Considering littering part of someones carbon footprint is not entirely wrong but it is quite a stretch. The aim really is the littering, not the carbon footprint caused by the littering, at least that’s what the legislator communicated as goal.

It is not so much that the comic is “anti-EU” indeed, it is that it uses an anti-EU narrative. The tethered caps have been parts of a number of clearly anti-EU memes, usually from the right, some of them from the tech-bros.

No it would not be exactly the same comic. There is a reason they used “carbon footprint”. It strengthened the message of hypocrisy. I do not claim that Tesla/capitalism isn’t the butt of the joke here. If they had written “to protect the environment” I probably would have no issue with the comic. Then the tethered caps would not be presented in a way that people who don’t know about it would be mislead about the intention behind the tethered caps.