The Environmental Protection Agency has fined Tesla a paltry $275,000 for repeated Clean Air Act violations—chump change for the $800 billion electrical automobile firm heralded as an environmental champion. I really like a bit of irony within the morning!

In a launch issued Tuesday, the EPA stated that Tesla’s Fremont, California, manufacturing unit had violated a number of parts of the Clean Air Act that management the quantity of emissions firms can launch from portray and coating vehicles and vehicles. According to the EPA, from 2016 via 2019, the power had a number of lapses that led to it not sticking to those requirements, together with failing to develop a piece plan for minimizing emissions and never preserving ample data.

The firm’s automobile coating consists of some chemical compounds which have hyperlinks to critical well being results like most cancers, together with formaldehyde, ethylbenzene, naphthalene, and xylene. These chemical compounds are on the EPA’s official list of hazardous pollutants that should be regulated at industrial amenities to be able to hold them from harming employees and other people residing close to factories.

Tesla, the EPA stated, “has corrected the violations noted in both settlements and returned to compliance.” The firm reported $2.3 billion in revenue final 12 months, so I can’t think about it is going to have any hassle arising with $275,000 for that pesky high quality.

The issues that the EPA’s high quality covers on the manufacturing unit have been well-reported. While paint store fires are comparatively rare occurrences in manufacturing, fires have been endemic on the Fremont through the time interval the EPA’s high quality covers. At least 5 paint store fires occurred on the Fremont manufacturing unit between 2014 and 2018, together with one which shut down Model 3 manufacturing for every week. In 2018, Tesla staff working within the paint store told CNBC that poor upkeep, coaching, and cleansing have been accountable for the fires, and that CEO Elon Musk and different high-level executives had inspired them to maintain working to make Model 3s fairly than suspending manufacturing to implement bigger fixes. Some paint store staff expressed considerations about their well being to CNBC.

Some of this mismanagement could also be baked into how the corporate is designed, particularly in its rush to hit Model 3. In 2018, Tesla, together with Amazon, topped a listing of the U.S.’s most harmful locations to work, thanks partly to the inordinate quantity of accidents on the Fremont manufacturing unit. An investigation into working circumstances on the manufacturing unit by information outlet Reveal in 2018 discovered that employees overwhelmingly stated that Musk doesn’t just like the aesthetics of numerous frequent security markers in factories—like the colour yellow, or extreme signage—which means that the Fremont manufacturing unit lacked these qualities. (Tesla has denied this declare.)

“If someone said, ‘Elon doesn’t like something,’ you were concerned because you could lose your job,” Susan Rigmaiden, Tesla’s former environmental compliance supervisor, advised Reveal in 2018.

Some of the problems at Fremont have been addressed in earlier environmental fines. In 2019, the EPA slapped Tesla with a $31,000 penalty and ordered it to spend an extra $55,000 on emergency response gear following inspections that discovered that the Fremont facility wasn’t correctly disposing of poisonous waste. Tesla has additionally confronted penalties for a smattering of offenses since 2010, together with paying $71,000 in 2013 after employees have been sprayed with aluminum.

But it’s troublesome to imagine {that a} measly $275,000 will rework an organization that has again and again prioritized government enter and the underside line over employee security and environmental protections—and but has profited off its picture as an organization working to alter the clear vitality future. In 2020, the Fremont manufacturing unit repeatedly put employees in danger by forcing them to come back into the manufacturing unit to work on the peak of the covid-19 pandemic, resulting in an outbreak of circumstances on the facility, according to Alameda County data. Regardless, Musk sued the county over its insurance policies, and the corporate in the end bullied the county into altering security guidelines so employees may proceed to come back into the manufacturing unit to work. A few months later, Tesla’s annual report referred to as covid lockdowns an “unprecedented opportunity to learn from this disruption and accelerate the deployment of clean energy solutions.”

It feels like Tesla could have mounted a few of its air air pollution issues, however these fines are a fantastic reminder that simply because an organization could place itself as a clear vitality chief doesn’t imply there isn’t some dust simply beneath the shiny floor.