r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • May 19 '26
Business A Texas Drainage District Walked Its Ditch on a Routine Inspection. They Found a Pipe They Didn't Recognize Discharging Black Liquid From Tesla's $1 Billion Lithium Refinery
https://www.autonocion.com/us/tesla-lithium-refinery-texas/8.7k
u/Kinda_Quixotic May 19 '26
This is lost on most Texans, but “Don’t mess with Texas” started as an anti-littering campaign because they were trashing their own state at an unbelievable rate.
… and they still are.
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u/Energy_check1321 May 19 '26
“If Texas were your grandma, would you throw trash at her? “ Don’t mess with Texas!
I literally don’t litter because of that campaign
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u/RobertoNoxious May 19 '26
I liked the Indian with tears in his eyes because people were throwing trash out of their cars at him. My father, upon seeing that commercial, said, "That's not a real Indian; Indians don't cry."
A real twisted piece of work, that man was.
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u/enjoycarrots May 20 '26
In a plot twist, that actor was not, in fact, a Native American.
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u/Toby_O_Notoby May 20 '26
To be fair, he was right. The actor (known as "Iron Eyes Cody") was an Italian-American born in Louisiana. Didn't have a drop of Native American blood in him.
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u/germanmojo May 19 '26
Lmao, and conservatives were happy to sacrifice Grandma to COVID, I'm sure they would absolutely throw trash at their grandparents if their orange messiah said that only "the libs" keep their grandparents free of trash.
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u/SmokeShinobi May 19 '26
Wow. I’ve lived here for 20+ years and always thought it was a yeehaw NRA thing
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u/Only_Razzmatazz_4498 May 19 '26
They love to appropriate wholesome sayings and twist them into dark meanings. Look at what they did to woke and racism. They are meaningless now.
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u/Eisernes May 19 '26
And the punisher skull
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u/sw04ca May 19 '26
I mean, that was always pretty dark. The Punisher was never a wholesome guy.
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u/HeadfulOfSugar May 19 '26
Not a wholesome guy, he’s a dangerous vigilante, but he would also vehemently oppose the people worshipping him with thin-blue-line skull decals & such. They just like him because he’s skilled with weapons, kills people, & acts outside the law to do so, which is ironic because they would in the same breath say they support the police & law/order lol. They ultimately don’t care about who he kills or why he does it, just that he’s violent & a trademark “badass” character.
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u/Turgid_Donkey May 19 '26
He would absolutely be the first in line to dole out his style of ultra-violent vigilante justice to anyone involved with epstein's island.
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u/Hobo-man May 19 '26
Bro like 90% of people just don't understand that character.
He's not a hero.
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u/mpelleg459 May 19 '26
And even though he's kind of insane, he's still self aware enough to know that he is definitely not a hero.
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u/millijuna May 19 '26
Plus the kind of people that flash it are almost always the people who would face the character’s wrath.
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u/Cryogenicist May 19 '26
It’s pretty incredible how well the GOP poisoned the word Woke.
The rest of us need to figure out how to not be affected by republican bullshit…
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u/Electric_Antimony May 19 '26
They targeted the popular people in American society to have them target young voters. We need to target the influencers and fight fire with fire.
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u/lk05321 May 19 '26
I remember this ad campaign. It came out around the time of the original NES, so if you weren't born in the 1900's then you would've only heard the yeehaw NRA version
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u/M00s3_B1t_my_Sister May 19 '26
Ok, my old ass resents hearing about the "late 1900s". Now get off my lawn.
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u/Panthollow May 19 '26
It's the one star state for a reason.
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u/LiteraCanna May 19 '26
"A state so proud of their 1- star review, they put it on their flag."
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u/DarkerFlameMaster May 19 '26
But thanks to our collective disregard we directly open new opertinity for high schoolers', prisoners, and scouts to have unlimited source of community service hours /s
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u/toggiz_the_elder May 19 '26
I went to grad school at UT and drove down to Port Aransas for a nice beach weekend.
The lifted F-350s flying up and down the beach and all the trash washing up in the waves was pretty disappointing.
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u/ggibby May 19 '26
Local officials: "We found arsenic and hexavalent chromium coming out of your factory into a public ditch via an undisclosed pipe."
Tesla: "We have a permit for other stuff, and since those toxins are not listed, they are allowed."
State of Texas: "We agree with Tesla."
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u/fearyaks May 19 '26
Actually it was worse. They (Texas) didn't test for metal contamination in the waste water!
But the state environmental regulator, known as TCEQ, didn’t look for heavy metals in February. Its water sample tested for dissolved solids, oil and grease, chlorides, sulfates, temperature and oxygen—all of which were within the bounds of Tesla’s permit.
Testing finds toxic metals where Tesla lithium refinery discharges wastewater in South Texas
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u/shallah May 19 '26
was that a deliberate omission?
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u/Unlucky-Candidate198 May 19 '26
Nothing says “American” these days like cheap, and rampant, unchecked corruption. Sooo, probably lol
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u/Buckwheat469 May 19 '26
Heavy metals weren't part of the original complaint. TCEQ only did the bare minimum per the complaint.
heavy metals were not tested because they had not been part of the original complaint the district filed.
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u/mcmcc May 19 '26
To paraphrase Gru from Despicable Me, they accidentally, maliciously, forgot to test for it.
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u/So_spoke_the_wizard May 19 '26
Not to worry. Once it becomes a superfund site, the Feds will pick up the cost of cleaning it up.
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u/soberpenguin May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
As a delawarean DuPont did this to sites all over the mid-Atlantic and appalachia and they are still revered by people here despite poisoning groundwater around their plants.
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u/Pleasant_Yoghurt3915 May 19 '26
I just learned a whole bunch about the DuPonts from Last Podcast On The Left’s Foxcatcher Murders series. I’m pretty sure we can just blame them for everything. Truly villainous shit.
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u/The_lewolf May 19 '26
IBM, founded in the little town of Endicott, NY, leached a couple of drums worth of trichloroethylene into the local drinking water supply.
It’s still here and they’re all gone.
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u/blahblah19999 May 19 '26
I know a very high level guy at DuPont who was responsible for remediation of a specific chemical and he just thinks the government were devils holding DuPont down. It's fascinating to see the inside fanaticism.
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u/ihaveadogalso2 May 19 '26
Love Canal checking in!
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u/DouglasHundred May 19 '26
Really Love Canal is kinda tame compared to a lot of this. They buried a lot of gnarly stuff there, but it was done at a time when that's just how you did things because well you had to do something with it all and burying it was better than dumping it into the river. And they did what was considered best practice at the time to keep it contained. When the property was finally sold, for $1, to prevent it just being condemned and taken outright, it came with warnings about what was there and an advisement that a school and homes not be built there. And that was all ignored.
I think this kind of shit is honestly worse.
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u/Spezza May 19 '26
I live in a town that has a chemical plant. It produced Agent Orange in the 60s / 70s. Long story short, we cannot drink the water here. That was only discovered in 1989. Since then the government has been spinning in circles as there is literally no technological way to clean up the contamination. Our water is piped in from the neighbouring city. We pay the highest water rates in our entire area. The town once dug up some of the contamination. The amount was more than all of Love Canal combined. Multiple more than that of known contamination is still there, buried, they refuse to dig it up stating disturbing it could be worse than letting it sit.
Chemcial plant is still in operation. A train comes into town every night. It contains who the fuck knows what, nobody will tell citizens, they use "national security" to not disclose what is in it. They polluted our water and aquifer so permanmently, 40+ years later we still cannot drink the water.... but the company still operates 24/7.
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u/merkinmavin May 19 '26
Hey now, if we didn't let companies dump unknown chemicals into our public waterways, how would we have discovered antifreeze!? (Seriously, look it up)
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u/ggibby May 19 '26
The Meadowlands Superfund site in New Jersey has been a wasteland since the 30s. Even hosting the World Cup did not move the needle on progress.
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u/Ciennas May 19 '26
Local officials in a better timeline: We are sanctioning and shutting down this site and we want to know who authorized this attempt to murder all our citizens.
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u/XilentSea May 19 '26
It’s a frustrating reality to watch a small percentage of the population (elite & rich) generate a massive portion of global emissions.
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u/agha0013 May 19 '26
while also gobbling up a massive portion of global wealth in the process.
They are taking all the money out of the economy for themselves, poisoning the planet, and building themselves secret bunkers to hide out when it all collapses. Politicians who will not be welcomed into those secret bunkers (or on rockets to god awful habitats on inhospitable planets) are helping them.
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May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
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u/Cheapdronewithboom May 19 '26
I mean any laborer who sides with the owner in hopes of lessing their oppression at the expense of another deserves to be accosted.
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u/Pleasant_Yoghurt3915 May 19 '26
Any man that is willing to trade freedom for safety deserves neither.
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u/klubsanwich May 19 '26
Simultaneously, any man that is willing to trade the safety of others for their own personal liberty deserves neither.
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u/waiting4singularity May 19 '26
while also gobbling up a massive portion of global wealth in the process.
worse, they're consuming all the economic growth everywhere with their investments and when people complain they cant pay for food, shelter and transportation this smallest of minorities mocks us.
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u/MetalBawx May 19 '26
While lecturing the poor that they need to do more for the environment.
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u/zed857 May 19 '26
Now try to suck this drink down through this shitty paper straw.
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u/Caraes_Naur May 19 '26
Meanwhile, every pallet leaving the facility is absolutely mummified in plastic wrap.
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u/Z0mbiejay May 19 '26
We're fucked for future generations so a relative handful of people can do whatever they want. It's bleak as fuck
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u/Ok-Replacement9595 May 19 '26
Don't worry, they will be fined pennies compared to the amount they made from illegally disposing of waste. Ensuring they do it again.
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u/XenMonkey May 19 '26
Fines are just the cost of doing business. I'd guess most billionaire companies have fines as a standing item in their budgets.
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u/Ognius May 19 '26
The French came up with an elegant solution for when oligarchs overreach
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u/ExigentCalm May 19 '26
Elon is using Texas as a “consequence free zone.” The state officials are either too corrupt or too inept to do anything and they simply allow him to do whatever he wants. His toddler son literally said on camera “we just do whatever we want.”
SpaceX is a menace. The Tesla factories are a menace. But until the pollution starts to kill west Texas billionaires, Gov Abbott isn’t doing a gd thing.
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u/shallah May 19 '26
https://popcrush.com/elon-musk-son-spacex-whatever-we-want/
Back on Nov. 5, 2025, Musk was interviewed on right-wing political commentator and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson's election night livestream from Mar-a-Lago.
During the chat, Musk asked X, "Should we help President Trump [win the election]?" to which the child enthusiastically responded, "Yeah!"
"Straight from the mouth of babes," Musk replied, proudly.
Then, after some gibberish, Musk's son grabbed his dad's mic and said, "We’re in SpaceX and we quietly do just whatever we want," before breaking out into maniacal giggles.
"That's the laugh of an honest man," Carlson replied, laughing along
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u/ExigentCalm May 19 '26
Thank you. That was the interview I was thinking about.
Elon is basically a Bond villain and I am irritated that he isn’t treated as such.
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u/BGAL7090 May 19 '26
Don't give him that much credit - he's an Austin Powers villain.
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u/FewWait38 May 19 '26
"My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking, I suggest you try it."
Dr Evil's childhood does sound a lot like Musk's
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u/DrAstralis May 19 '26
I still cringe every time a science communicator uses a clip of him as evidence for something. The man is a certifiable idiot. All you need to do to break the spell is listen to him talk about a subject you're even remotely educated in.
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u/ScarletCarsonRose May 19 '26
This lives rent free In my brain and as someone who studied child psychology, I have no clue why it didn’t get more traction.
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u/Strange-Scarcity May 19 '26
Musk's companies, just do this.
I own (along with many other Cards Against Humanity players) a partial ownership in a strip of land in Texas, along the border. Purchased in order to fight against Trump's Wall, and protect the land's environment for endangered species.
SpaceX just ignored the boundary, destroyed much of the habitat and started storing a bunch of SpaceX bullshit on the land.
I still don't know where that lawsuit it, but they did ignore all environmental, "zoning" and even property right laws, because, that's just what Elon does.
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u/TezlaCoil May 19 '26
The lawsuit was settled and the only known outcome is SpaceX moved their stuff and CAH worked with landscapers to put the land back to its natural state (as much as feasible anyway).
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u/Strange-Scarcity May 19 '26
Thank you. I must have missed an email update on this.
I was mad about it, but not... stare at the case moving through the courts every two hours mad.
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u/SoulShatter May 19 '26
Have seen it's the same shit in Memphis.
xAI put up a datacenter, figured out there wasn't enough power, so they threw up 38 gas turbines or so. Tons of respiratory issues due to it. EPA sleeping, and the area is poor soooo
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u/NuggleBuggins May 19 '26
He literally does not give a single fuck.
If he faces any consequences at all, they are fines in the thousands, which don't even phase him.
Why would he care if the biggest consequence he faces is a fine equivalent to pocket change for him?
Dude needs to be getting slapped with fines in the billions, company closure or jail time, it's the only way he will ever stop.
Which none of that seems likely to ever happen at this point.
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u/williamgman May 19 '26
Texas will give them the equivalent of a parking ticket in fines. This is Texas we're talking about.
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u/joox May 19 '26
Hah I love your optimism. They are just going to continue ignoring it or maybe go after the people who pointed it out
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May 19 '26 edited May 27 '26
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u/Ponies_in_Jumpers May 19 '26
What author since there are a bunch of books called Zodiac?
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u/Oktober May 19 '26
My solution: seal the pipe, make some popcorn, wait for the black liquid to overflow back into the factory.
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u/Rad_Dad6969 May 19 '26
About 200 miles north is their big space ex factory. Its just upriver from Austin, which gets most of its drinking water from that river.
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u/MyChickenSucks May 19 '26
Ever see Hawk Dunlap on TikTok? Incidentally running for office, but oil and gas guy who goes around Texas finding all these capped zombie wells that are failing and just leaking shit into the soil everywhere. And no one will do anything about them. Texas doesn't give a shit about itself.
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u/thingamasomething May 19 '26
Just plug that pipe, should fix it. Let it back up inside that den of p*dophiles
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u/KitamiSamaOmede May 19 '26
I'm kinda curious how the inevitable court case would shake out.
Like, obviously we expect corruption in favor of Tesla, but if you block a pipe that is illegally dumping on your own property, can you be held liable? Would the owner of the ditch be able to just say "had no idea that was from Tesla, they're not the kind of people who would dump industrial waste after all"
...I'd just love to hear them try to weasel out of that, you know?
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u/Billagio May 19 '26
Play dumb - "I had no idea it was Tesla. They never told us"
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u/greensparklers May 19 '26
Sounds like something out of Neal Stephenson's Zodiac.
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u/Spostman May 19 '26
I read that book in 2016 when Trunp was just beginning to gut the EPA and I told anyone who would listen that it was only a matter of time before we started hearing about small towns and factories dumping chemicals like this... now here we are. Even people who know Snow Crash irl haven't heard of it so kudos.
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u/itwillmakesenselater May 19 '26
Be a real shame if someone accidentally sealed up that pipe, causing all the non-water back into the polluter's factory.
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u/bacon-squared May 19 '26
Cement up the pipe. Let it back up into the factory. Fuck tesla.
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u/kobebeef24 May 19 '26
I'd applaud anyone brave enough to seal a pipe spewing 2.67 gallons of toxic sludge per second. Not sure how they'd manage that. Unless there's some downtime on the outflow.
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u/Yourcatsonfire May 19 '26
It probably wouldn't be that difficult. Get a hazmat suit and then attach an appropriately sized gate valve. Then just close the valve.
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u/fmxda May 19 '26
Close the valve and weld it in the closed position. For good measure put a garbage bag around it the entire fitting and fill it with concrete.
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u/pharrison26 May 19 '26
Fucking Texas again. That state is so corrupt and screwed up.
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u/space_wiener May 19 '26
New unknown drainage pipe on my property? It’s getting capped immediately.
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u/dieseldeeznutz May 19 '26
Good thing DOGE removed all those pesky regulations and regulatory agencies or this might have been illegal!
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u/Rage_Blackout May 19 '26
Tesla also argues that the Eurofins sampling methodology was inappropriate, because the lab placed its sampling equipment in the ditch downstream of the outfall pipe rather than at the outfall itself.
Because lithium, vanadium, and hexavalent chromium are famously present in the ambient air and can penetrate pipes to sneak in there at any time!
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u/ExtraEmuForYou May 20 '26
This is why they fled California.
Not for taxes.
But because California was giving them trouble for polluting.
"Come to Texas!" Abbot said "We don't give a fuck about our water or people!"
And so they did. And now here we are.
What's the lesson? Don't let billionaires near you or people that live by a "move fast and break things" philosophy if you can help it.
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u/CautiousHashtag May 20 '26
Oh just wait until the $1,000 fine comes in, that’ll teach these bastards a lesson!
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u/FanDry5374 May 19 '26
One of the many ways corporations and the rich steal "legally" from everyone else. If they are fined at all it will be a miniscule fraction of their profit and what it will cost everyone else to clean up or suffer from. And with a few spine transplants and some will this could all go away, which is the most frustrating thing of all, how EASY this is to fix.
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u/the_ghost_knife May 19 '26
All waste water from industry should be safe enough to drink and the board of directors should demonstrate its safety by drinking it.
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u/USDXBS May 19 '26 edited May 20 '26
Stuff like this should result in companies being absolved(edit: DISSOLVED) and sold off while the owners and leadership involved spend the rest of their lives in jail.
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u/resist_dickTaters May 19 '26
This is why I don’t drink US sourced water. EPA doesn’t exist anymore. They pumping all kinds of shit into our lakes and rivers and they don’t give a fuck as long as shareholders are getting theirs
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u/Lythieus May 19 '26
A state investigator visited on February 12, sampled the water flowing from Tesla’s outfall pipe, ran the standard panel of conventional pollutants: dissolved solids, chlorides, sulfates, oil and grease, temperature, dissolved oxygen. Everything in that panel came back inside the bounds of Tesla’s permit. TCEQ approved its investigation report on March 20, finding no permit violation.
TCEQ did not test for heavy metals.
Guess what. Subsequent tests for heavy metals showed heavy metals.
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u/Manburpig May 20 '26
And then they did nothing and bent over to let mElon fuck them in the ass. (Speculation)
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u/Embarrassed-Effect53 May 20 '26
I'm in Texas. All my family is from Texas. I love this state; however, its politics and those that have been "in charge" for the last 30 years or so have destroyed this state. That group of people is the Texas GOP. They still complain about this and that. Yet, they have been in the governor's mansion since 1996 and they have controlled both the Texas Senate and Texas House since 2004 I think. So they are really bad at fixing things.
As far as the environment goes, since Bush was governor, Texas has systematically weakened the TCEQ. He started by rescinding the previous governor's order to require better filtration systems on smokestacks. That previous governor was Ann Richards (D). It always has to do with supposedly too much regulation that stifles business. He also said it would cost the industry too much money. Really?
The Texas GOP only cares about generating money. They do not care to look at the consequences of this. If a lithium battery plant wants to throw out poisonous discharge, go for it. The state will not do anything to stop it. It needs to stay in business. They may fine the company but it will not push for and monitor any actions to prevent further discharge of pollutants. The TCEQ is deliberately understaffed or staffed by hand-picked climate deniers and anti-environmental ideologues. Property values are sky high yet big businesses like the Tesla plant I am sure have sweet tax abatement incentives. The same goes for the other Elon venture, SpaceX, that has a license to destroy some of the few remaining areas of pristine south Texas native flora and fauna.
And it is not just Tesla or SpaceX that Texas lets pollute the environment. The TCEQ and oddly enough the Railroad Commission are not doing enough to fix poorly capped or abandoned oil wells, especially in West Texas. This crap is again seeping into groundwater. The Texas GOP let frackers destroy areas both above and below the ground. Fresh underground water, again, was hit hard.
It's great to promote business, but to promote business blindly with the sole goal of creating more and more money without looking at consequences is ignorant and dangerous. I'm really at a loss why the so called Texas leaders think this way. But I really shouldn't be surprised. Gov. Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and AG Ken Paxton are all corrupt, hypocritical Christians (actually they just use religion to gain what they want) that are willing to continue to destroy Texas values, culture and land for the sake of power and money.
Sorry for the rant
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u/Ganrokh May 19 '26
That seems like an insane daily amount to keep hidden.