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Tesla only 8th greenest automaker, BMW is best, says Newsweek

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Once Tesla begins to start converting Superchargers to Solar power in earnest I would imagine this number will improve. The company's goal is not to be the greenest - it is to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport. Overlaps between efforts in this direction and the criteria used to gain these rankings is likely to be incidental.
 
I seriously doubt calcs take into account lifetime energy consumption of the product, where tesla could excell, probably only footprint of the manufacturer. I don't know if giga plant will help or hurt ranking. Regardless, I agree this is not the shade of green that is tesla's target.
 
From their methodology, it appears they are speaking about Tesla "the company", not Tesla's "products"...appears to me that the author's failure to adequately explain this was intentional (to grab headlines)...:rolleyes:

Or ignorance. Many reporters are 1 millimeter deep but with mile long antennas. I doubt author read the criteria or understood the difference. "tesla" is a top 10 trigger, they saw an angle, and went for it. Next up: amazing jellyfish whose sting causes weight loss - wealthy Chinese are keeping tanks of them.
 

Tesla Motors, Inc. is 431 in the world with a score of 16%. It is 8th in the automaker.
The No.1 greenest automaker is BMW and 26 in the world.

Tesla only 8th greenest automaker, BMW is best, says Newsweek - news from Allwebsolutions.net


here is the list
http://www.newsweek.com/green-2015/top-green-companies-world-2015

I hope Tesla will make it to top 50 in next year when the mega factory opens.
If you don't count all the nasty stuff coming out of the tailpipe for the next 20 years.
 
I seriously doubt calcs take into account lifetime energy consumption of the product, where tesla could excell, probably only footprint of the manufacturer. I don't know if giga plant will help or hurt ranking. Regardless, I agree this is not the shade of green that is tesla's target.

This. Anyone who claims that BMW (or Ford or GM) is doing more than Tesla to positively impact the planet isn't considering the lifetime footprint and must be incredibly naive.
 
...I don't know if giga plant will help or hurt ranking...
I believe that the giga factory is intended to be powered by renewable energy, so that ought to help. Although I haven't a clue how the raw materials used in battery making would affect the ranking.

As others have pointed out, the whole exercise is pretty silly if one doesn't count the products made.
 
All that matters is total GHG emissions. Any model that tries to rank "green-ness" that involves revenue is deeply flawed. The climate doesn't care if when carbon is emitted it made 1 cent or 1 dollar. It's effect on the climate is the same. Revenue / GHG emissions gives a pretty much useless/confounding number of carbon intensity per dollar of product sold. Lower is better, but still bad. Zero is the number that counts. Making more money per unit of carbon emitted doesn't make a company or product greener. Emitting less total GHGs does that. Revenue has no factor in it.

Studies like these that try to rank greenness are basically an attempt to commodify environmental friendly-ness without actually being environmentally friendly. This particular one seems to give points for environmentally friendly products, but doesn't subtract points for polluting products. They even give points for linking executive pay to corporate environmental performance.

Lots of weird metrics that miss the issue. The issue is total carbon emitted -- it doesn't matter how it gets there, or how much revenue it generated, or how the CEO was compensated.
 
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I believe that the giga factory is intended to be powered by renewable energy, so that ought to help. Although I haven't a clue how the raw materials used in battery making would affect the ranking.

If they were to consider raw materials in the battery, but exclude those going into an ICE, that would be pretty short-sighted. For instance, nickel is a common material in many ICE specific components.
 
All that matters is total GHG emissions. Any model that tries to rank "green-ness" that involves revenue is deeply flawed. The climate doesn't care if when carbon is emitted it made 1 cent or 1 dollar. It's effect on the climate is the same. Revenue / GHG emissions gives a pretty much useless/confounding number of carbon intensity per dollar of product sold. Lower is better, but still bad. Zero is the number that counts. Making more money per unit of carbon emitted doesn't make a company or product greener. Emitting less total GHGs does that. Revenue has no factor in it.
I disagree. Without scaling emissions to something, you'd (uselessly) conclude that the greenest companies in the world are street vendors selling lemonade or something. Likewise, I'm sure that Tesla's overall GHG footprint is smaller than BMW's, but BMW makes a whole lot more cars. Doesn't it make more sense to ask, what's the GHG generated per car? And how then would you compare Tesla to, say, General Electric? Comparing product-to-product isn't possible, so the author used a reasonable proxy, comparing GHG/dollar of sales.

I agree with others above who note that metric is incomplete because it doesn't consider the downstream GHG emissions from use of the product. That's very tricky to do, though, across different kinds of products. GE's jet turbines create tremendous amounts of GHGs when used (as do all airplane turbines), but it's still reasonable to want the turbines made in the most environmentally responsible way possible. And GE would also credit for all the wind turbines it makes, which arguably generate net negative GHGs (by displacing fossil generation). So, going downstream would get complicated, fast.
 
These "green" standards can be quite flawed. They're in the eyes in the beholder. I remember years ago an "ethical" mutual funds company was investing in the worst clear cutting polluting logging company in the world. Why? They had set up a paper recycling plan in their head office. Another time they were investing in a gold company that had planned to destroy a glacier that fed indigenous villages water. Why? They had promised to destroy the glacier SUSTAINABLY. I asked "How can you destroy a glacier sustainably?"
 
I seriously doubt calcs take into account lifetime energy consumption of the product, where tesla could excell, probably only footprint of the manufacturer. I don't know if giga plant will help or hurt ranking. Regardless, I agree this is not the shade of green that is tesla's target.

They do not consider lifetime energy consumption of product. In fact, 20% of the score is "Green Revenue Score" defined as % of revenue derived from products that "contribute positively to environmental sustainability and societal health". Tesla should score very high there, but the kicker is that they use values assigned to the industrial classification into which the company falls, not the individual company's products, so Tesla is stuck with the rating of the "consumer discretionary" sector, not EV manufacturing.
If they considered lifetime GHG production, major oil companies would have ranked last, but they are all in the top 3 quintiles.
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I agree with others above who note that metric is incomplete because it doesn't consider the downstream GHG emissions from use of the product. That's very tricky to do, though, across different kinds of products. GE's jet turbines create tremendous amounts of GHGs when used (as do all airplane turbines), but it's still reasonable to want the turbines made in the most environmentally responsible way possible. And GE would also credit for all the wind turbines it makes, which arguably generate net negative GHGs (by displacing fossil generation). So, going downstream would get complicated, fast.

Notably, all of the major oil companies ranked in the top 3 quintiles, whereas Tesla ranked in the last quintile.

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Not only is the methodology flawed. According to them, they give a score of 0 if the company does not respond to their partner's requests.

Tesla did not respond:

Results - Company Responses


So they got a score of 0 in many categories.

I don't get the relevance of this. Newsweek says that they used publicly available info and notified the companies so they could make any info available. I don't see any mention of CDP in their methodology.
 
I don't get the relevance of this. Newsweek says that they used publicly available info and notified the companies so they could make any info available. I don't see any mention of CDP in their methodology.

It is right there in their FAQ:

http://www.newsweek.com.nyud.net:8080//2015-newsweek-green-rankings-faq-338193

All the data used in the 2015 Newsweek Green Rankings was pulled from Bloomberg’s Professional Service, which includes sustainability information on over 15,000 public securities and the CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project. The Green Revenue Score was informed by analytics provided by HIP Investor.