Reference no: EM132946317

On May 13, Elon Musk said Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin because of bitcoin's heavy energy consumption. Yet the company ranks well behind General Motors and Ford in reporting carbon emissions and setting carbon-reduction targets. So how green is Tesla, really? Those concerned with the fate of the planet have long lauded Tesla for its efforts "To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy." The company says that "the faster the world stops relying on fossil fuels and moves towards a zero-emission future, the better."
While founder and CEO Elon Musk caused alarm among environmentalists in early 2021 by endorsing bitcoin, whose annual carbon emissions are equivalent to that of a small country, he reversed this position with a tweet on May 13. Responding in part to a tweet from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance calling bitcoin's energy usage "insane," Musk said that Tesla would no longer transact in bitcoin because of its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and its "great cost to the environment."
There is no denying that Tesla has disrupted the auto industry by making exclusively electric vehicles-and maybe more importantly, by making them sexy. When the Model 3 was released in 2017, corporate elites and tree-huggers alike put their names on the wait list. Tesla succeeded in electric cars where its American competitors, General Motors and Ford, had failed.
But Tesla's story about being green is not as black-and-white as it may seem.
A recent study conducted by Arabesque (not publicly available) found that the car company is among the 15% of the world's largest companies, across 14 indices, that do not disclose their overall greenhouse-gas emissions. General Motors and Ford, meanwhile, are far more
transparent-about both the emissions they create in making their vehicles and their targets for reducing those emissions.
Granted, even though Tesla does not disclose the specifics of its carbon emissions, it has disrupted the auto sector's reliance on combustion engines. And the company is seeking not to just move a single part of the transportation industry, but the entire transportation and energy ecosystem.
For example, Tesla provides both businesses and homeowners an opportunity to generate solar energy through solar panels and store them in a Powerwall battery. Tesla also claims to be seeking to extend its battery life and ensure they are recycled responsibly. Remarkably, it has also opened up its patents-a bold move in an industry that works hard to protect its intellectual capital in order to capitalize on research-and-development investments.
Despite all these positive-even revolutionary-moves, Tesla's lack of transparency regarding its carbon emissions and targets should raise questions about its commitment to a sustainable future. As much as we all love a good story of the maverick that disrupts the way we do things, we need to take a long breath before we say that Tesla is deep green. If Tesla is truly committed to low carbon emissions, it should, at the very least, be willing to report them. If it had done so, maybe it wouldn't have committed to using bitcoin in the first place.

Reflect and answer the following question:

Now, construct an argument on "how green is Tesla" by using the literature from the course Business Ethics & CSR and scholarly research articles. You must make your position/thesis statement clear in the introductory paragraph. That is, whether you think Tesla is or not really practising true sustainability. Please take any of the positions and support your argument with evidence.