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Abstract

In late 2019, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla would be building its first European car factory in Grünheide. While the factory was constructed with much political support and heralded as an inevitable step towards Germany's energy and mobility transition in the media, a small but persistent opposition managed to turn the factory into a site of controversy: a controversy not just about the factory's impact on its immediate environment, but also about ‘the future’. Positioned at the intersection between science and technology studies and critical future studies, this article approaches that controversy as a case study for contested future-making at a time when the looming threats of climate change and environmental destruction are rendering the question of ‘the future’ ever more urgent. Relying on an analysis of publicly available materials such as media reports, recordings of press conferences and speeches, promotional material by Tesla and documentation of the factory's approval process, it asks how and why the future became so ubiquitous in the controversy. In doing so, it makes visible how different imaginaries of the future clash with each other, how they are narrated, made persuasive, materialised, contested, silenced, and enforced in the present. Ultimately, the article seeks to highlight the potential of the controversy to challenge taken-for-granted imaginaries of the future as predetermined by a linear path of technological development and to create the kind of political contestation in which alternative imaginaries might emerge.

Keywords

controversy studies critical future studies future imaginaries ‘post-political’ politics of climate change sustainability transition Tesla

Introduction

On 22 March 2022 a grand spectacle takes place in a small town south-east of Berlin, to announce a momentous achievement: the future is saved. On this ‘Delivery Day’, electric car manufacturer Tesla celebrates the inauguration of its new factory in Grünheide. The event, which peaks in the ceremonious delivery of the first 30 electric sport utility vehicles (SUVs) produced at the factory, is attended by Tesla CEO Elon Musk personally, as well as a number of high-profile German politicians, among them Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Federal Minister for Economy and Climate Protection Robert Habeck. It is the culmination of a success story that began 2 years earlier when the location for Tesla's first electric car factory in Europe was announced. Here was the opportunity for Germany to ‘catch up’, and finally deliver on the promise of the energy and mobility transition. Or, in the words of Grünheide's mayor Arne Christiani: ‘Tesla is the future’ (Messmer, 2020).

Standing in a tunnel of bright, white lights in the newly finished production hall, Musk assuages any lingering doubts:

Sometimes people are sad about the future, or they think: Will we solve sustainable energy? Maybe the climate issue is too late? […] I really want to make sure everyone that you can have hope in the future. You should have hope in the future. This problem will be solved and this factory is a major step in that direction. So: believe in the future! (Tesla Welt Podcast, 2022a, 00:15:45–00:16:31:00)

At the same time as Musk delivers his speech to roaring applause, thousands are stuck in traffic jams on the Berlin beltway near the factory. Environmental activists have rappelled down a departure sign above Highway 10, temporarily blocking traffic in both directions. Meanwhile, the Bürgerinitiative Grünheide (BI Grünheide), a citizen's initiative founded shortly after the factory's announcement to prevent its construction, is leading a protest march up to the factory gates. Joined by climate activist groups such as Sand im Getriebe and Ende Gelände, they are here to proclaim what they have repeated since their first protest: ‘We are here, we are loud because Tesla is stealing our future!’ (ARD, 2020). Their protest has turned the factory into an object of controversy, rather than the self-evident implementation of a predetermined future.

This article reconstructs the controversy surrounding the Tesla factory in Grünheide as a site of contested future-making. From its most enthusiastic supporters to its most vehement opponents, the factory is turned into a site for mobilising particular visions of the future and resisting others. Ultimately, the controversy is animated by the question of what a desirable future looks like in times of climate change and ecological disaster, and how a democratic society should transition towards it. I combine insights from critical future studies (CFS) and science and technology studies (STS) to look at the controversy as a case study for exploring how this future is narrated, made persuasive, materialised, contested, silenced, and enforced in the present. I draw attention to the controversy as one of the small spaces and moments that challenge the post-political formulation of the future, in an attempt to amplify its ability to broaden the field of future possibilities.

The controversy as a site of contested future-making

Studying the future in the present

In this article, I approach the future not simply as the temporal realm following the present, but as enacted in the present, as a result of currently unfolding material and discursive practices (Tutton, 2017: 480). This approach assumes that the future is inherently plural, as there is not just one inevitable future but a multiplicity of conflicting futures, depending on multiple, co-existing possibilities in the present (Coleman and Tutton, 2017). My approach is inspired by a body of work which can loosely be subsumed under the heading of ‘Critical Future Studies’ (Goode and Godhe, 2017: 1).

At the core of CFS is the notion of performativity (Konrad et al., 2017: 468). Stories about the future ‘can rehearse and stabilise particular futures, and in so doing make others absent’ (Watts, 2008: 188). Discursive and material practices are closely entangled in this process (Micheal, 2000: 35). It matters how the future is collectively imagined, anticipated, predicted, expected, and prepared for in the present because such practices do something, they increase the chances of materialising some futures over others. They become the foundations on which strategic alliances are formed, policies developed, investments made, infrastructures built, etc. (Borup et al., 2006: 289). Work in STS on the sociology of expectations and on ‘socio-technical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) shows the particular importance of future imaginaries in the development of science and technology (Konrad et al., 2017).

The concept of performativity does not suggest that imaginaries of the future are self-fulfilling prophecies, however. The present is full of failed futures and unintended consequences (Tutton, 2017: 483). As sociologists Adam and Groves (2007: 178) argue, materiality entails its own futurity, which enables or resists human imaginaries and desires. The effects of carbon emissions, plastic waste, and nuclear radiation testify to this (Tutton, 2017: 484). Nonetheless, there is great power in stories of the future, which succeed in becoming collective imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). In my analysis of the controversy I follow Jasanoff and Kim (2015) and Goode and Godhe (2017) in their understanding of future imaginaries as collective, normative visions of the future which have become so self-evident as to influence social behaviour largely unconsciously, without having to be explicitly spelled out. As Mangnus et al. put it,

The main social function of imagined futures […] is their capacity to inform meaning and stimulate action and guide choices in the present […] their primary social function is bringing people together around particular orientations for action—not describing the most accurate future. (2021: 4)

This is also where their power lies: future imaginaries mark the limits of what is deemed possible and desirable (Goode and Godhe, 2017). Consequently, CFS pays particular attention to the politics of future-making and asks how the future is ‘governed’ in the present, who gets to participate in making it, and how relations of power work to encourage the unfolding of some futures over others (Konrad et al., 2017: 482; Oomen et al., 2021: 258). Future-making emerges as a political practice in such work, and its study can ‘make visible the emergence of new political collectivities’ (Mathews and Barnes, 2016: 21).

The controversy in Grünheide provides a perfect opportunity for studying the future in the present because it is a moment when tacit and taken-for-granted imaginaries of the future underlying the German mobility and energy transition, are actively brought to the surface and mobilised. It provides an opportunity for reconstructing what the future ‘does’ to the present (Harding and Rosenberg, 2005: 9).

The future as an object of controversy

In adopting this approach to the controversy, I combine insights from CFS with the method of controversy studies, which has a long tradition within STS and shares many of the same sensibilities guiding work in CFS. While the origins of STS are indebted to the studies of controversies within scientific communities in the 1970s (Pinch and Leuenberger, 2006: 637), a more recent strand of studies has emerged that analyses ‘public knowledge controversies’ (Barry, 2013: 187) more widely. These occur when a taken-for-granted aspect of daily life becomes the focus of ‘intense public interrogation’ (Whatmore, 2009: 587). Much work on controversies in STS has focused on how such moments are triggered by objects or material processes, be it the construction of an oil pipeline (Barry, 2013) or a wind farm (Papazu, 2017), radioactive fallout (Wynne, 1992), or floods (Whatmore and Landström, 2011). Controversies are thus seen as moments when ‘relations between human actors and the non-human elements that constitute their life worlds’ (Marres, 2007: 773) are disrupted, when the latter turn from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004: 235).

It is this disruption that can turn controversies into ‘generative political events’ (Whatmore, 2009: 587), in which alternative ways of doing things can arise (Venturini, 2010: 6). The notion of ‘the political’ underlying controversy studies recalls the work of Chantal Mouffe (Barry, 2013: 7), who argues that the political is born out of antagonism (Mouffe, 2005: 10). An issue becomes politicised when it is acknowledged as an object of contestation, when there are multiple irreconcilable alternatives around which temporary compromises might be reached, but never a final consensus (Mouffe, 2005: 18). Those opposing the factory in Grünheide use the material disruption caused by the Tesla factory, as an opportunity to politicise the taken-for-granted imaginary of the future, to which it is so closely attached. The controversy calls into question what a desirable future looks like in times of climate change and ecological disaster, how to decide whose desired future wins out in the present, what costs are acceptable (and for whom), and ultimately about how the future should be governed in a democratic society.

I trace these questions to the sites of the controversy's unfolding, teasing out the future-making practices within them. To do this, I analyse publicly available materials, such as media reports on the development of the factory and the controversy (published between late 2019 when the factory was first announced, and early 2022, when it started production), the website of BI Grünheide, recordings of press conferences and speeches, media interviews with opponents and supporters of the factory, promotional material by Tesla, as well as the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) document which functioned as the replacement for the second public hearing in the factory's approval process. My analysis is divided into three steps: first I follow Tesla's vision of the future as materialised in its new Grünheide factory, then I zoom in on the media and political response this vision engendered in Germany, to finally look at how opponents of the factory have attempted to resist this future and open up a space for its contestation.

It is not my intention in this article to contrast two monolithic futures, that of Tesla and its supporters on the one hand, and that of their opponents, on the other. The latter are not held together by a joint vision of an alternative future. Their resistance, instead, makes apparent the need for creating a political space in which the potential for such alternatives is acknowledged and their exploration and development are encouraged. Where Tesla and its supporters claim to ‘fix’ the future, offering a supposed solution that closes the future in place, those opposing the factory seek to draw attention to and pry open the cracks in this vision, so as to re-open the future to political contestation. It is this attempt at ‘prying open’ that I want to highlight.

Tesla is the future

When Musk was imploring his audience to rekindle their hope in the future during his Delivery Day speech, he was repeating a story that has been at the core of Tesla's success from the beginning: the story of technological ingenuity propelling humanity forward on a linear path of never-ending progress. Tesla's overarching goal, as stated on its website, is to ‘accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy’ (Tesla, 2022a). It is an optimistic story that becomes increasingly attractive, the more speculation about the future is dominated by frightening projections of climate disaster and environmental collapse.

And this story does something to the present. Thanks to its persuasiveness, Tesla has been a stock market success since long before 2021, the first year in which the company made a profit that did not rely on revenue gained from emission credit sales (O’Kane, 2021). In June 2020, when Tesla's value on the stock market surpassed that of Volkswagen, Daimler, and BMW together, the company's electric car business had been making losses for years. But, as Handelsblatt explained then, ‘The stock market is where the future is traded’ (Rutkowski, 2020) and the future, many experts agree, belongs to electric mobility. Tesla's most valuable asset is not its material performance, but its ability to tell a story about the future that people want to believe (Vint, 2019: 24; Watts, 2018: 9). In this section, I will take a closer look at this story by analysing the images, videos, documents, and events which Tesla uses to tell it, in Grünheide and beyond. My aim in doing so is not to refute Tesla's marketing claims but to understand them as future-making practices that ‘do’ something to the present, regardless of their validity (Mangnus et al., 2021: 4). I am interested in the imaginary of the future that Tesla creates and how its persuasiveness is related to what Harding and Rosenberg call ‘future nostalgia’ (2005: 4). But first, let us return to the Delivery Day celebrations.

With every car we make, with every battery we make, we’re making the future better

Musk held two speeches that day, the second one addressing the workers at the Grünheide factory to remind them of the value of their efforts:

It's worth remembering that any car that we make is a step in the direction of a sustainable future. The thing about this factory and the cars that we make is that it gives people hope about the future […] with every car we make, with every battery we make, we’re making the future better. (Tesla Welt Podcast, 2022b, 00:01:35–00:02:05)

The car in question is the ‘Model Y’, whose production had just started in Grünheide, an electric SUV that weighs above two tonnes, can go up to 249 km/h, and accelerate from 0 to around 96 km/h in 3.5 s. Like other Tesla cars, it boasts a sleek customisable design, an expansive touchscreen, and over-the-air software updates. This is what a ‘sustainable future’ looks like, at a minimum price of €47,500.

The future that Musk is inviting his audience to imagine is one in which ‘technological consumerism is posited as the solution to ecological catastrophe’ (Taffel, 2018: 163). Tesla’s claim to ‘stop climate change’ (Tesla, 2021: 3) relies on the ecomodernist belief that the climate and ecological crises can be addressed, not by strategies of de-growth, but by ‘decoupling’ economic growth from environmental impact, mainly through technologies, which are supposed to deliver ever-increasing energy and resource efficiency (Breakthrough Institute, 2014; Isenhour, 2016). The result is envisioned by ecomodernists as a win–win situation for the environment and the economy, as technological innovation is expected to also improve the efficiency of production processes, encourage the investment in new infrastructure, and open up markets for new products and services. This has proven a very influential idea, permeating discussions about sustainable development at the European Union, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations (Isenhour, 2016: 317), despite the lack of evidence supporting the possibility of significant ‘decoupling’ (Victor and Jackson, 2015: 44). Critics note that even where new technologies achieve an increase in efficiency, this tends to lead to higher consumption with corresponding ecological consequences (Caradonna et al., 2015: 9; Victor and Jackson, 2015: 43). Moreover environmental degradation is often merely moved elsewhere (Hornborg, 2015: 65). Tesla is a case in point. Standing on the Delivery Day stage, squinting at the sun, Musk talks of ‘scaling up’, ‘expansion’, and ‘growth’, to finally project a ‘best-case’ scenario: ideally, Tesla will produce 20 million cars in 10 years (Tesla Welt Podcast, 2022b). A growth rate corresponding to a 13-fold increase over the company's then-estimated production figures, requiring ‘four times as much lithium and nickel, twice as much cobalt and seven times as much graphite as the entire EV industry [expected] to consume in 2022’ (Lienert and White, 2022). Even if the necessary material capacity did exist, in Musk's ideal scenario, a reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions thanks to electric cars in some places, would necessitate dramatically increasing the extraction of finite materials elsewhere, exacerbating the serious social and environmental harms their mining is already causing (Taffel, 2018: 176).

What matters about the growth scenario projected by Musk is not its highly dubitable feasibility, nor its concrete contribution to averting climate and ecological collapse, but the story that it tells about the future. A story in which no radical socio-economic change is necessary to avert catastrophe, and in which the comforting idea of endless economic growth and technological triumph remain unchallenged.

Commodifying future nostalgia

Answering questions from the audience following his speech, Musk made a revealing comparison:

If you look at our rate of growth: Tesla is the fastest-growing company in history that makes a large manufactured product […] the next fastest was the Ford Model T. That was a hundred years ago. We’re actually growing faster than the Ford Model T. (Tesla Welt Podcast, 2022b, 00:09:11–00:09:33)

Earlier that day German Chancellor Scholz had drawn the same connection, recalling the construction of Ford's first car factory in Germany in 1925. It is no coincidence that both Musk and Scholz referenced the beginning of assembly line production in their speeches. A historical moment, which Marxist philosopher and activist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi views as the symbolic beginning of ‘the century that trusted in the future’ (2011: 4), a bright future associated, like the first mass-produced automobile, with technological ingenuity, speed, and the possibility of limitless economic expansion, the idea of ‘the future as growth’ (2011: 57).

It was at the start of the twentieth century, Berardi (2011) argues, that the unwavering belief originating in European modernity that the future would always be brighter, reached its peak, only to falter and wane by the century's close. The atrocities of the Second World War, facilitated by the technological advancement supposed to engender progress and prosperity, represented the first serious blow (Andersson, 2020: 31; Tutton, 2023: 439). It led thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Gunther Anders, and Lewis Mumford to challenge an imaginary of the future synonymous with progress and question the Enlightenment beliefs it was founded on (Andersson, 2020: 31). And yet the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s assured the continuation of a widespread belief in a better future.

According to Bearadi, it was the double shocks of the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972 and the 1973 oil crisis, which ushered in the end of the perception of ‘the future as growth’ (2011: 34–35). Both the idea of limitless economic growth and the Enlightenment belief that the future would be necessarily better, were now widely called into question. As Berardi puts it, it was now possible to imagine ‘that we were already living beyond our limit, in a state of suspended crisis, innocently waiting for the future to boomerang back in our faces’ (2011: 104).

It was not just the heightened awareness of limited resources and material constraints, which led to the ‘slow cancellation’ (Berardi, 2011: 13) of the optimistic twentieth-century future, but also the sense of a lack of alternatives engendered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread and consolidation of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s (Brown, 2015: 221; Buck-Morss, 2002: 239; Tutton, 2023: 446). The perception of the future as different and open to change through concerted action in the present was hollowed out by what cultural theorist Mark Fisher termed ‘capitalist realism’, the sense that ‘not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (2009: 8). The end of the twentieth century was thus characterised by the loss of ‘our capacity to imagine the future otherwise, as a site of utopian promise’ (Vint, 2016: 7). Many scholars and cultural critics agree with Berardi's diagnosis that since the end of the twentieth century, the world for the most part finds itself in a stage of post-futurity (Brown, 2015: 221; Coleman and Tutton, 2017: 440; Fisher, 2009: 8; Tutton, 2023; Vint, 2016: 7). As Harding and Rosenberg argue, one result of this ‘crisis of the future’ is that ‘our sense of the future is conditioned by a knowledge of, and even a nostalgia for, futures that we have already lost’ (2005: 3). This is where Tesla's story of the future comes in. The company's marketing strategy hinges on the successful commodification of this nostalgia for the future at a time when the looming threats of climate change and environmental destruction are rendering the question of ‘the future’ ever more urgent (Taffel, 2018). Its story promises the revival of the ‘cancelled’ (Berardi, 2011) twentieth-century future, with just a few tweaks and technological upgrades. The future marked by speed, technology, and the promise of ever-increasing prosperity is back with renewed intensity, it suggests. All it took was a change in motors.

This future is evident in the images and videos of the production line in Grünheide, which proliferated around the time of the Delivery Day event. They show a factory illuminated by clinically white lights, shining off gleaming metal surfaces, and huge robots performing a variety of tasks with precise efficiency (see e.g. Tesla, 2022a). In this idealised depiction, nothing could be further removed from the harrowing work accidents, toxic chemical spills, or manufacturing defects, associated with mass production in the past. Despite various media reports to the contrary (see e.g. Antenne Brandenburg, 2023), such visual representations of speed, control, and perfectly automated order suggest: this is a factory of the future. The ‘machine that builds the machine’ (Fehrenbacher, 2016), as Musk likes to say, which like the cars it produces, has received the necessary technical updates to rekindle the belief in a brighter future enabled by mass production, this time in the name of sustainability.

Tesla's story of the future, and the images and symbols through which it is told, are steeped in nostalgia. They recall the 1950s and 1960s imaginaries of consumerist utopias, and their trust in technology to surpass all obstacles to human prosperity. A prominent example of this is the company's association with ‘the future of driving’ (Tesla, 2022b), as it describes the ‘Autopilot’ function on its website. Despite numerous accidents and repeatedly missed promises, the 1950s fantasy of self-driving cars (Ackerman, 2016) has become entrenched in the public's perception of the company. The period's fascination with space exploration also resurfaces in Tesla's marketing strategy, bolstered by Elon Musk's SpaceX ventures (Tutton, 2020). In the TIME feature story announcing him as the ‘Person of the Year’ in 2021, he is described as ‘the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit’ (Ball et al., 2021). Tesla capitalises on the utopian imaginaries, for which space travel has served as a shorthand, since the Cold War space race, as seen in events like Grünheide's Delivery Day, which featured space-themed decorations and a quote from the 1965 science fiction novel Dune, written across one of the factory's walls (Tobias Lindh, 2022).

All these references to the future serve to underline Tesla's supposed newness. As the company claims on the webpage dedicated to the factory in Grünheide, ‘Our existence relies on a refusal to do things the way they have always been done’ (Tesla, n.d.). And yet the future Tesla stands for is a past-future of limitless economic growth, human control, and technological solutionism. A future that inspired the actions, which are to blame for the problems that it is claiming to solve (Rickards, 2018: 2), exploiting the current widespread anxiety about the future while offering no alternative.

The future comes to Grünheide

From its announcement in November 2019 to its construction and official inauguration in March 2022, Tesla's factory in Grünheide received much media and political attention in Germany, which significantly shaped the way the controversy unfolded. I here want to analyse how and why the ‘Tesla-is-the-future’ story explored in the previous section was so readily embraced by the media and political response to the factory and the effect this had on the approval and construction process in Grünheide.

A timely opportunity for ‘catching up’

To understand why the future became so ubiquitous in the controversy and why it often appeared as almost providentially inevitable, it is important to recognise that conceptions of the future are historically and culturally contingent, tied to specific moments and places in time (Adam, 2010). Electric mobility has figured prominently in the dominant imaginary of the German mobility and energy transition since at least 2009 (Wentland, 2020). One of the first steps to realise the sustainable mobility transition was the government's creation of the ‘Nationale Plattform Elektromobilität’. Considerable public money has since gone into funding research on electric mobility and building the necessary infrastructure while leading German carmakers have continuously increased their production (rbb24, 2022a). By the time Musk announced his factory plans, various automobile experts had long predicted the shift towards electric cars, cautioning that Germany was in dire need of ‘catching up’ if it did not want to lose its title of ‘automobile nation’ (Wentland, 2020: 74). The particular moment, in which Tesla stepped onto the scene, further heightened the sense of just-in-time, fated opportunity. During the time of the factory's construction and approval process, several events pushed the question of ‘the future’ to the forefront of media and political discussion: the rise of the Fridays for Future movement, the passing of the Federal Climate Protection Act, the political decision to end lignite-based power generation by 2038, severe droughts and floods discussed as illustrative of the indiscriminate dangers of climate change and a federal election widely termed the first ‘climate election’ (‘Klimawahl’).

During the press conference announcing the final approval of the factory in March 2022, Brandenburg's Minister President Dietmar Woidke (SPD) and Minister for Economy, Work and Energy Jörg Steinbach (SPD) stressed the timeliness of the factory's construction and its importance for the future. Woidke conjured the image of a historical turning point:

I believe that the day of the fourth of March is a big step into the future for Brandenburg […] in 20, 30, 40 years, when you look back at the history of Brandenburg, there will be a time before Tesla and there will be a time with Tesla. (rbb24, 2022b, 00:06:51–00:07:28)

Steinbach meanwhile suggested that the success of the Tesla factory had delivered a well-timed ‘blueprint’ for how the mobility and energy transition should unfold in the whole country (rbb24, 2022b, 00:24:40–00:25:04). The press conference echoed what from the beginning has been the dominant framing of the factory. In most media reports and political statements, it figures as a symbol of departure, with Tesla as the ‘innovation driver’ pushing forward towards a sustainable future (see e.g. Dettmer et al., 2020). Just in time, when protests, lawsuits, international conferences, and scientific reports were pushing the issue of the sustainability transition to the forefront, Tesla provided an opportunity for politicians to demonstrate that they had understood the sign of the times.

Grünheide on its way to the future

So how does Grünheide fit into this grand plan? As soon as Musk announced that it would become the site of Tesla's first European factory, the town southeast of Berlin, with a population of 9,000, suddenly became the centre point of a very persistent story. That of a ‘left behind’ community unexpectedly confronted with ‘the future’ (see e.g. ARD, 2020). In such framings, Grünheide's location in eastern Germany, its small size and its rural character are pointed out, to highlight the opposition's futility: a town stuck in the past engaged in the delusional attempt to stop the unstoppable. As one of Germany's most well-known experts on the sustainable energy transition commented on the controversy: ‘The future belongs to those who see it. And those who do not move with the times, are left behind’ (Kemfert, 2020). This narrative reproduces a familiar diffusionist view of innovation, which imagines a linear, universal future progressing from centre to periphery (Dányi et al., 2021). Its neo-colonial perspective, common in Silicon Valley success stories like Tesla's (Watts et al., 2014: xii), ‘colonises’ Grünheide’s future by commodifying it for present profit (Adam and Groves, 2007) and by imposing a universal future which excludes any alternatives.

Grünheide's location in East Germany makes it particularly susceptible to this process. In his speech held at the Delivery Day celebration, Scholz proclaimed the factory a sign that East Germany was now ‘at the forefront of industry’, demonstrating that ‘German Unity is working’ (Tesla Welt Podcast, 2022a, 00:08:10–00:08:17). This apparently anachronistic remark actually makes explicit a theme often forming the subtext to the ‘Tesla-is-the-future’ story in Germany. In much of the media coverage on the factory, Grünheide's past as part of the German Democratic Republic functions as the constitutive Other to the coming future of green capitalist modernisation (Boyer, 2006: 370; Dányi et al., 2021: 79). A linear history is evoked from the darkness of Stasi terror, scarcity, and inefficiency, to which the GDR tends to be reduced in the public imagination (Boyer, 2006), to the promise of the Tesla factory today (see e.g. Schröter and Fröhlich, 2019). The period following German reunification in which East Germany was subjected by its West German counterpart to a process of deindustrialisation, austerity, and mass unemployment (Knaebel and Rimbert, 2019), becomes a historical aberration. Now ‘the largest industrial settlement in the East since German reunification’ (Tagesschau, 2022) will belatedly deliver on the promises of limitless progress and economic growth.

A letter to the German government

This story has had a direct effect on the approval process of the factory in Grünheide. As STS scholar Kaspar Schiølin puts it, ‘imagining and defining the future becomes deciding in governing it’ (2020: 543). A moment in the controversy which made this particularly evident was the response to an open letter published by Tesla in early 2021. Published in support of a lawsuit by the Deutsche Umwelthilfe against the German government, Tesla's letter blames Germany's ‘outdated’ planning and approval law for delaying the energy and mobility transition and makes ten suggestions for ‘fundamentally reforming’ it (Tesla, 2021: 1). These include the introduction of a ‘fast-track’ approval process for ‘sustainable’ infrastructure projects (Tesla, 2021: 5), which the company, unsurprisingly, demands for its own factory:

Tesla's goal of starting production just 20 months after the site decision is not ambitious. It is simply a necessity. Any investment project that has the intention to stop climate change should be implemented with a similar or even higher urgency and a tight schedule. (2021: 3)

The letter lays out the main requirement for realising a sustainable future: governments need to stop laying bureaucratic obstacles on the path towards modernisation that technology has set, and that the market has already confirmed. In the name of ‘sustainability’, narrowly defined here as reducing CO₂ emissions, Tesla proceeds to suggest reforms, which undermine current environmental protection standards, and further limit public participation in approval processes. If the factory is ‘necessary’ (Tesla, 2021: 3) both in economic terms and for averting climate change, why delay the inevitable?

The letter was mostly well-received in the German media and had the desired political effect. A few months after its publication, Armin Laschet, then the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) chancellor candidate, promised in a joint press conference with Musk that, should he win the election, he would immediately launch a ‘planning acceleration package’ (Kersting and Neuerer, 2020). In fact, by the time Tesla published its letter, the company had already more or less been granted the ‘fast-track’ approval process it demands in it. To assure that Grünheide proceeded as quickly as possible on its ‘way to the future’ (Schröter and Fröhlich, 2019), Tesla was granted 19 preliminary building permits by the Brandenburg environmental agency, which allowed for the factory's construction to be almost finished by the time it was issued a final construction permit in early 2022. The usually time-consuming EIA process thus ran parallel to its construction, rather than prior to it. What was appreciatively called ‘Tesla speed’ in the media, was made possible by §8a of the Immission Control Act, which allows for the issuing of preliminary permits if ‘a decision in favour of the applicant is likely’ and, ‘there is a public interest or a justified interest of the applicant in the early start’ (Bundesimmissionsschutzgesetz, 1974). The expectation that the factory would and should be approved in the future, led to its de facto approval in the present. Similarly to Laschet before him, Federal Minister for Economy and Climate Protection Robert Habeck has since declared ‘Tesla speed’ the new norm for sustainable infrastructure projects (Handelsblatt, 2022).

The dominant media and political response to the Tesla factory evokes what human geographer Erik Swyngedouw (2011) calls the ‘post-political’ politics of climate change. Like several other European theorists (Kenis, 2019) he sees the issue of climate change as emblematic of a ‘post-political condition’ (Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 1999; Žižek, 2000), characterised by a focus on consensus that sidelines what Mouffe sees as the foundation of ‘the political’, namely the irreconcilable differences and antagonism inherent to all social relations (2005: 10). The post-political condition is marked by the ‘discursive concealment of contingency, conflict and power’ (Kenis, 2019: 834), which legitimises managerial and technocratic governance. The current order appears as the result of a rational consensus rather than as the temporary outcome of specific power struggles, which can be questioned and contested (Kenis and Lievens, 2014: 535). One reason why climate change has become emblematic of post-politics in Western societies is its dominant representation as a universal threat, which requires global action, overlooking crucial differences in responsibility for climate change, and its unequally distributed consequences (Kenis and Lievens, 2014: 532; Swyngedouw, 2011: 263). The (justified) sense of urgency engendered by climate change also contributes to marginalising contentious political debate (Macgregor, 2014: 620) and favours the reliance on tools readily at hand (Swyngedouw, 2011). Thus, growing consensus on the need to respond to climate change is mobilised in post-political societies in a way that reduces the matter to ‘the choice of technologies, the mix of organisational fixes, the detail of the managerial adjustments, and the urgency of their timing and implementation’ (Swyngedouw, 2011: 6). The urgency of safeguarding a desirable future in the face of climate change is used to foreclose debates about how such a future should look like (Stirling, 2014).

Tesla is stealing our future

And yet, the protests accompanying the Delivery Day celebrations demonstrate a demand for precisely such debates to take place. From the beginning, the opposition against the factory has challenged Tesla's past-future of endless growth and technological determinism, unmasking its ‘win–win’ solution as the promotion of some interests over others, attached to social and environmental costs that are distributed very unequally. In short, critics have made visible that there is a conflict that needs to be waged politically, and cannot be avoided by citing economic, technological, or environmental necessity. In the following I will examine how the opposition against the Tesla factory has challenged its perceived inevitability. To do so, I will follow the objections raised leading up to and during the two public hearings that took place in the course of the official approval process of the factory. They provide insight into how opponents of the factory have struggled against Tesla ‘stealing’ their future, as one of the first protest slogans against the factory put it (ARD, 2020).

A material theft

Opponents of the factory have challenged the taken-for-granted understanding of sustainability underlying the Tesla-is-the-future story by making those material realities visible, which the discourse of technological triumph and limitless growth gloss over. The ‘virtual public hearing’ details these issues in over 400 pages (LfU, 2021). This analysis will focus on the most prominent concerns, those regarding the forest and the local water supply.

The forest

The first big issue that triggered the controversy was the partial removal of the forest on the 300-hectare plot of land bought by Tesla. The first 92 ha were cut down in February 2020, followed by 82.8 ha in December. Twice, the clearing work was interrupted by lawsuits filed by environmental organisations, which only managed to save a small stretch of forest, left standing to protect the sand lizards and smooth snakes inhabiting it. Both lawsuits were successful, however, in causing a debate about the value of the forest and whether its removal could be justified in the name of a sustainable future.

Many supporters of the factory criticised the lawsuits as unacceptable given the project’s importance for the energy and mobility transition (see e.g. Becker, 2020). Especially because, as the court ruling later confirmed, the forest in question was not a ‘real’ forest, but a monoculture, a pine plantation destined for industrial use. Oliver Krischer, then vice chairman of the Green Party in the Bundestag, for example, argued that ‘turning a pine plantation into a battlefield’ had ‘nothing to do with nature conservation’ (as cited in Bernewasser et al., 2020). The president of the umbrella organisation of German environmental associations, the Deutscher Naturschutzring (DNR), cautioned: ‘We environmental associations must be careful here not to stand in the wrong corner […] Conservationists have an interest in intact nature, not industrial forests’ (Götze, 2020). The DNR echoed the dominant framing according to which Tesla could become a driver for a low-CO₂ industry and thereby create a ‘win–win’ situation (Götze, 2020).

Supporters of the lawsuit, on the other hand, complicated the conception of the forest as expendable, emphasising its function as a habitat for endangered species and a carbon sink (Dörner, 2020). In a TAZ article, Norbert Weber, professor of forest policy at the Technical University of Dresden accused Green party politicians of misleadingly using the terms ‘monoculture’ and ‘plantation’ to appear more industry-friendly (Heigl and Ismar, 2020). BI Grünheide stressed ongoing efforts to convert areas into mixed forest, ‘those who know the forest, who have walked here, know that it is not just a pure pine forest’ (Bürgerinitiative Grünheide, 2020). The citizens’ initiative organised group walks through the forest to showcase its unique features (ARD, 2020). Photos on their website highlight the forest's aesthetic and emotional value, presenting it not as an easily replaceable pine plantation, but as an ecosystem, which people in the area had formed a personal relationship with. Some residents even placed a mourning notice for the forest in one of the regional newspapers (Bürgerinitiative Grünheide, 2021).

The dispute about the forest triggered by the opponents of the factory demonstrates the complexity of determining which natures are worthy of sustaining, which cannot easily be settled by mutually agreed upon categories for measuring ecological worth (Swyngedouw, 2011). The need for achieving a sustainable future emerges here as a complex and contested question.

The water supply

Next to the forest, the issue which has been most prominent in the actions against the factory and takes up the most space in the virtual approval process is that of the local water supply. East Brandenburg is one of the regions in Germany with the lowest precipitation rates in the country and has registered groundwater declines of up to 1.20 m since 2010. Construction began amid the region's third consecutive year of drought. Moreover, the factory’s location falls within a water-protection zone, near several drinking water wells, and lakes, rivers, and sensitive moor ecosystems affected by declining groundwater levels.

Soon after the first EIA documents for the factory were published in January 2020, the regional water association Wasserverband Straußberg Erkner (WSE) raised concerns about potential water pollution and threats to the public drinking water supply, accusing the responsible state authorities of ignoring ‘extensive and serious problems’ (WSE, 2020). In response to criticism from WSE, BI Grünheide, and environmental organisations, Tesla reduced the factory's maximum yearly water consumption from 3.3 to approximately 1.4 million cubic metres, an amount equivalent to the annual consumption of a city with 40,000 residents. Despite ongoing protests, Tesla and WSE signed a contract to ensure the factory's water supply, necessitating increased water extraction from the nearby Eggersdorf waterworks.

Opponents have repeatedly drawn attention to the numerous open questions about the water supply, which the approval process failed to answer. One question is where the additional water for the next two expansion stages of the factory might be drawn from, as the WSE warns that the current contract already strains their capacity. Opponents of the factory accuse those responsible for the project of relying on ‘short-term, not future-oriented attempts at solutions’ (LfU, 2021: 176), citing a scientific assessment published by the Leibniz Institut für Gewässerökologie und Binnenfischerei, which highlights the alarming and partially unpredictable development of the region's water supply, due to the effects of climate change compounded by Berlin's population growth (Goldhammer et al., 2021). Another pressing question is how the groundwater might be impacted in case of an accident. In May 2021 an alarming internal report was uncovered that highlighted miscalculated risks to the local ecosystem and population, urging Tesla to reevaluate safety measures (Kaleta, 2021). Even the normal operations of the factory are sure to exacerbate the already critical levels of pollution of the Müggelsee, the drinking water reservoir for large parts of the capital region (Goldhammer et al., 2021: 11).

By drawing attention to, and mobilising resistance based on such issues as the forest and the water supply, critics of the factory demand for the futurity of matter to be taken seriously. As Adam and Groves argue:

Our physical world — the earth we live on, the soil that feeds us, the air we breathe, the water we depend on, the body we inhabit, the landscapes and cityscapes we dwell in, the other beings we co-evolved and co-exist with and the socio-cultural world of artefacts […] is to be understood not just spatially as frozen in time but also as temporally extended and enduring, interacting and regenerating, decaying and leaving a record, projecting and entailing […] futurity. (2007: 178)

Those opposing the Tesla factory point to the impossibility of imposing a future imaginary, in disregard of local realities. For many opponents, the expectation of a partially unpredictable and catastrophic future becomes an opportunity to take the futurity of matter seriously and to re-think and re-do their relationship to the local environment. While the dominant discourse emphasises inevitability and control, the opposition highlights uncertainty and the need for caution. Sustainability here is not a fixed, predetermined concept and the question of how to build a sustainable future does not lend itself easily to the universal response suggested by the ‘Tesla-is-the-future’ story.

A political theft

As opposition to the factory grew in early 2020, it became evident that the controversy extended beyond the material threats to a livable future. It was also fuelled by concerns about the limitations placed on political participation by the approval process, hindering the exploration of alternative futures. Critics aimed to expand the narrow scope of participation allowed in the approval process and politicise both the construction of the factory and the EIA process itself, as demonstrated in the two public hearings.

In a press interview during the first public hearing, Manuela Heuer, chairwoman of BI Grünheide, expressed her frustration at the proceedings, ‘I’m so angry’, she said, ‘it's all just an alibi event so they can say ‘we involved the public’ (rbb24, 2020). Critics perceived the approval process not as a platform for democratic engagement but as a formality to legitimise a predetermined project. They highlighted issues such as the overwhelming volume of documents, the technical complexity of the materials, the timing of the hearing during working hours and the refusal of the environmental agency to publish a written record (Hoppen et al., 2020). The impression that the approval process was a mere formality only intensified during the second, ‘virtual’ public hearing. Rather than a video format, it turned out to be a 488-page long document, providing a summary of all objections and the respective responses of Tesla and the environmental agency, explaining which objections were legally relevant and what Tesla was doing to address them. Critics disputed the official explanation, according to which the virtual format was necessary due to COVID-19 restrictions, especially since, around the same time, 9,000 people were allowed to attend an ‘open day’ party hosted by Tesla at the factory (Business Insider Deutschland, 2021).

Those opposing the factory perceive the approval process as ‘undemocratic’ (Bürgerinitiative, 2021), not only because of the practical hurdles hindering participation, but also because of the very limited grounds it acknowledges as legitimate for justifying their opposition. As the environmental agency explicitly states on its website:

Only those issues that are actually relevant to the decision are discussed. These include all effects of the specific project applied for. […] It is not relevant to the decision whether the project applied for makes economic sense or is socially acceptable. (Ministerium für Landwirtschaft, Umwelt und Klimaschutz, n.d.)

As the discussion leader made clear in the first public hearing, ‘We will not discuss any objections on whether or not lithium production in Bolivia is environmentally sound’ (Metzner, 2020). In the virtual public hearing objections such as:

Electric mobility is an important building block of the transport transition. But the Model Y is useless for this. Sensible and sustainable mobility does not need overpowered (400 hp), overweight (over 2000 kg) and oversized SUVs. (LfU, 2021:438)

are filed under the heading ‘miscellaneous’ and marked as irrelevant objections to which Tesla is not obliged to respond. Despite the crucial role of future imaginaries in expediting the factory's construction and approval, discussions in both public hearings centred solely on technical risks to be anticipated and mitigated. While Tesla's permits were framed as advancing the transition to sustainable energy and mobility, the shape of this transition was removed from the realm of discussion.

Resisting de-politicisation: the future is political

And yet, the official approval process is not just illustrative of the post-political politics of climate change, but also of the struggle for re-politicisation and therefore for opening up the future to possible alternatives. The virtual public hearing document makes evident how critics of the factory challenge the narrow confines it imposes, placing the factory in the broader political context that the approval process disavows.

They do so by approaching the factory and the electric cars it produces, not in isolation, but as part of the wider social and natural systems they are entangled with. One objection, for example, argues:

For the production of electric vehicles, the livelihoods of the local populations in the countries of the Global South are being destroyed by depriving them of land and water. The working conditions in these countries are also hazardous, often even resembling slavery-like conditions. (LfU, 2021: 402)

Several objections point out Tesla's history of preventing labour unions at its factories and reference work time violations, undignified housing, and the undercutting of the minimum wage at the then-construction site in Grünheide (LfU, 2021: 343, 392). In contrast to Tesla's promotional materials, objections against the factory view electric cars as material products requiring natural resources for production, assembly by workers, and specific infrastructure for operation, tying them to political questions about exploitative commodity chains, labour struggles, and mobility justice (Henderson, 2020). While some oppose Grünheide as the site for Tesla's factory without rejecting Tesla or its concept of electric mobility, many others reject the factory as emblematic of a specific approach to organising mobility. Objections criticise that a mobility transition focused on replacing conventional cars with electric cars continues the current prioritisation of individualised transport (LfU, 2021: 437, 459), in cars that take up too much space (LfU, 2021: 438), are difficult to recycle (LfU, 2021: 284, 483), use up finite resources extracted at a high environmental and human cost (LfU, 2021: 402), and in Germany depend on electricity that is still largely generated through the burning of fossil fuels (LfU, 2021: 64, 473). In pointing this out, critics challenge the factory's association with the future, showing instead how it entrenches and prolongs past ways of doing things. Consequently, the factory is rejected as a blueprint for how the mobility and energy transition should unfold.

The factory's opponents challenge not only the content of Tesla's future imaginary, but also the form in which it was put up for debate (or rather removed from it). Several objections argue that ‘The outcome of the proceedings is […] not only important for the preservation of the environment, but also for the trust of citizens in authorities, politics and the rule of law’ (LfU, 2021: 62). The construction of the factory is rejected by critics as the result of an ‘onesided political decision’ (LfU, 2021: 449) and the approval process as a mechanism to enforce it. The opposition against the factory makes evident the need for a democratic space in which disparate future visions can clash with each other and be recognised as alternatives.

Those opposing the factory have attempted to create such a space outside of the official approval process, at protests, information events, or walks to the factory, forging relationships with other groups in the process. The protests that took place outside the Delivery Day event testify to this. International protesters held up signs referencing other local conflicts, for example in Chile, ‘Desde Rio Cholchol hasta Río Spree el agua no se vende, se defiende!’ (‘From the Cholchol river to the Spree river, water is to be defended, not sold!’) (Bürgerinitiative Grünheide, 2022). Sand im Getriebe, Ende Gelände, and other groups joining BI Grünheide that day positioned the factory as one particular instance in a wider political struggle against environmental exploitation and global injustice continued in the name of green capitalism. As a representative of Ende Gelände puts it: ‘We should not delude ourselves: No technology will save us. On the contrary, we need less growth and have to change the way we live, travel and use resources. What we need is system change’ (Baliani and Joswig, 2020).

Conclusion: A potential sparked and stifled?

In this article I have looked at the controversy surrounding Tesla's factory in Grünheide as a moment of contested future-making. To do so, I have analysed the specific discursive and material practices through which the future is mobilised in the present, including media narratives, marketing strategies, speeches, the public participation process, protests, the cutting down of forest, and the construction of the factory itself. By applying the method of controversy studies to questions from CFS, this article contributes to understanding future-making as practice (Oomen et al., 2021: 257), taking place within specific social and material contexts that produce unequal opportunities for actors to explore and impose their visions.

The future does different things to the controversy, depending on how and by whom it is mobilised. Tesla's past–future of endless growth enabled by technological progress offers an imaginary escape from the urgency of finding alternatives in the present. The continued extraction of finite resources, the pollution of life-sustaining environments, and the exploitative labour relations that go into making the car of the future are presented as the inevitable costs that need to be incurred now, in order to create a future that will show them to have been necessary. The question of the future is mobilised by Tesla to discourage meaningful change in the present.

But a preoccupation with the future does not need to amount to escapism. To the opponents of the factory, the sense that their future is being ‘stolen’ renders the present more immediate and urgent. To them, the future becomes a perspective from which to question the present (Vint, 2016: 14). The disruptive and creative potential of the controversy lies not in its ability to provide a ready-made alternative future to replace that proposed by Tesla but in the very act of sparking a discussion about a taken-for-granted future imaginary, according to which the sustainable mobility and energy transition will happen and electric mobility will play a key role in it. But how is that societal transition being prepared, who participates in the process, how fundamental does the change have to be, what are its costs, who has to bear them, and what does ‘sustainable’ mean in the first place? The opposition against the factory disrupts the technological determinism and solutionism underlying the enthusiasm for the factory.

The controversy illustrates that future-making is not a neutral or inevitable process but a contested and performative one, where different visions of the future have real and immediate implications for the present. Tesla's story of a bright, exciting future in times characterised by future nostalgia, has fuelled the sense of inevitability permeating its factory in Grünheide, legitimising one preliminary construction permit after the other, with little regard for environmental protection regulations and public participation requirements. But performativity also works the other way around. The opponents of the factory, simply by acting as if a different future is possible, increase the chances of it becoming so. This article underscores the importance of looking at the politics of future-making, especially at a time when the unfolding climate and ecological crisis heightens a widespread concern with the future that, as this analysis has shown, lends itself to entrenching the current status quo, if there are no political spaces where the future can be put up for debate.

In Grünheide, the official approval process stifled the potential for creating such a space, but the opposition against the factory and the future imaginary it stands for is ongoing. Several organisations continue to contest the final permit granted by the environmental agency, and in legal actions, open letters and ever-growing protest marches, BI Grünheide now fights against the factory's planned expansion, delivering on its chairwoman's promise: ‘This is going to sound stupid, but I'm going to fight to the last breath. I’ll continue to throw a wrench in the gears’ (as cited in Busch, 2022).

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Professor Endre Dányi for his inspiring academic curiosity and kind support throughout the research and writing process of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tamara Mercante Thierauf

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Fixing the future? The controversy surrounding Tesla's ‘Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg’ as a site of contested future-making in times of climate change

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The controversy as a site of contested future-making

Studying the future in the present

The future as an object of controversy

Tesla is the future

With every car we make, with every battery we make, we’re making the future better

Commodifying future nostalgia

The future comes to Grünheide

A timely opportunity for ‘catching up’

Grünheide on its way to the future

A letter to the German government

Tesla is stealing our future

A material theft

The forest

The water supply

A political theft

Resisting de-politicisation: the future is political

Conclusion: A potential sparked and stifled?

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References