emissions from the tail pipe to a smoke stack. An EV is only a net negative CO2 producer if you charge it from renewable sources. Even then it'll only be a net negative only after the break-even point for the CO2 produced by the construction of the EV and charging system.

This is like saying that taking the first step is useless because there are more steps to take before you get to destination.

It's widely understood that switching to EV is part of a larger package of policies that can get society to zero carbon but it is nonetheless an absolutely necessary part of any zero carbon future. Tesla's role in pushing that forward is highly commendable, by any reasonable standard.

> It's only moving emissions from the tail pipe to a smoke stack.

I kinda like A LOT not having tail pipe smoke around me all the time on the streets...