Forest clearing operations were halted at Tesla’s Giga Berlin on Monday, after an environmentalist group claimed to a Frankfurt, Germany court that the tree removal would harm hibernating snakes.
On Thursday, Reuters shared that environmentalists’ bid to stop the deforestation at Tesla’s Giga Berlin factory site had been rejected by a German court. As a result, Tesla is once again free to continue clearing trees for the construction site and the factory to-come.
To support its position, the courts said that the appeal had been rejected due to Tesla’s having taken the correct measures to protect the snakes – requiring them to capture and resettle any snakes to an alternative habitat.
While Tesla’s official permission to begin construction again does depend on conditional approval as granted by local authorities, the same local authorities aren’t unlikely to raise future alarms and consult with environmental groups, as well as the community – seeing as they’ve already done so on other environmental and resource issues in the past.
A German court has rejected a bid by environmentalists to halt tree cutting at Tesla's proposed manufacturing site near Berlin, paving the way for the electric carmaker to proceed with plans to finalise construction of its Gigafactory. https://t.co/8WyPPqZike
— Reuters Science News (@ReutersScience) December 10, 2020
Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU), the environmental group responsible for taking the claim to court, will have the potential to appeal against the decision at higher levels of Germany’s administrative courts. Whether it will be able to halt Tesla’s continued deforestation on behalf of snakes and sand lizards, as it attempted to in court in Frankfurt, is unclear, and will be revealed only in time.
