Banned in California
bannedincalifornia.org
bannedincalifornia.org
Instead you have to ship things from out of state and other countries, which generates emissions and pollution itself that might actually be more than local production.
Its the same issue as housing. Endless rules and regulations, many of which make no attempt at doing anything but block, cause the wealth of socirty to be siphoned away. An apartment project in LA with permits complete is worth twice as much as one without. How do we see this and expect our economy to do anything except drown in bureaucracy?
My advice is dont ever manufacturing anything in CA. They will try and kill your business for simply existing no matter how perfect you are.
This didn't occur in a vacuum. Business interests and their aligned politicians fought successfully for a century for their freedom to destroy human health and life in pursuit of profit. Many died, many were injured and countless more had their lifespans cut short. There's obviously legitimate concerns about over-regulation, but concerns about corporate abuse of power are just as legitimate if not more so based on the history. And it's not unopposed either, but most of the backlash in California has centered on housing construction and occupational licensing - not the rights of investors to build new industrial facilities in a post-industrial state.
Using this I see that within 10 miles of me are
- a microprocessor testing facility that contaminated soil and groundwater with 1,1,1-trichloroethane, trichloroethylene, Freon 113, 1,1-dichloroethane, and tetrachloroethane which affects 300k nearby residents
- a semiconductor manufacturer that led to "trichloroethylene, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, trichlorofluoroethane, and 1,1-dichloroethylene, in soils on the site and in ground water on and off the site."
- a 5-acre drum recycling plant that contaminated wells within 3 miles with trichloroethane, trichloroethylene, 1,1-dichloroethylene, and tetrachloroethylene. Affecting the drinking water of 250k residents.
- about 10-15 other sites I'm not gonna cover in detail but the contaminants include asbestos-laden dust, PCBs, dichlorobenzene, trichloroethylene, trichloroethane, chloroform, vinyl chloride, xylene, and many many more
Posting a list of them as a justification for red tape that blocks industries does not make sense.
And OK, sure, there's a lot of industry that ought to happen somewhere. Someone has to build ships and electronics and whatever, and if California's code is too strict then it just becomes NIMBYism. But if some company moves their gigafactory to Reno for easier permitting, I don't whether (or more likely by how much) CA is too strict, or NV is too lax. And I know that CA has NIMBYish and overregulatory tendencies, but given the clear bullshit on this website, I'm not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt either.
I'm especially doubtful when it says "THE classic example of what you can't do in CA" is auto paint shops ("Impossible"!) ... but then the detail it gives is that they're "effectively impossible" to permit in the Bay Area AQMD, that being only one of the state's 35 AQMDs (albeit one of the larger ones).
It’s not a great example. I’d be more convinced if you picked a decommissioned shipyard with more conventional problems, like marinship.
But sure, there are other shipyards they cleaned up in less than three decades.
Neither defend nor refute, and by "presume false" I don't actually mean to come way actively and newly believing the opposite of the claims, but just disregard entirely.
Argue over some other article that actually backs it's assertions with citations and reasoning.
The difference is that successful businesses in California just do. They don't whine about problems caused by their own incompetence.
How CA can manufacture more when you add all the other SE states?
And your statement is like saying “sure the food has poison in it, but people just tough it out and don’t whine”
How about not poising food? Seems like a worthy goal.
Some years ago, a plating company in San Jose dumped a plating bath into the sewer system. This was so toxic that it killed the bacteria that reduce organic sludge at the sewerage plant. This knocked the whole plant offline, releasing untreated sewerage into the bay. The lower bay was toxic for a week. It's normally swimmable. San Jose was fined by the EPA. The plating company was heavily fined by San Jose.
It's a good sewerage plant. The output is drinkable, and if you take the tour, you're offered some to drink. Some of the output is used for irrigation. In a severe drought emergency, water could be fed back into the water system. They've never had to do that, but in a big drought a few years ago, things got close to that point.
San Jose, which is more of an industrial city than most people realize, still has plating companies. Here's an inspection report for one of them.[1] This one was releasing too much chromium.
[1] https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/region9/water/pre...
I wonder if chemical plants have something similar, a way to contain an uncontrolled outflow of toxic stuff if the normal flow of neutralization fails.
BTW this likely means quite a bit of land used up by such a reservoir which is ideally never needed, but must be present.
Wastewater plants have other ponds and tanks which are part of the process, and they're usually full, with liquid moving in and out, accompanied by stirring, air, and chemical injection. A big empty one is a backup system.
Real engineering.[1]
[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-09/documents/la...
Anyway, it's not bad-- I run around there all the time. It's just when the wind blows a certain way. I live a half mile from it and you absolutely do not ever smell it outside of the park.
This is enough to earn chemical plants a spot on a future "BANNED in California 2" article, because it's "clearly" overregulation.
It can range from overflow tanks to capture spills to concrete “pools” around the entire operation that capture any catastrophic leaks and direct it to underground holding tanks.
There are a ton of highly toxic industrial processes. Properly designed plants and safety infrastructure means it’s never an issue.
toxic because of chemicals and toxic because of the release of untreated sewage (bacteria) are sufficiently different that I thought I'd point out that you kind of mix them here. Also, toxic because of high concentrations (e.g. pH) that will dilute vs toxic cumulative forever chemicals are different orders of magnitude altogether.
This incident you describe seems like a one-off and fairly benign compared to long term patterns that lead to superfund sites. Till this company dumped that batch, they weren't dumping batches, i.e. the system was working.
I'm not up on the latest, not a civil engineer or public health authority, but it is generally recommended in many seaside places not to swim at the beach after rainstorms. the influx of large volumes of water into the sewage treatment systems means that they overflow and raw sewage is released. These systems are being improved all the time, but it's a known problem and civilization hasn't collapsed. Some natural creatures like sewage outflow. When Boston moved their outflow pipe from the inner harbor to deeper water in Cape Cod bay, the lobster population collapsed. Maybe we should have called it the lobster poopulation.
Waiting for civilizational collapse to justify regulation seems like an unhelpful standard TBH. In fact, I would argue that it's one of the main problems we are having right now: that we know our current trajectory will lead to civilizational collapse, but aren't willing to change course.
Years later, swimming in Hawaii, I found myself looking for wipes. I mentioned it to a snorkel-outfit operator, and she looked at me like I was insane. They didn't even put damaging sunscreen in the water, and there was no expectation of little 1-2 inch sticky spots of oil.
The good old days, in the 80's, where we swam in oceans filled with slow-motion natural disasters. I wonder how much of it was place (Hawaiians seem to have a stronger relationship with the land and nature surrounding them) and how much of it was the time (20 years later).
Oil production and natural oil seepage happen in the gulf of mexico because there's oil there, there's not much oil around Hawaii.
So there's likely both a human and non-human reason for this in Texas.
Extraction of that oil via commercial wells greatly reduced the natural seepage, which is why there is so little crude oil floating in that ocean water today. Oil drilling actually made the water cleaner.
And some of it, if not most of it is not natural seepage but early environmental catastrophes in the 50s and 60s, particularly around Summerland.
(Source ex-resident)
That area has been like that for something like 100,000 years, which is a considerable amount of time in evolutionary terms.
And not far down the rabbit whole one finds: The author of the study often cited by oil companies for above narrative, felt impelled to publish a clarifying statement: https://luyendyk.faculty.geol.ucsb.edu/Seeps%20pubs/Luyendyk...
Maybe stricter guidelines against operational "routine" spills led to a reduction of the sticky spots, plausible?
You are projecting your biases. There was no "drilling is good for the environment" narrative. I was recounting an interesting fact about the environment there.
Many of these seeps are under considerable pressure as there is substantial natural gas mixed in. The seepage rate of each has been mapped and studied for many decades. It has long been observed that the introduction of drilling appears to substantially reduced the seepage rate at many of these underwater sites. Drilling wells significantly reduces natural pressure in these reservoirs, likely leading to the observed reductions in seepage.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill
…
> Oil drilling actually made the water cleaner.
This insistence that acknowledgement of facts has an ideological narrative is a pernicious strain of anti-science thinking.
That is very well put. This should be added to the general list of fallacies in argument, and like the other ones (the slippery slope, hasty generalization, Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.) more general awareness should exist about these.
The current wave of anti-science, anti-logic, rejection of objective data, etc. is like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. This is a subjective observation, maybe it has always been this way and I never paid attention because I was caught up in whatever I used to be caught up in.
I just thought it's ridiculous - and kind of funny - to deny making the claim you literally made. I'm not sure you have a lot of legs to stand on, accusing others of "anti-science thinking" and a "failure of reading comprehension" when asking us to ignore the clear, textual evidence of that contradiction.
> For it to be a "narrative", there would need to be an additional claim that this specific case and context, which is factual, generalizes to most unrelated cases.
Says who? That seems a very narrow and unusual definition of what makes a "narrative", bent to your purpose. It seems to me, a "narrative" in common parlance just means "telling a story" or "relaying a sequence of events". I honestly have never seen someone use the word to imply generalization (doesn't mean no one ever did, of course).
In any case, given that you responded to a comment talking about the two examples of Texas and Hawaii with an example about California and an "actually", it seems pretty fair to me to say, that you even fulfilled this artificially narrowed definition.
I mean, come on, you have got to admit that you have at least been unclear, if you didn't intend to make this argument. Instead of just defensively flinging insults.
Hawaii has other problems. When I lived there, I went through a lot of Neosporin because every scrape you get from a reef pushes in bacteria that got into the ocean from the leaking sewer pipes.
The regulations are to stop the pollution, if you can manufacture without polluting, then you'll comply and be able to manufacture.
The problem is that there are other regulatory environments where the people aren't protected from pollution.
What would fix that is enforcing the regulations nation wide, then applying tariffs on imported products that don't enforce the same regulations.
Net result, more expensive phones, better health and improved environment for the public. In the same way as car pollution was cleaned up.
Maybe by then we'll have returned to building products which last (although I'm not holding my breath).
~30 miles to Lake Tahoe.
And according to https://www.reno.gov/home/showpublishedimage/4088/6351980817..., it's about two miles from the watershed that feeds it.
Well yes, it's designed so that a handful of teenagers can't just clone the IRS database, for example.
China's system is authoritarian state-capitalism. It is precisely the bureaucracy that steered it's industries toward this outcome.
that is literally nonsense .. lazy nonsense, ill-willed nonsense.. Ignorant nonsense.
literally four seconds to search " history of us environmental law"
Even if the bureaucracy didn't exist and everyone voluntarily followed the regulations, you could not run a globally cost competitive business without some sort of subsidy when competing with places where rampant pollution is allowed.
It's a real problem without an obvious long term solution that I am aware of.
There is a large opportunity to simplify and rationalize the regulations. This would dramatically reduce the cost of both bureaucracy and compliance. In addition to massively reduced cost, it would enable people in CA to do more cool stuff faster!
But simplification, rationalization, and acceleration is not in the interest of the bureaucracy or the incumbents... so we are very unlikely to see change until there is an existential crisis.
First: we may have gone too far toward anti-pollution. China has more naval vessels than the US. Everything changes when peace isn't a foregone conclusion, as it has been for the past 30? 50? years.
Second: it's not the regulations per se, but the difficulty of dealing with the bureaucracy, particularly (a) long delays and (b) uncertainty.
I run an electrical contractor, so this is not the least bit theoretical to me. The hassle of dealing with local government and PG&E for what should be routine things adds tremendous cost to doing business. Recent concrete example: it cost over $1,000 and two months to process a minor change to an electrical permit set, in Alameda (City). The actual change was moving some panels outside, a small revision to a plan that had already been checked and permitted. This required $1,400 in engineering fees, plus a ~$200 application fee to the City, and then the actual plan check and review charge of $650-700. It was probably one hour of actual work. The worst part was that Alameda outsources its plan check to a third party and I'm pretty sure the plans sat for two weeks on someone's desk at the City, before I asked for status, and then, an hour later, by "complete coincidence", it was sent to the outsourced plan checker.
If we could put a precise price on pollution, it would be a different story. It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.
I keep hearing this, but it never happens. Despite attempts to get jurisdictions to race to the bottom, businesses simply follow the money/markets: I can bet you a hefty sum that Alameda will never go without electrical contractors.
You *really* don't understand the issue then because no one is saying that there will be 0 electrical contractors.
Electrical contractors will continue to exist because demand will continue to exist, but the wait time to get the work done will increase due to not enough electrical contractors.
Or the work will be left undone because the owner doesn't have enough money to pay the few electrical contractors that remain.
Or the work will occur but will avoid all regulations because the cost of complying relative to the odds of being caught don't justify paying it.
The tension you may be blind to, is that society wants to maximize safety in an area - and any work done should be in service to that goal, and not an end unto itself. We shouldn't blindly maximize for work done in an area, we have to make sure the result is safe: this introduces rules and regulations, and the time and monetary costs tag along.
No two people will agree where the balance is, but generally there's regional culture. Hell, Texas allows home-owners to do their own electrical work - does that "drive business away" since some people won't pay for small DIY fixes in TX? I can't say I've ever heard that argued, but I hear it deployed a lot in response to regulations.
Every time someone trips on a cord and smashes their face, gets mashed by a forklift, slips and falls on ice and can't work for 6mo, you personally, along with everyone else who's fetish for bureaucracy has driven up the cost of "better solutions" that would've prevented that has a little bit of that blood on their hands.
I'm not saying to just let anyone do a 3ph 480v panel swap and connect that shit to the utility. But at this point that might be better than letting you people continue to run things your way.
Half my house was built less-than-safely by the previous owner because getting the permits for the structures would be too expensive, time-consuming, and maybe not even possible.
The increased costs (time and money) of permits really changes the risk-reward.
... what?
We need to push these people out of California.
These banned industrial processes sum to making almost every physical object. The net effect is that it’s nearly illegal to make anything physical. Do you think that the state or country will do well in the long term if it’s basically illegal to actually make things?
Also funny that you Musk derangement people will never actually engage with the content of the quote’s message, preferring to dismiss it based on your political disagreement with the person who said it.
I see no reason to engage in any way with the mental flatulations of this virulently racist Epstein fanboy. The quicker his empire can be dismantled and the sooner he gets utterly shunned from polite society, the better off we’ll all be. To a lesser degree, the same goes for his eager and willing co-conspirators.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
As for California, as a resident, I’ll take environment over industry, thanks. Half my home neighborhood is already a Superfund site. Go fuck up Texas if you like.
>Go fuck up Texas if you like.
Indeed, Texas is taking a net inflow of builders and entrepreneurs, California has a net outflow. The state is booming and the future is being built in Texas. The most advanced rocket in the world, something that puts governments to shame, is being built there. Massive semiconductor manufacturing plants, electric cars, financial companies, tons of new housing (look at Austin, 25% price reduction because of new supply in recent years), all happening there.
But I really do think that your train of thought is sort of misanthropic. Anti-progress, anti-science, and just generally being "anti-building" does not play out well in the long term. I supposed it's a lesson that generations have to re-learn.
And doubling down on puerile trigger words like “derangement” does absolutely nothing aside from reflecting poorly on the author. It’s a strange sentiment to preserve in the Internet amber, I must say.
Maybe the regulations for new car factories are good, maybe they are bad, maybe Musk was exaggerating or making things up whole cloth, but the veracity of these things is mostly unrelated to Musk's views on race.
Which is to say: I’m not going to quote David Duke at someone if I’m engaged in intelligent discussion, even if he happens to have the perfect quote. Unless I want people to think I share his values.
> These banned industrial processes sum to making almost every physical object
The processes are obviously not banned, only an idiot would think that. You just can't do the process and dump all the pollutants into the nearby river.
This is the biggest lie we are told, and the most heinous. The only thing that will fix it is when people like you (and me!) stop purchasing things which were made in those regulatory environments. If you continue to purchase them under the premise that "I have no choice, I have to participate in this fallen world," so does the state of California. Banning these activities when there are alternative regulatory environments just pushes the problem to someone else.
A great example of this is the Obama-era fuel efficiency laws. No one actually wanted a more efficient truck, so to get around the laws, the manufacturers just made larger trucks, which caused more problems than they solved.
Outlawing something, then doing nothing to stop demand for that thing, that's just irresponsible.
Why would you expect it to be impossible?
They finding out it's basically impossible, aren't they?
- Are able to put up $5m of their own money in order to receive $25m. - Are not associated with a university. - Are not a public non-profit electrical utility (heaven forbid!)
One, as it turns out. Who received $28m. According to the list of grants given under the program.
Smells a bit off.
They list playing and Cnc machining as banned and then only describe the chemicals used in playing.
There is a huge defense production industry in CA and an even larger machining industry that would be really surprised to hear that.
The largest manufacturer of machine tools in the US (Haas) is based in California.
I thought they hadn’t been built for other reasons over the last decade. But according to this, not being built means banned. TIL!
Started reading this site but the massive gaps in logic and reasoning are like nails on a chalkboard.
No new fabs being built in CA means fabs are banned?!
Okay well fabs are banned in pretty much the whole country then, so why call out California?
Just because something isn’t done doesn’t mean it’s banned. Neither is it necessarily bad. There’s a lot of reasons why not to build certain things certain areas - labor cost, earthquake risk, land is more desired leading to higher cost, blah blah blah
That doesn’t mean something is banned. Maybe we should look at making some things easier but this website is just a hit piece and has a clear motivation rather than being a trustworthy evaluation.
It’s like those cringy billboards on highway 5 about Gavin newsom and water.
Edit —— Complaining that large factories can’t easily be built in dense population centers like the Bay Area means things are banned is weird - who in the right mind thinks a sprawling factory with emissions should go smack dab in the middle of population centers? Why can’t we build a new nuclear plant in Manhattan or maybe an oil refinery on wall street!? Waah waah so outrageous! None were built in the last decade so it’s the outrageous regulations fault! I want my lead battery smelter in downtown Portland but Oregon banned it! Waah waah!
Aside that, this site is mostly blaming California regulations for the nationwide manufacturing issues driven heavily by free trade
The problem for me is that when you go out in the rest of the country the dislike bordering on hate for California is really common. It is insane to me that you can send Marines to Los Angeles and almost no one cares. California is a such a huge chunk of the US economy, not just tech but agriculture, trade and yes even manufacturing.
The partisanship is poison for everyone and it holds back reform in California. We're all the same country.
Uh..
I'd do Massachusetts K-12. Texas is pretty bad.
Massachusetts consistently ranks in the top 10 in the world on PISA. An exam which removes all the political "BS"-ability from the results and comparisons. It's just your students taking the same test as all the other students in the world, and the resultant scores being ranked.
Texas K-12 is horrible. Lived there from Katrina to a few years past Harvey. Our PISA scores were consistently horrible when we were ranked internationally.
Though, curiously enough, we were not "horrible" if you only compared us to the same test results in other US states. We were nowhere near Massachusetts. But we weren't Alabama/Florida/Mississippi either. Which means education in general in the US is pretty bad outside maybe the top 3 to 5 states by performance on the PISA exams.
Texas, California, and Florida are all fairly similar, with California doing somewhat worse than Texas and Florida. Unfortunately, the dedication of California to effective education is going down over time, while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up.
Well their PISA scores haven't been going up. In fact they've been going down. So if their education is getting better, it's not showing up in the ability of their students to answer questions that other students seem to be able to answer.
That's kind of what I meant by PISA removing "BS"-ability from the equation. For some reason, on American standardized tests, all our children do great. Then we take PISA with all the other kids in the world, and the truth comes out.
That's also why I think we should all just take Massachusetts' education curriculum and implement it across the nation. Because you talk about demographics, but even when you control for income and race, kids in Massachusetts just flat out do better than our kids. Even just taking all kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts, they are still doing better than kids at the median of the rankings of many, many other states. (And think about the demographics of kids at the bottom in Boston, Brockton, or Springfield. Come on, admit it man. I'll try to stay politically correct here and just state that those very likely aren't professors' kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts.)
Massachusetts is so far ahead of all of us that I think I'd be comfortable just saying that they seem to have gotten it right, and we should simply copy it. Because right now, the gap is just getting wider and wider with every round of PISA testing.
Personally I hope that the two Republican candidates in California both win the jungle primary - maybe that will lead to some soul searching on how bad the Democratic politicians have become in the state.
It’s an appeal to absurdity that falls flat because nuclear plants and oil refineries have been built near population centers in the US (including in California) without problem.
California had had more issues from under investment in industry (see it’s ancient electrical infra that lit the state on fire) than from collocation of industry and people.
Both of the largest ports are right in SoCal and that’s going pretty well. Building another one would never make it past the permitting stage in today’s California.
We should, it would replace significant amounts of natural gas usage for space heating. Not doing so is literally cooking the planet.
> Sometimes people don't want heating, but you still need to cool down the plant.
You can turn it down or off.
> Remind me why power lines aren't an option?
It's more economical not to waste half the plant's power output. 1 GW of heat comes out the reactor, 50% becomes electricity (with heat pumps you can make that 2x heating) and 50% is low-grade heat sufficient for space heating. You get 1/3 more heating for the same cost.
> Your smartphone contains materials processed through semiconductor fabrication, chemical etching, metal anodizing, glass tempering, and electroplating — none of which you could start a new facility for in California without years of litigation.
I agree that we should make it easier to do things, specifically by decreasing the amount of litigation involved in doing stuff. But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right? I get that it's trying to be attention-grabbing, but calling it a ban when it's not just sort of confuses the issue.
but why is this a problem?
There are other states without the regulations that these businesses apparently find offensive. Why can't the manufacturing be spun up in those states?
Serious question.
Funny enough, I've known some people over the years who have explicitly viewed litigation as a reasonable alternative to regulation. Their logic was that we should just let people and companies do whatever they want. Then, if it turns out a company is dumping mercury in the river or whatever, you litigate based on the damages. Better than regulation, they assured me.
/s
Things can appear banned even when they aren't merely because there is a new technology that's better and cheaper and it's a big investment so people go with the cheaper option.
Nobody is building new coal in the US because it's so expensive, not because there's an outright ban. Now, part of the reason it's more expensive than in the past is that using once-through water for cooling raises the cost of disposing of waste heat. And now, modern and much more efficient natural gas combined cycle plant is the obvious choice because not only is the fuel cheaper per kWh, but you also need to spend a lot less on waste heat disposal.
So is coal banned? No. Did some environmental regulations have an impact on just how bad of an idea coal is these days? Sure, but let's talk about the tradeoffs here, it's not a ban and framing it is a ban leads to bad solutions to real regulatory problems.
> Cell manufacturing uses NMP solvent for electrode coating, handles flammable electrolytes, and requires formation cycling that generates heat and gases. Tesla chose Reno for the Gigafactory specifically because of California's permitting environment.
EPA tried to heavily restrict these outright in 2024 [1] and California has air/environmental rules that made it nearly impossible to develop large battery factories in California, which is why Tesla chose Reno in 2014. An alternative didn't exist at the time and now a decade later Tesla recently filed a patent this year for Dry electrode processing [2]
So basically California lost a decade of possible lithium factories
[1] https://www.sgs.com/en-ca/news/2024/06/safeguards-9624-us-ep...
[2] https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/02/50290319/elon-mu...
Given the labor challenges in California due to high housing costs, which selectively pushes out those willing to work for lower wages, I am always surprised when manufacturers choose the state at all. Throwing additional challenges doesn't make it any easier.
Why mince words?
If there's a specific regulation on one aspect of a factory, as you describe, then "unbanning" the factory isn't going to help either, one must specifically unban that which was banned.
Mincing words would be saying "Factories doing X are banned" when in fact an existing Factory doing X with negative externality Y had negative externality Y priced or regulated.
That's exactly what we shouldn't be mincing, if we want to address the problems and make better decisions.
*This is not a post in support of death penalty, just how CA politicians have figured out ways to legally get what they want even if it directly contradicts the will of the people.
After the deindustrialization people started to enjoy healthy air and clear water.
As always when it comes to "the good old times" or "make great again", your brain will remember very selectively.
I used to live next to a large river for about 35 years. As a kid, it was forbidden to swim in it, and if you did, you had weird oily chemicals on your skin that felt unhealthy (burn, itching etc).
Back then we had huge production industries upstream, employing thousands of people.
Today you can swim in the river without any problem at all. But the industry and the jobs have shrunken a lot, because not polluting the air and water simply is expensive.
You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.
This is why you outsource to other countries and let them do it, because you simply do not care about them living in a polluted environment. Poison Outsourcing.
So, if the US wants production industry again, and want it to be competitive, than have a look on how the environment in the countries you will be competing with looks like, and then to an informed decision if you really want that.
I'd pick the clean air and water, and have people poisoned far away that I don't know and can ignore.
What would be your choice?
It's mostly a question of when, not if.
Food is slightly different, judging by the rates of obesity people can afford more than they need.
Current democratic party is currently a pro-corporate pro-deregulation party, basically Reaganites from 80s.
https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2024-Democr...
This is the current DNC platform. There are zero mentions of a universal / single payer / socialized healthcare system.
There are four mentions of "healthcare" it refers to maintaining the ACA (which is a bad law), making a more integrated health care system in the US territories (Guam, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, etc.), climate law which will improve health care nebulously, and a vague statement about the supreme court hurting healthcare decisions (which is just a statement about them supporting the murder of babies).
What do you want? If there were more Democrats in office in 2010 we would have already had socialized healthcare.
People keep getting pissed that the party without power can't do things. If you want a politician to change something, you have to vote for them first
Even the people who vote for Trump understand that, but so many people who think they are smart can't understand that about voting for democrats. They continue to get pissed that the democrats secure the presidency and nothing else and can get nothing done as is intentionally the design of the american system
FDR's New Deal was possible because the Democrat party held about 80% control of both houses of congress and the presidency. Their threat to pack the supreme court to bypass them worked because it was trivially doable for them. You want a New New Deal? You have to vote for more Democrats.
Less stuff and less pollution everywhere.
Something to bear in mind when you are being told environmental damage is being caused by the poor or some foreign country.
After all most of us work hard so that we can buy things.
And that choice is basically the exact opposite of what western civilization is heading for, and thanks to the AI boom, it has never been worse at any time in human history, I guess. Which means you are likely surrounded by people who want the opposite of what you want. That will be problematic.
However, this really only would be the proper answer if given by a majority as a community. In a crowd of people who want more, more, more more MORE, you will just drown and die.
But in principle you are right:
No, you do not really need to re-industrialize your country. Instead think about how endless growth in a reality of finite resources is going to play out. California is just fine as it is. Let's think about where Californians will get drinking water from in the near future, instead of thinking about building water-consuming factories.
Americans seem to love to count their past successes and then declare the game is over and they won.
History doesn't end though.
Chinese cities had terrible air quality 20 years ago. Now they don't.
The Chinese and Indian governments have climate change plans that they're actively working on, sometimes ahead of schedule. The current US government has banned the words "climate change" in official documents.
I mean, the true reason here seems to be that producing stuff without polluting is impossible if you have to compete with stuff produced with lesser pollution standards.
In theory, this could be an argument for heavy import tariffs from countries with lesser pollution standards. The downside, of course, is that at the end of the day this would still mean "stuff is more expensive, maybe a lot more", which is obviously unpopular as it means fewer people can get the stuff. (And of course, a US state's ability to restrict trade with other US states is extremely limited)
I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing. The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer, not through regulation, but through process. There is a difference.
So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment? Put high tariffs on dangerous process products, reduce regulation (permits, etc), increase standardization and final safety measurements. Then the products we use, we make, safely.
But people don't actually care about the environment. They care about looking like they care about the environment, and sending industrial processes somewhere else. There is a difference.
Also: I suggest rethinking your opening line. It's not very endearing.
Practically, ‘in theory’ might actually be doable - if there was a single, overarching regulatory environment. That was enforced.
Chances are, that would defacto make a bunch of people starve in poorer countries, and blow a lot of stuff up, so would also likely be worse than ‘the disease’. At least right now.
But maybe I’m just being a cynical bastard.
The meat of their comment wasn't the personal anecdote, it was actually on government policy:
>>> You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.
>>> This is why you outsource to other countries and let them do it, because you simply do not care about them living in a polluted environment. Poison Outsourcing.
This is 100% about globalization: if some countries let their rivers catch on fire, the externality lets them out-compete anyone who tries to do the process cleanly. So if you let their externality-fueled products into your country, you just can't build similar things, because they wouldn't be price-competitive.
If labor and environmental standards were strong and global, or countries with high standards refused to trade with countries with low standards, we wouldn't have this situation. There would be an economic motivation to develop and implement cleaner processes.
No, why would you say that? When America and Europe built their wealth, they were mainly (though not exclusively) producing and selling manufactured goods for themselves. This whole idea of a poor country developing by building polluting factories to make items for rich countries is a more recent and different thing.
Europe and America insisting on certain labor and environmental standards as a condition of trade wouldn't mean poor countries can't build factories for themselves. At worst, you just split the current one big market into two smaller markets: an expensive and clean one, and a dirty and cheap one.
Do we let other countries wage war, pillage, etc. because others gathered wealth that way previously?
But what will be the result? The product now has equal cost to be produced, but the market is gone.
People consume cheap stuff because it is cheap. If it is no longer cheap, they will not consume.
US americans just need to make up their minds. Do they want keep getting more and more and more cheap stuff? Fine. Then go on exploiting other regions of the planet. Or do you have enough cheap stuff now? Ok, then nobody needs another factory.
Many on HN are living in a society where it is normal to use a TELEPHONE for only two years before throwing it away.
What would happen if you instead used it for 5 years? No more factories needed. Problem solved. You don't have to compete, as there is no competition.
The result of charging the true cost of T-Shirt to the consumer is not that everybody now has 100 Fair-Traded-Ecofriendly T-Shirts at home that they don't wear. They will notice that 10 T-Shirts are more than enough if you wash your clothes once per week.
What I am trying to say is: The demand is only there due to the option of exploitation. Take away the part of ruining other peoples lives to get cheap stuff, then it's no longer interesting and will just stop.
So of course you can take the detour, try to re-industrialize, and then find out that your people do not actually like this kind of work, and that they for sure also aren't willing to buy your stuff at the price you are asking.
There is a reason nobody would be so stupid to produce "Make America Great Again" merch in America. Your target audience would not buy it if it was made in America.
It is pragmatic to simply skip this step and end up with the same result: You'll just consume less.
I have a friend who works as an environmental engineer at a chem plant. They work hard to keep things safe and clean, and rigorously monitor their output.
I'm sure we could do even more if we weren't competing in meany areas against legal jurisdictions which DON'T care about such things. We aren't "priced out". We are regulated out and out competed by jurisdiction which have many fewer labor laws and much more lax environmental monitoring. If we are out-competed on product, then we deserve to loose, which is where libertarians and free-trade have a point. But if we are out-competed on keeping people and the environment reasonably safe? That's when we enact trade barriers.
That is how you actually keep the environment and people safe.
We do manufacture things. Just not in California.
So why does it even matter if California bans manufacturing dangerous things? Who cares? Just manufacture it in some other state. As a bonus, you don't have to pay those high California taxes.
In what world is this a problem?
Texas beats California in total value of manufacturing shipments only because because of its petroleum and coal products manufacturing. And California beats Texas in manufacturing employment.
Again, what is the reason New Mexico, or Utah, or Nebraska, or Tennessee cannot manufacture these things? And why is it a problem if they do so instead of California?
Manufacturing jobs are also some of the most unstable because big companies will shop around for tax breaks. Once they find a political sucker ... they build a new plant and close the old one which wrecks havoc on the local economy. PR teams are designed to mitigate negative feedback when this happens.
Smart politicians know this and will not concede to tax breaks for big companies, like Amazon.
I mean if these jobs are so bad, isn't it good that California is trying to not have them in its own municipalities? The way you laid it out, shouldn't everyone be trying not to have those jobs?
Manufacturing jobs are not bad. The environment and de-regulation makes them bad.
To me a job must have a living wage tied to it and it must be in an environment that doesn't poison the employee, community, and nature.
Others have low standards like calling USA McDonald's a job when they don't even pay enough to live off of. EU McDonald's is forced to pay a living wage because of proper regulations.
California has the highest manufacturing employment and most manufacturing companies of any state, the second highest (behind only Texas) dollar value of manufacturing output.
It is just below the national average in manufacturing as a share of GDP, but its also the fifth highest state in GDP/capita; leaving it still above average in manufacturing GDP/capita.
Trade barriers however are bullshit and don't work. And they are a lie. You are not building IPhones in the US because building an IPhone in the US would cost three times as much as it would doing in Shenzhen. And people would not be willing to pay that. And that's why they get an exception from the trade barriers. And that list of exceptions basically goes on and on and on...
Anyway, what works, works. This is especially true if that industry had been in the area for long, and therefore has access to a lot of skilled and experienced workers.
But it does not make sense to cry and complain that building such a thing from scratch is "banned". No, it is not banned. It's just a stupid idea, and there are laws against stupid ideas using limited natural resources.
(China's predicament is not much better, with the added wrinkle that there's absolutely nothing whatsoever they can do about bad demographics due to their size, whereas Central/Eastern Europe can import people once we collectively get over ourselves and let go of uppity xenophobia).
There IS labour over abundance. Unemployment in most EU countries is at record highs. And it shows no sign of slowing down.
The problem is it's mostly white collar labor overabundance. And those college educated people aren't gonna want to make sneakers in sweatshops.
There's not going to be any point even having sweatshops or factories in this region soon. Why bother? If it's anything low or medium-skill and low or medium-capital intense, just open up shop in... Well, why not Uzbekistan? And if double-landlocked isn't your thing, there's dozens of other options.
There are also network effects. Your plant that is energy intensive is closing? Now other manufactures must increase their cost as transportation is increased and local contracts harder to get. Your chemical plant, which has operated within good bounds for a decade can't get a permit to expand, or is protested? Your intake products now either go up in price or become unable to attain them at all.
And even still - there's a lot of manufacturing in Easter Europe. Go to IKEA or an appliance or auto store. You might be surprised to find where things are made these days. Often they'll say "made in EU" instead of the actual country name though.
Plus scaling industrial production is one thing, but if proletarians are unable to afford them because wealth distribution is exponentially concentrated, what is the point?
No but they are significantly cheaper than an employee, A robot can pick up something and move it from A to B for upwards of 10 years. The programming and setup are a fraction of the time a robot can operate reliably
I cannot stress to you how reliable and little maintenance is required for a $60,000 fanuc robot.
You don't even need manufacturer support or access to the PLC. You want to start the machine? Just have the 6axis robot hit the start button lol
The difference between the USA and, for example, China, in manufacturing is the difficulty of getting a new factory built.
If you have a product designed and ready for production, it will take you years to build a factory in the USA. All the while you'll be losing money managing the build, paying your employees and, most importantly, letting your competitors get a head start.
Likewise, if you build that factory in China, it'll be up and running in less than a year and you can start making your R&D money back, get to market before your competitors and not bleed money keeping your companies doors open.
The labor costs are easily offset by removing the logistics of moving the product.
Tesla Gigafactories are a pretty good example of this. The first two took ~3 years to build in Nevada and New York. The third, in Shanghai, took 10 months.
Gigafactory Berlin is a different beast and produces a different product mix.
Gigafactory New York produces photovoltaic cells and Tesla Supercharger assemblies but does not produce batteries or vehicles yet another product mix.
Giga Shanghai just does final vehicle assembly (basically the easiest kind of factory and most minimally regulated) and is a million square feet smaller than the other factories and with no joint partnership/co buildout.
You may want to ask your LLM to do very detailed research.
Maybe those that own the wealth should pony up more in taxes or give away their factories to the workers so they can run it themselves (something tells me they'll do a better job than greedy owners that just care about money rather than building a community).
And the other limiting factor is knowledge/education. Your region has been known for 100 years to be highly skilled at building $THING? That knowledge is still there and has not fully retired? That's also a resource.
"High labor cost" is a smoke screen. We are not talking about acquiring from a pool of lazy dancing monkeys. The labor you need are for tasks that machines can not yet do. Those jobs are either really shitty, or need a lot of qualification.
Due to this: If you want to build a factory in an area where there aren't already similar factories, you first need to build a University and come back 25 years later.
The articles author should next try to build a business based on offering camel riding in Greenland. Camel riding? Banned in Greenland!!!1
If it was California wouldn’t be covered in superfund sites that originated from industrial activities that took place decades ago.
If you’re worried about people evading the tax, you can make a border adjustment for imports across national borders. Note California is simply forcing things to be done elsewhere.
Right, and if the US congress[0] properly cared about the environment, the regulation would require both A) requirements to keep the manufacturing clean if done here, and B) tariffs for goods produced with polluting processes over there, scaled so the costs are somewhat higher if produced dirty.
They can produce cleanly here or there without extra tariffs and without losing market share because some other competitor externalizes the pollution costs.
[0] Tariffs are proper the domain of Congress, not any other branch. OFC, because of this, it isn't really an option for California, since states cannot levy tariffs externally or vs other states.
The other thing you're not understanding is how the state can enforce regulations and how the federal government has to. States cannot levy tariffs.
They probably do if it's near their backyard
I'm not sure about that, maybe it is based on the definition of "safe". There are tortilla chips made in Chicago that explicitly say they cannot be sold in California on the packaging. This is due to chemicals banned in Prop 65.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1220zn9/...
CA can't say "the factory that made these chips emitted chemical X into the air during manufacturing, but none of it is in the final product", so you can't import it.
The Federal Government can, but not an individual state.
If you don't have regulation, for profit industry won't do it right “through process”, because that would be throwig away money. Regulation is how you do it right through process.
> So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment? Put high tariffs on dangerous process products, reduce regulation (permits, etc), increase standardization and final safety measurements. Then the products we use, we make, safely.
Standardization and final safety measurements are literally regulations (and permitting is just a means of enforcing standardization.) So, basically, you “cut regulations” plan is actually to pair regulations doing exactly what the regulations you claim to cut do, call them a different thing, and add tariffs on top.
Which, is a long winded way of just saying “add tariffs”, which of course, a US state can’t do.
We cannot. We are richer because we don't do it. We export it to areas so poor they view the environmental impact as a fair trade-off for being able to eat.
> We cannot.
Apple can afford to do test fabrication while abiding by the rules, but chooses not to. https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-fine-over-bay-area...
We can afford to do it right. It will cost more and we'll have to make more prudent, effective, efficient, etc... decisions about producing and allocating goods and services and would need to give up many of the net negative/zero economic activities we like.
We've also likely enriched ourselves by externalizing the negative externalities of some of our goods and services to other countries. That's our choice, and I don't think it's a great one.
Yes exactly. And most of the complaints in this post is not stuff that's outright banned but stuff that's "hard to do".
These companies are complaining about how much more it costs to do this AND keep the environment clean. In an ideal world we would just have environmental protections all over the world so these companies don't simply find some small town with a local gov't they can buy off and do whatever they want
In your proposal you'd also cede the global market to China- because nobody in Angola cares about how those solar panels were made.
America barely cares about the domestic poor[1] - do you think its captains of industry will care about the poor abroad? Charity begins at home.
1. See locations of Superfund sites. Or for a modern example, where they are choosing to build AI datacenters powered by on-site diesel generators or gas turbines.
Then in 1995, congress "chose not to renew" that provision.
Now you and I literally and directly pay for the cleanup of hazardous waste. Companies don't really. Yet somehow they "Can't make factories" here
The idea that people setting pollution rules secretly don't care is silly.
California can't fix the whole world's problems.
No, California can't do that. States cannot impose tariffs per the Constitution: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S10-C2-1...
They could push for more regulations at the federal level (and indeed, Californians do this quite often!)
- I don't need a car, I'll use public transport. - I will only buy and eat the amount of calories I actually burn. - This 10 year old phone actually works pretty well. I don't need a new one.
etc
You need new factories because you want more stuff. If you stop wanting more stuff, you don't need more factories, and therefore nobody needs to cry about his industry being "banned".
I have visited the US a hell lot of times. I swear, I never ever in all these visits in any part of the US had the following thought in my head: "Boy, these people really need more car factories!".
This is about as true as saying "But people don't care about child sexual abuse". Sure, those partying with Epstein don't.
Plenty of people do care and indeed are today making sacrifices that align with this. Including lowering living standards. If you don't then that's on you, but speak for yourself.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-us-cities-looked-like-b...
And those people left jobless still have the right to vote. So you'll have to bribe them with welfare or invest in their upskilling, otherwise they'll turn to crime to survive and vote the most extremist parties to power that will undo all your environmentalism.
It also leaves you economically and militarily vulnerable to the countries you outsourced all your manufacturing too, as you can't fight back an invading army of mass produced consumer drones with just your remaining HR and software departments.
>I'd pick the clean air and water, and have people poisoned far away that I don't know and can ignore.
Until they mass migrate as refugees out of their polluted hlleholes you helped create, and move into your clean country straining your resources, making it your problem once again. Or, they tool up and economically or militarily crush you, turning your country into one of their colonies.
You(the West in thsi case) reap what you sow. There's no free lunch where you can have your cake and eat it too. In a highly globalized, highly mobile world, things tend to come back at you pretty quickly and the only ones safe from this are the ones who profited the most form this, the billionaires with private islands and doomsday bunkers.
In the real world, decided to move to a part of the planet where this question doesn't even come up, due to society having different priorities and a different base definition of "quality of life".
I know, that's why I wasn't judging it as being your own perspective but the general business perspective of the west that lead to the current situation.
> due to society having different priorities and a different base definition of "quality of life".
What is their definition of quality of life?
Another facet is that not only we got to enjoy clean air and outsourced pollution, we also paid our strategic enemies enough for them to transcend us.
- a factory is built relatively far away from populated areas
- workers were moving closer to the factory, building houses (when factory workers could still afford them and were allowed to build them) closer and closer to the factory
- workers retire, die, their now adult children live in, or inherit, the houses
- adult children complain about factory being too close to the city, complain about trucks, noise, pollution, dust, demand this and that
In some cases, there is the next step too:
- factory eventually closes down, people complain about having to drive to work far away, usually to the capital city where factories and many other businesses still operate. Centralization bad! Same people protest when someone else wants to start a new factory, industrial zone, anything in their city.
In some more extreme cases:
- since everyone is driving to the capital city, they also shop there, send post there, visit doctors there, do bank stuff there... this means that the store, post office, the bank, etc. close down in their smaller city. Again, people protest. Sometimes literally: https://siol-net.translate.goog/novice/slovenija/krajani-gri... & https://www-nadlani-si.translate.goog/novice/zapirajo-kar-dv... & https://www-kostel-si.translate.goog/objava/1129317?_x_tr_sl...
That's almost exactly how my dad and many of his siblings got permanently disabling muscular dystonia. The old times were fucking bad and we don't want them back.
> So, if the US wants production industry again
It should be noted that the VALUE of US industrial output is many times higher than it was 20 years ago, even if the VOLUME is lower.
The good old coal? Have a look at the life expectancy of a coal worker, and maybe a ct scan of a coal workers lung.
Good old nuclear? Will you accept the nuclear waste getting store in your neighborhood? No? What about your neighbors neighbor? No? Keep asking until you get a yes. See you again after having asked 341.8 Million people.
There are reasons we moved on from this and de-industrialized. Because the industries we got rid of simply weren't actually that great. Go visit a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen/China. I have done it a couple of times. The part of electronics production that is not done by machines is painful and exhausting work. Your back will hurt. Your eyes will hurt.
I really wonder what people are thinking how these jobs look like. Nobody would want them. The only ones in the US who would accept those jobs would be immigrants who have seen far worse and therefore view these jobs as an upgrade. But the US doesn't want those immigrants. So why try to build industries creating jobs only the kind of people would accept that you do not want in the country?
Frankly, any deindustrialized country is quite simply irrelevant. You need industry to have a middle class. You need middle class for capitalist consumption. There's a reason why american corporations kowtow to China now. The USA thought it could deindustrialize and act as the world's boss. China is proving them wrong via relentless industrialization. I only wish my own country had the balls to do the same.
Where do you find clean water to fill the pool with?
> You need industry to have a middle class.
Your average industrial assembly-line worker is _not_ middle class. They are horrible jobs no-one really wants back, or at least not for themselves.
It is very much possible to keep your air and environment clean, and still reasonably grow and remain relevant - look at France.
> You need middle class for capitalist consumption.
Again, industry workers were not middle class, and if you pay them enough to be middle class, your product's price stops being competitive.
To have middle class for capitalist consumption, you need to stop funneling literally _all the money_ to single-digit amount of people and companies, leaving everyone else poor, regardless of what they do for work.
The Earth is literally surrounded by water. I'm sure people will find a way. Treat the water if needed.
> if you pay them enough to be middle class, your product's price stops being competitive
Tell that to China's growing middle class, not me. We have western corporations shitting all over western values and culture and kowtowing before China and their censorship because they can't afford to lose the chinese market. That's where money is flowing now. It's one of the reasons why Trump wants to weaken the US dollar.
That's incorrect. Factory work is a ramp from low to middle class. It's low skill on entry but teaches on the job. Long term employees are valuable because they have expertise on the process and are, therefore, more valuable.
Ask Detroit if they want the Auto Industry's manufacturing back.
I used to think this way, but I've come to realize that it's very short-sighted. It's not sustainable, and we're already seeing how unchecked industrialization over the last couple centuries is leading to unintended/undesirable effects on our health, and indeed the suitability of the environment we need to live in. Sure, those problems can be pushed onto future generations, and so far (maybe) we've been able to solve them. But if we care at all about humanity's ability to thrive, we need to be more careful.
In developed countries, nobody has to struggle anymore just to stay alive, which is a far cry from the way it was 200 years ago. Advancements now are along the lines of increasing entertainment, or quality of life. But enjoying a good life doesn't have to be a zero-sum proposition, and I think society should put a higher cost on the ability of wealthy people to use up irreplaceable natural resources for their own benefit.
You know what's not sustainable? Exponential growth fueled by credit.
Banks loaning money at nearly zero percent interest. Money that gets loaned out, spent, deposited back into the bank and loaned out again, and again, exponentially, until a ludicrously huge financial callstack is created.
This financial callstack wants to unwind. It can only do so safely by the payment of debts. At some point, someone will actually have to go out there and extract value out of this planet in order to pay back those debts. Since debt grows exponentially, so does the harvesting of the resources of this planet.
If you want to solve the problem, you need to go to the source. You need to get rid of credit. Without this, environmentalism is nothing but national suicide. You're opting out of exponential growth and promptly outcompeted by the countries that didn't opt out.
> In developed countries, nobody has to struggle anymore just to stay alive, which is a far cry from the way it was 200 years ago.
Yeah... Because they industrialized and got filthy rich. Now they can afford to give so called "rights" to their citizens.
Rights cost money. They don't appear out of thin air. Somebody's gotta work to provide them. Even the right to not get killed in broad daylight only exists because extremely violent men with guns are protecting the rest. Those men gotta be paid.
Money is not infinite. It runs out. The music can't stop. Gotta keep making money in order to keep providing all those nifty rights. The simple reality is if you don't have real industries you're probably not making that much money. My country is essentially the world's soy farm, nvidia stock alone probably moves more money in a day than my entire country put together.
Look at the national debts of countries the world over. That's money they don't have. Money future generations will be paying interest on for a long time. You want to get reelected but you're broke, so you borrow money you don't have and spend it all giving "benefits" to a population that is dumb enough to think it comes for free. Then there's so much money circulating the value of the currency is inflated away, and people's children grow up and get radicalized when they realize most of their taxes are spent on interest payments on loans made by the previous generation.
Not a single atom on the planet has to be moved to extinguish all debts. Money and debt are (very useful and powerful!) bookkeeping constructs only.
> Look at the national debts of countries the world over. That's money they don't have.
Then who has it? Modern money is based on debt, and where there's a debt, there must be a creditor.
> Banks loaning money at nearly zero percent interest. Money that gets loaned out, spent, deposited back into the bank and loaned out again [...] Money is not infinite.
You seem to be basing your argument on some seriously outdated and thoroughly refuted models of money.
You should elaborate more on this bold claim.
> Then who has it?
Plenty of people. Treasury bonds holders. Pension funds. Insurance companies. Other countries. The government owes all of those people and regularly pays them interest.
> You seem to be basing your argument on some seriously outdated and thoroughly refuted models of money.
Fractional reserve banking is outdated and refuted?
Which is precisely why it's so short-sighted to try to solve your problem by "wiping out the entire Amazon jungle and replacing it with a world class high technology industry." If you're going to have a magic button to solve problems, then why not use it wisely, instead of propagating the spiral towards destruction?
> The simple reality is....
True -- there are no magic buttons. The reality is that people with wealth and power use them to take finite global resources and leverage them to ensure they they stay wealthy and powerful. That is implicitly not sustainable, as well as being questionably moral. It's not possible to avoid being part of the system, but you don't have to actively make it worse. You can advocate for fairer alternatives, or at least not wish for the destruction of entire major global ecosystems.
How does this work without water?
IMO, the (existing) towns should get more state support to have affordable safe domestic water. The shortage is not raw untreated water, but just transporting it and treating it.
The farmers? I sympathize, but they are trying to grow crops in an extremely fertile but arid valley. It's going to be constrained by the natural environment.
This creates an insane political environment where the rich as fuck agribusiness which owns that final water right is incentivized to get that tiny municipal water usage reduced as much as possible to squeeze out a tiny bit more water for their own business, rather than reform the dumb water rights system which would ensure that they only shoulder a tiny tiny portion of drought scarcity but probably force them to pay a little bit for irrigation improvements or stop growing almonds as cheaply.
The only reason the rest of the country even knows about the California water situation is because those bottom rung agribusinesses are still wealthy as all fuck and have actively paid for national political campaigns
The definitive book on the subject is "Cadillac Desert"
Wow. Why, because the Amazon is just a bunch of trees or something boring? If "high technology industry" is so much more valuable without even thinking twice about it, you probably don't understand very much of the world.
You are absolutely relying on some very outdated tropes, especially because I know China is in your mind. China remains a production powerhouse and has radically overhaul the country environmentally in the last 15 years. It's pulling away fast and hard in green energy. It's a country that had to go from mass poverty to modern era in 50 years compared to the hundreds of years. They aren't perfect yet, not California level of drinking water from sewers, but I fully believe they'll get there and still be a production power house by not having delusions and anti-engineering drive decisions.
I really meant what I wrote: Compare the environment. Pretty much everybody in Shenzhen hates Shenzhen. People live in tiny apartments. And not because they are poor: Even if you have money, you live in such a tiny box. Because everybody understands that Shenzhen is a Machine, and you are a part of that machine. Your goal is to one day be able to have made enough money to be able to exit that system, and unlike the USA, that actually really works.
Want to build electronics manufacturing and be able to compete with Shenzhen? Start by first building 50,000 box apartments of 200 square feet in size. Next step: Find 50,000 US Americans who want to work in that machine.
So yes, when it comes to electronics, it's not so much about getting poisoned by a poisoned nature, but by suffering in another way.
For clothes it's a different matter, for example. There you still have the oldschool stuff - want the US to be able to compete? Let's give the kids some cancer!
Let me try to re-phrase: Go to the place where stuff is successfully made that you want to in-source into the USA. Then make an informed decision if you really want the baggage that comes with it at home.
I am massively benefitting from something like Shenzhen existing on this planet. It is so effective and productive because it was designed for that from the ground up. Would I want anything like Shenzhen anywhere near me? Hell no!
Most US Americans asking for re-industrialization have neither worked in those industries nor even have a clue what it feels like working in those industries. The people who are asking for these industrial jobs to be re-created are those who do not have any intention to take one of those jobs.
Make it non-competitive with what?
With products made via "poison outsourcing" so other people can suffer what we refuse to suffer ourselves?
Seems like if an economy like the US or the EU actually wanted to, they could pretty easily say it's the clean way or no way at all, and voila, these things would magically be competitive again.
Green manufacturing tech is much closer in viability, now is the best time to re-industrialize. 1/5 of people having no work is a crisis, how can they support their family?
Stop promoting overpopulation. The USA adds ~1.8 million of people every year. That's one more Phoenix city, every year.
Of course a world where everyone has an equal quality of life is almost a dream but I’d say humanity has been very slowly, very slowly getting there.
What we do now is that “1st world countries” focus on high value manufacturing and growing countries unfortunately take up the dangerous and polluting manufacturing — but bear in mind, the US and other industrial countries also had the same phase.
What fucks up this is when trust breaks down between countries. Now suddenly you need to bring lower value manufacturing in house for national security even if it doesn’t make economic sense. It’s inefficient, puts the world back at square one, causes everyone to fight for survival instead of progress, and frankly leads us away from that “Star Trek” future.
This is also why we’re having to worry about asking these questions now when we didn’t so much have to 20 years ago. We’re living in a mildly cooked part of humanity’s timeline where trust seems to be fleeting.
The working class citizens of China have paid the price for all the industrial factories. Don't believe it, look up the cancer studies China has published. (Oh right, communist countries always tell the truth, right?)
Famous Trust Buster Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive republican who openly stated he had no desire to harm or kill industry in the USA but was instead working to ensure there continued to be competitive pressure to make that industry work better.
Employment has never effectively redistributed wealth. Possibly it improved things a little bit after the black plague reduced the labor pool by about 25%.
The only peaceful and low death form of fixing obscene wealth inequality has always been government, through taxes.
Inheriting money from your parents is taxed lower than earning your own money through work. Making more money due to already having money is taxed lower than earning your own money.
US Americans by a large majority over decades got trained to believe changing that would have something to do with "socialism", which was made a bad word.
But this isn't about re-distribution, making people equal or anything.
It's just that it is not logical, does not make sense, and in the end will destroy your society if already having money, which provides no benefit to society whatsoever, is rewarded over producing something, which does provide a benefit.
Why does a teacher who provides REAL benefit to society in the US has less yearly net income than someone who does not work at all but has once inherited 200k from his parents?
You have been trained to find all of this normal, and to believe it's your fault. Just work harder! No, it's not your fault. Working harder won't change anything.
So imagine you have one of the richest countries on this planet. But you don't really have enough work for every human to work full-time. Why is this a problem instead of an ideal? What strange goal is "everyone should work hard" when it comes to enjoying life? If you have an insanely rich country, there are far better solutions than trying to artificially create jobs that make no sense.
You can not compare this to a POOR country with high unemployment. There unemployment is a problem. In the US? Who cares if there is no factory to work in? Instead go help your neighbor. Study something. Become an artist. Do a public gardening project.
Again, the problem is that "having money already" that is of no use to society whatsoever is valued and awarded higher than any of those useful things above.
So, Step 1 for the US would be: You don't have to take away anything from anyone. But stop rewarding people for already having money.
As the CEO and owner of a German limited company I can choose between paying me a salary, getting taxed 45% ) for that, or paying myself a dividend, getting taxed 25% ). The first time I learned that 20 years ago I found it totally crazy and could not believe it. I still find it crazy today. Even in my own f'ing company my OWN work is valued less by society than me owning my company!
*) Oversimplification, but the ratios are correct
The same is true re: data center water use. Evaporative cooling is cheaper. You can build a DC that uses little or no water but it costs more.
One thing is to regulate the industrial sector to be cleaner if waaaay more expensive and another is to just forbid stuff that can be reasonably be done cleanly (but again, waaaay more expensive than in asia, for example)
Then author just wanted to be over dramatic about how it’s not cost competitive to build in the Bay Area vs places like Reno where the land is cheaper and labor is less. Their scape goat or whipping boy is regulations but that’s highly myopic at best.
A hell lot of industries, including most the original author is mentioning, simply would not work in California. California is running out of drinking water for humans. You can de-regulate all that you want, even cancel all environmental laws, but that will not change the reality: You don't have water. Want to build a water-consuming factory? Great, but please go to somewhere where water is available.
Yes, bureaucracy can be annoying, and of course California has a hell lot of "let's not fix the actual problem, but make it mandatory to put up a sign about it" regulations that for someone from the outside (like me) look silly. If the state of California knows this substance REALLY is harmful, why... is it here?! Either it's not really harmful, but if it is... what? A sign is the solution?! ;)
So I understand people complaining about environmental regulations in California. We had the same in Europe for decades. Everybody was complaining and making fun about all the EU regulations. Then the UK left via Brexit. And learned a lesson. And today nobody is joking about EU regulations anymore.
Anyway: One may call it "banned", or "expensive" or whatever. But it really is "does it really make sense to put this here?".
This statement makes me smile. Although I see where this comes from...
In part that's simply because while looking different, the general environment is fostering respecting nature, giving room for arts and creative and having an open mind.
(This example of course is coming from a past world where you could safely travel to/from the US, say, 10 years ago:)
Travelling from say Portugal to Miami ) would give you a massive culture shock. Portugal to San Diego? Not so much.
) Yes, Portugal to Key West would have worked.
I guess there should be an ability to do this farther from the population centers though.
If somebody else values their health less - let them have pollution in their own back yard. If enough communities worldwide care about their health, then polluters will have to clean up their processes. But it's not for the residents of California to decide what happens in other jurisdictions.
Do you think the ship breakers in Bangladesh do it for fun?
This outsourcing of misery is the absolute worst feature of Western neoliberalism. You get a two for one, dumping misery on other countries because it’s cheaper, while outsourcing strategic concerns because they are “too dirty.” It’s NIMBYism taken to its logical conclusion.
> they are forced to allow pollution because the alternative is grinding poverty and eventual starvation
The mechanisms by which this can be accomplished are antitrust and careful application of trade barriers. The obsession with “free trade” has done damage to countries all across the world in order to benefit a small class connected to multinational industry. The short lived benefits came at a huge cost and countries are only just now seeing this.
Free trade/open borders libertarians have lost influence to nationalists because the former position is antithetical to maintaining a functional society. It’s possible to build “libertarianism in one country,” and the sooner that people wake up to that, the better. The alternative is some form of left or right despotism.
They want to duplicate this success and displace the West, similar to how the USA displaced Europe during and after World War 2.
Like where?
Not trying to sound like a jerk but there’s plenty of places in the US where people welcome stuff like coal mines and polluting factories.
If the factories have to be somewhere and they consent, then why not there?
Just because houses cost more and there's a state tax, doesn't mean it's _bad_.
1. Louisiana 10.11%
2. Tennessee 9.61%
3. Washington 9.51%
4. Arkansas 9.46%
5. Alabama 9.46%
Crazy how we never hear pithy drops about sales tax in Louisiana. I wonder why that is literally never a talking point in these discussions? Probably a very similarly motivated reason as to why people rant about murder in Chicago but never Memphis.
I would like far less of all of these to exist than we currently produce (I use a 5 year old phone, an 11 year old car, and think the US Navy could function just fine with a lot less budget and warships).
I don't, because I care about security updates, and I don't want to have to choose between a highly degraded battery and giving up waterproofing.
> an 11 year old car
Crash safety has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. I suspect you're more likely to be killed in a car accident that you wouldn't be in a new car, than to be killed by one of the industries that California bans.
> think the US Navy could function just fine with a lot less budget and warships
If a powerful adversary goes to war with us, then we'd want a lot more, and only increasing then would be too late, because we'd lose the war first.
TFA appears to be arguing just that. It lists a prohibition on spewing cancer-causing chemicals into the air, as a ban which needs to be lifted.
For a long time, it was jobs and the promise of a better future for your family. By killing that all we have is weather.
The “snowball fallacy” is a fallacy because there is no reason California s can’t swing the regulatory pendulum back the other direction if there is too much economy / freedom impacted.
We are never going to catch up.
3 to 4 decades ago anything from China was poor quality and US manufacturing was tight tolerance.
When we outsourced, we did the training to get them where they are today and stopped investing in our skills at home.
There are still skilled people here who can train and the knowledge is not some sort of eldritch incantation.
The main issues with learning is lack of jobs and lack of opportunity to apply skills if you have them.
> There are still skilled people here who can train
If you don't acknowledge you're losing the race, you will never catch up.
IMO this is all cyclical.
* This is metaphorical. Obviously there were also textbooks and research papers and technical manuals and everything else. The point is much of it came from abroad and they learned it all to the point that they're the experts today.
Detroit was once one of the US’s largest population cities, at nearly 2.5 million residents in the late 1960s, falling to less than 1 million by the 2010s. On this scale, California is still in the peak days of the 1960s, but we aren’t showing any current signs of shrinking. Maybe AI will be the catalyst for massive job losses, but that’s for the future to unfold.
Machining is a low value part of the economic supply chain, like sweat shop clothing. While I don’t want to lose it, it’s being dominated by countries (China, Taiwan) which are willing to throw MASSIVE money at the industry. TSMC was literally a whole-of-country effort to centralize the entire world’s supply chain of cutting edge semiconductors on one island. China is winning because they have cut-throat competition between companies and they don’t slow down for legal concerns such as regulation or intellectual property. That is only going to last for a certain amount of time before people will demand better living environments (which is partly why they have such a terrible fertility rate).
https://lwvtexas.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=979482&i...
This is kind of disingenuous.
I mean, not everything used in California, needs to be manufactured in California. Why not manufacture it in New Mexico? Or Arkansas for that matter?
What you're implying, is that Wisconsin, Nebraska, Maine, Florida, etc, etc, etc, should all build out the manufacturing base to manufacture things that are used in those states. That's not really how a healthy economy should work.
I guess what I'm pointing out is that, we don't need to manufacture smartphones in South Dakota. It's perfectly acceptable to manufacture them in, say, New Jersey, and then ship them to South Dakota. Similarly, we don't need to manufacture everything in California.
Not the parent but nobody is implying that. Just that most Californians consume or want these things and thus expect other states to build them.
Why can't things be be built here, in a state other than California?
What is the fixation with California? Tennessee or Nebraska would love to build smart phones, or even just the chips for smart phones. What is the reasoning for not building these things in other states?
Companies that are complaining are complaining that they can't treat the environment as an economic externality anymore in California. Therefore the price of all of these goods are being subsidized with our health and our ecosystems' health.
I hope more of the world follows California's lead and we eventually have a price of these goods that represents what it actually takes to manufacture them in a fair way
Maybe Texas is far enough? The [l]one-star state has laissez-faire regulations, and may be more to author's speed.
Texas got so sick of Texans trying to protect themselves by creating regulations that they created the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act. It took away the ability of local communities to protect themselves and instead protected the profits of some the state's biggest industry buddies.
I can think of multiple manufacturers that do all engineering and have recently built manufacturing facilities in California and would manufacture there at scale too except other states gave them massive tax incentives. Tesla and Rivian both do initial manufacturing in California. Startups like Freeform, doing metal 3D printing at scale, are in California. This article is wrong.
It’s…not even wrong it is detached from any effort at truth.
"Semiconductor Fabrication (7nm/5nm)
The main processor requires ultra-clean rooms, toxic gases (arsine, phosphine), and chemical etching. No new fabs have been built in CA in over a decade. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all build elsewhere."
Phosphine is pretty nasty stuff. California was full of EPA Superfund sites when the government got stuck with cleaning up all the toxic waste. Politicians and voters went, "Eff that!" after manufacturers left the state, but left their barrels of shit behind.
It says, for example, that it's impossible to manufacture batteries in California and cites Tesla moving to Texas as the example. But Telsa still makes batteries in California in Fremont. They last did expansions on their battery manufacturing plants in 2023.
It cites all the dangerous chemicals used in manufacturing, but those aren't banned in California. CA has safety requirements for handling toxic materials. And we should be safely handling those materials, it's crazy to suggest we don't because of progress or whatever.
His point was that they were grandfathered in for making cars in general. But he flat out lies about making batteries being something grandfathered in. That wasn't a battery manufacturing plant to begin with.
And he further lies to say they had to build elsewhere because cell manufacturing was "effectively impossible" because they expanded the factory for cell manufacturing in 2023. [1]
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/06/09/tesla-snaps-new-location-frem...
If I, as a voter, voted for a politician who promised to ban dumping mercury in the local river, I don't expect them to say "Oh, but any company already dumping mercury in the river can keep doing so, because we don't want to hurt people's livelihood." That's not what I voted for.
https://dailykanban.com/2016/09/29/docs-reveal-teslas-produc...
(With things like…links to their permit applications, I.e., sources)
What part am I misreading? How is it that tesla expanded their cell manufacturing in 2023 in California when it was "effectively impossible"?
They didn't, they built it in Reno.
So they may be doing simpler portions of manufacturing. The article didn't claim you couldn't build any part of a battery without grandfathering.
all sites: https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/EPA::epa-facility-registry-s...
npl sites: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
Also funnily enough, the first place I checked from this site's list of facilities that have been grandfathered in led to this finding
> Lehigh Hanson's Permanente cement plant in Cupertino, CA, is permanently closing following thousands of environmental violations and over 80 years of operation. The plant was a major source of air pollution and discharged toxic selenium into Permanente Creek.
Not being able to build a destroyer in California seems like a small price to pay for an ecosystem not poisoned
The Bay Area is peppered with Superfund sites that used to be fabs in the 80s. Maybe CA is saying it's done its part and now it's someone else's turn.
Example: cites automotive paint shop restrictions as the quintessential example of what you can't do in CA, and qualifies it with a specific Bay Area regulation.
So, the restrictions on incredibly stinky processes like spray painting cars that emit lots of VOCs and dust are somewhat reasonable?
Or to put it more crudely, isn't it a bit like putting up a big "NO FARTING" sign in a crowded room where the windows don't open, and then simply expecting people to understand that this is a place where they should not fart?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_ocean_dumps_off_Southern...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
The very first Google offices sat directly over one of these sites around 2004. It took decades to dissipate. People complained about noxious fumes and this was more than 20 years after the spills had occurred.
There are real tradeoffs to having heavy industry to human health and well being.
See also https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232 (Ashley M. Gjøvik , 2024)
But, locals don't love that because of the environmental concerns.
https://mashable.com/article/naacp-data-centers
I, for one, would not want to live within 100 miles of these data centers. But, people that live there already are not being given the choice.
And, I imagine not many of the people that live there are being offered one of those 3000 jobs.
The word "generated" is used to make it sound like the project opened up 3000 new permanent jobs for people. Those contractors were employed before the contract and will be employed on another contract at some later point. There's no net gain of jobs in the long run. The contractors won't even necessarily be local. The builder isn't going to call up Bob's AC repair from Collierville to do the specialized datacenter HVAC. They'll fly in a company specialized in that task who will fly home at the end of the contract.
The companies scrambling to build datacenters take advantage of that linguistic ambiguity and then the local politicians end up doing the same. They give these companies sweetheart tax/zoning incentives, proclaim contractors as "generated jobs", and then leave the locals with all of the negative externalities and none of the revenue.
But cash strapped councils take what they can get.
For instance, NC milling is done in California. Printed circuit board manufacturing is done in California. Small-scale integrated circuit fabrication is done.
America did that. If it was just California then they could import iPhone parts from Alabama, but they don't do that do they?
Don't need to worry about those pesky people and their rights in other countries where people are in desperate need for, or are coerced into, working in these industries.
In addition to banning these manufacturing processes in California, we should ban the products manufactured with these processes from California. This would require products to "green up" in order to access California's vast market.
By allowing dirty products manufactured elsewhere, we've simply moved the problem and its harms out of our line of sight. And frequently to a place where the people are poor, non-white and under represented.
States have a lot of power to regulate commerce, interstate commerce and the products their citizens have access too.
If indeed they can't, then perhaps its one subject dems and r's could get together on. Instead of blanket tarrifs, tarriffs on products made with slave labor or without strong consideration for environment impact.
Since D's control California, no need to work with R's there.
I also think they could get creative. Eg., without an attestation validated by <agency> products can't be sold.
For example, this is already done with controlled substances and food.
1. Keep the item as is and don't sell it in California.
2. Make a California version that meets regulations. Sell that only in California. Keep making the original version and sell it elsewhere.
3. Same as #2 except sell the California version along with the original version outside of California.
4. Make a California version that meets regulations. Stop making the original version and sell the California version everywhere.
California is a big enough market that many makers cross off #1. Once they are making a California version it often turns out they selling that everywhere is more efficient for them than keeping the original version around.
This was back in the 80s.
You are very much Not Allowed To Do That Now.
That and the lathe oil in the machine shop where they made various mechanical components, too.
Do people want oil refineries that constantly catch fire or explode [1], or toxic superfund sites for fabs [2]?
There are opportunities to build safer systems of course, the capital is there but there's places with looser regulations where you can harm people for cheap.
Also, this website does not actually show what laws or reasons why things are banned, it just says it's impossible, no sources, how do I even know this is true?
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-look-back-at-s... [2] https://www.theverge.com/23990525/semiconductor-biden-infras...
This is to show that there is more geopolitically than meets the eye.
If oil refineries are bad in California, they're bad everywhere, and if they're bad everywhere, we ought to stop using them altogether, which will make for some unwelcome lifestyle changes.
So, no combustion-based private or public transportation, no detergents, no aspirin, paracetamol or ibuprofen.
It would still be possible to drive an EV, though. You could keep it lubricated with whale oil.
In any case, California is a state, not a city.
That doesn't follow. It only follows that they are bad everywhere with circumstances similar to California. A place differing in distribution of population, distribution of agricultural land, weather patterns, and/or water flows might be able to have refineries without causing the harms that makes them difficult to place in California.
The state is large, diverse and already contains vast chunks of unpopulated land. Almost everywhere that isn't near the poles is similar to some part of California.
This list isn't things you "cant do in california" but "polluting things you can't do in highly populated cities".
I'm not sure what the conclusion here is other than health is not important.
First, manufacturers don't really make non voc compliant auto paints. The market is too small. They may make 550 and 275 variants but most don't.
Second, even like Texas has voc regulations on paints and also requires filtering and enclosed spray booths and gun cleaners and ....
And like I said, nobody is selling non compliant coatings because the market is zero.
It's an interesting conundrum though, because in many cases, the cities could not exist without the things that are being banned in the cities. It's a curious goal of populations to centralize, then ostracize all the things that enabled that centralization
- the cost of mitigating the human health risk is too high - competitors in low-environmental regulation places don't pay for those costs - ongoing verification is expensive
I mean, let's face it, "self-regulation" of industries isn't really working that great. And for things that are health hazards that are basically borne by someone else, why should a local government make it easy to cheat and lie about this stuff?
The people arguing against this seem to assume that their right to have a business, make a profit, whatever, is a self-evident Good Thing, and rarely provide any additional arguments beyond "but the jobs". If they were at the VERY LEAST saying "we can make X safe" then maybe it'd be interesting. But as it is, the argument is basically asking us to mortgage the health and safety.
Hint: It doesn't stand for "there forever"
Nobody here wants to just let big business do whatever and turn the rivers weird colors again or go back to smog but it's very clear that the current regulatory system is not suitable and is hurting us.
It boggles the mind that someone could honestly (by which I mean dishonestly and malice are far simpler explanations) step into this conversation and be like "no, this is all fine and well, god forbid someone start spraying cars in a shop in the desert without jumping through all most of the same expensive hoops that make it not worth it down town (and would make it doubly not worth it out in the desert).
And it's not just autobody work. There's all manner of necessary economic activity that's being kept out or made artificially expensive in this manner.
One can hope that most Californians switch to BEVs from ICE vehicles before this becomes more of a constraint.
Gasoline usage externalities are poorly priced-in so the resulting increase in cost of gasoline here is probably overall a good thing. If we had appropriate carbon/sulphur/etc pricing on the outputs, I think it would be less justifiable since then the externalities would be priced in.
They are all using voc compliant paints these days, even outside California.
I have no idea how hard permitting is mind you, but the claimed thing here is that they can't be voc compliant and that's just totally wrong.
He clearly has an agenda against what he perceives as onerous environmental regulations: https://x.com/sdamico/status/2026536815902208479 https://x.com/sdamico/status/2026552845294792994
Everyone has an agenda. Is anything on this site false? Is it incorrect information?
But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic, makes me wonder how many of these banned industries I don't want in my state. I think if we want to build them in the US maybe don't build them in the most agriculturally productive and highest population state. Or first figure out how to do it without turning the US into China with its "cancer villages" from poisoned river water.
I'm not defending the dysfunctional CA bureaucracy, but the site should probably focus on specific cases of government-produced insanity than a general complaint that certain industries are banned from operation.
Wait, hold on - I watched all the seasons of "Rust To Riches" on Netflix, about a small shop that flips cars.
They routinely painted cars.
They'd paint in this sealed-up room/garage thingee, the guy would wear and industrial-grade mask, and the camera would slide past as he expertly painted the car. The 30 second montages looked awesome!
That show took place in Temecula, California. So there's no way that site is accurate.
And, more to the point, if they want to show that they are accurate they should be linking to the rules & regulations that actually prohibit these things instead of just making a claim & calling it a day.
The site provides no citations, no evidence, so there’s no need to defend the count argument or honestly even make it.
The sit isn’t just false, it is flat out disrespectful to all the workers, engineers, founders, and everyone else involved in the industries he says don’t exist that actually do exist. The site is basically “I think this is hard so no one else could possibly do it”.
Secondly, it says you can't permit a new auto paint shop in CA, but it specifically mentions the Bay Area AQMD as the reason. But, as its name implies, the Bay Area AQMD only regulates within the San Francisco Bay Area. It is only one of 35 air districts in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_air_distric...
So, it is impossible to permit a new auto paint shop in all of these districts, or just the bay area? Because those are very different. It also labels starting a new paint shop as "impossible", but then says it's "nearly impossible". So is it actually impossible, or just nearly impossible?
I go by a paint shop every now and then. It’s not nearly as smelly as a quite of a few of the nearby restaurants.
So the right thing is to outsource the dirty jobs to countries that can’t afford to be picky?
Wouldn’t it be better for the world if we used our wealth to develop methods of safe semiconductor manufacturing with low environmental impact, and proudly built those facilities in California?
It's not like the laws are simply "you can't make semiconductors here". The laws ban the harmful externalities of the process. The companies that want to make semiconductors don't want to find a way to make the processes less harmful: it's cheaper and easier to just go somewhere where they can pollute instead.
There's a large middle ground between "Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone" and letting blatant polluters turn your neighborhood into a Superfund site. California solved the latter problem by going too far in the other direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-y...
There are. They just cost more and take more time.
> But lumping that in with semiconductor fabs, which are extremely toxic
People say this all the time, but semiconductor fabs simply aren't very toxic compared to just about every other industrial manufacturing process. Mostly this is because everything is sealed and sealed and sealed some more.
Yes, they handle stuff like arsenic gas (arsine AsH3), but they really try to reclaim it all. The semiconductor waste stream is often purer than most industrial inputs. Yeah, old plants would just dump crap into the environment. However, for modern semiconductor facilities, it is generally more economic to reprocess your waste than try to purify from primary sources.
Now, PCB manufacturing, on the other hand, is quite terrible or at least it used to be. I don't know if people have sealed and automated that yet.
I realize it isn't completed yet but I don't think anyone is buying sites for something that's impossible to build.
Here's another one: https://www.bosch-semiconductors.com/roseville/
The Infinera one is described as a "new fab" though (https://www.nist.gov/chips/infinera-california-san-jose) and the Bosch one is adding a new type of fabrication to an existing site. If you can do all that without getting new permits then that makes California sound like a pretty lenient place to do business. I'm assuming they did have to get new permits though.
This might be a refutation but it's not super clear. It's definitely not a commercial semiconductor fab but it might do all of or some subset of what a commercial fab does at R&D scale. Hard to know for sure how this jives with the claim in the main website.
> If you can do all that without getting new permits then that makes California sound like a pretty lenient place to do business.
Being able to retool under original zoning/permitting is specifically lenient? That's extremely basic. If you're a co-Californian with me, though, it does help to understand that many people think that anyone doing anything without a permit is "lenient".
> I'm assuming they did have to get new permits though.
Well, that makes it really easy to be "right". I should try this more.
As others have pointed out, the article itself fails to provide any direct citations of the regulations either. This is classic Russell's teapot territory; the one making the initial claim shouldn't have a lower burden of evidence than the one refuting it.
> so obviously his point can’t be true > so obviously he’s biased and we can’t do the mental work of sifting > so obviously I can dismiss this as teleologically false.
Please don’t be so lazy you guys. There is something to be gained here.
This guy, with an obvious bias, created a website that misrepresents the situation in California (by implying things are banned or "nearly impossible" when in actuality they just take time/effort), while also failing to show the specific regulations or requirements for any of it. Without supplying that kind of information this website is little better than "It's banned. trust me bro". It's not our responsibility to try to dig up evidence to support or verify this guys claims just because he can't be bothered to do it.
His motivations, his framing of the problem, and his failure to back up his own statements makes the site pretty damn easy to dismiss and I don't even doubt that there might be instances where bad regulation exists, especially regulation that protects the profits of established players in certain industries by keeping out competition. I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea that it might be happening, but if there is something to be gained you aren't going to find it on this guys website. Serious coverage on this topic would include actionable information we can use to identify and solve specific problems. This is just anti-regulation propaganda.
Your downvotes are invalid.
The article contains no citations, and so may be presumed 100% false by default.
"may be presumed", as in, sure it might actually contain some other mix of true and false, but it doesn't matter what that mix actually is. That only matters in some other article written by someone else that citates any of it's assertions.
This piece is the same as if monkeys typed stuff at random and some of it could possibly happen to be the same as something true. It doesn't mean the monkeys made a valid point, and no one should spend one second either defending or refuting it.
I'm actually quite surprised by the number of people who have fallen for this. There aren't even any concrete claims here – just the vague assertion that some things are "impossible".
There are a ton of CNC machining (AL and otherwise) and anodizing shops in the Bay Area.
His point is that it's impossible to manufacture much of anything in California if you aren't grandfathered in. Seems pretty important for economic and security issues.
The electric induction cooktop he and his team has made is pretty cool! I'd check it out.
Unless you believe there needs to be a plan for CA to secede in the future and thus it needs to be self-sufficient, why does manufacturing need to be in CA? As you stated, the Impulse stove makes heavy use of outsourced manufacturing to other parties; as long as those parties are within the US (which I'm not claiming they are, but there are states like TX that are far less concerned about environmental impact than CA is and thus could pick up any such slack), why is there a security concern here?
As for the economic concern, it seems like this is backwards: I'd argue it's the HCOL that drives industry with the need for low-wage labor away to non-CA locations. There's nothing stopping non-polluting corporations from working and hiring large numbers of people in CA.
Their website says
> We’re designing and manufacturing the stovetop, battery pack, and key internal components to comply with all relevant UL standards and other applicable compliance requirements.
but this device appears to be for sale, right now. Either it is designed for safety already or it isn’t. WHICH UL safety standards? Is there an emergency shutoff? A regular old fire extinguisher probably is not going to cut it.
It's an induction stovetop. It doesn't itself get hot, other than whatever heat gets transferred to the top of the stove because it is in contact with the hot pot or pan sitting on top. I don't know about this one specifically but with most induction stovetops that just makes it warm to the touch in the area right under the pot or pan.
That's not going to be hot enough to be a problem for the battery even if for some reason they mounted it in contact with the bottom of the top surface, which I doubt they did.
My point is that’s what safety standards are for. Do they do safe things or not? You might be surprised to hear how many manufacturers do dumb things for one reason or another. If they really do comply with safety standards then they should be able to say which ones. Why don’t they say?
To your last point, I am somewhat doubtful that this website is being honest about automotive paint shops being banned in California. Am I to believe that the 3,000 auto body shops in Southern California sit on their hands all day? Was West Coast Customs just a fake TV show filmed in Texas?
https://www.autobodynews.com/news/new-paint-voc-regulations-...
If this website’s author is correct I’m supposed to believe that no paint gets applied to cars in Canada.
As another nitpick, let’s also not forget that nobody else is building oil refineries in the US. The newest one in the entire country was built in 1976. Oil demand in the US is relatively flat since decades ago; there isn’t a pressing need for new refineries.
I also think that readers in this thread should remember that California has strict air quality regulations because its geography especially in Southern California lends itself to bad air quality. These regulations are very much written in blood. Globally, almost 7 million people die prematurely every year due to air pollution.
From the page itself, "A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA." This point is trotted out and reframed multiple times on the page but it's literally self contradictory. It's not something you can't do in California, it's something you can't do without approval in the Bay Area Air District.
It's not a good place to be doing such an activity, as the area already can't successfully keep the air healthy enough to stay within federal limits due to environmental factors that trap particulate low to the ground. If you're at all familiar with the area you know concerns about air quality are not overblown and. Go further away from people or meet strict VOC regulations if you absolutely need to be doing that kind of work in the area, seems completely reasonable to me.
Existing shops get grandfathered.
See also the counterproductive legacy of the anti-nuclear movement.
Some guy’s website claims with big red scary graphics that this stuff is banned and these poor downtrodden business owners can’t operate.
I can’t imagine that nobody has opened an auto body shop in California in the last decade or two.
When it comes to businesses like large factories opening up that’s more of something that often gets approved on a case by case basis.
E.g., we can’t just say that the Chicago Bears are banned from building a new stadium in Chicago just because they aren’t willing to pay the costs required to do so and aren’t willing to meet the city’s requirements to get the approval vote they need.
You either make it doable or you don't.
This statement doesn't acknowledge why NIMBYism is odious. The reason is that we all need housing, but new housing may devalue current housing. While some may wish to protect their housing values/community feel/etc, others wish and may rightly deserve, access to housing at the same levels of access as earlier generations.
The analogy to manufacturing does not exist—to suggest it does ignores the real negative externalities to people who live next to polluting facilities, especially those where the pollutant was not recognized during use.
Obviously, California is not composed exclusively of heavily populated cities. But it does contain a lot of them! So it is not completely insane that the regulation is skewed in favour of this.
Of course, for things that are equally polluting no matter where you do them (like burning fossil fuels), moving production outside of the location but still buying produced materials is simply passing the buck. But it's not totally clear to me that's what's happening here.
CO2 might be a long term problem, but it isn't the core health concern of living near combustion facilities - moving those away from residential areas isn't passing the buck, it's just good sense.
> Charged with regulating stationary sources of air pollution emissions, the Air District drafted its first two regulations in the 1950s: Regulation 1, which banned open burning at dumps and wrecking yards, and Regulation 2, which established controls on dust, droplets, and combustion gases from certain industrial sources.
> Much research and discussion went into the shaping of Regulation 2, but there was no doubt about the need for it. During a fact-finding visit to one particular facility, Air District engineers discovered that filters were used over air in-take vents to protect the plant's machinery from its own corrosive emissions! This much-debated regulation was finally adopted in 1960.
https://www.baaqmd.gov/en/about-the-air-district/history-of-...
The outcome is the same as long as only California does it, but the ethics of it and the outcome if every state acted like that is vastly different
The Copper stove is made in Berkeley, California, by the way.
With aligned talent you can make the process neutral. I’m assuming lots of ‘eco conscious’ engineers would love to implement better practices and get paid for it.
I think to be eco neutral, you would be cost prohibitive. Which would be an issue in car manufacturing and phone manufacturing.
Also, the website lumps adjacent tech together and says they're all banned, but they are not. Lumping sheet metal stamping in with gigs casting is plain wrong, and you could make the argument that that's an agenda driven aspect of this website. They're casting a wider net than exists.
Point stands, though. California's policy is "go fuck up some other states environment". This policy might not work forever, but that's their stance.
Which just shows that other places are allowing those costs to be externalized to society in general which is classic "privatize profits, socialize costs" that businesses have relied on.
Pointing out that such costs have been externalised for decades should be the starting point to internalise them.
I absolutely agree. 100%. The issue is single companies can't do that. They will not be competitive against companies that aren't doing it. You need an even playing field for this to work, i.e. you need legislation and uniform environmental standards across all states, whatever those standards may be. Probably even need similar pacts across countries, within reason.
Right now, the US is moving in the opposite direction to this statement.
I've grown rather weary of performative complaining about trash which has a waste lifecycle which ends at "stabilized landfill".
Because that's one of our best waste lifecycle processes: what's a disaster is greenhouse gas emissions, it waste which is reliably ending up in the oceans and doesn't biodegrade.
I cannot to move to California once all the billionaires move to Texas and Florida.
For most things it says that they are “impossible” or “near-impossible” with no explanation or just "getting a permit is hard" with no futher detail.
It does give some cherry-picked metrics : - 0 Semiconductor fabs built in CA in the last decade => as there been ANY semi fabs built outside of taiwan and china in the last decade ? Not exactly surprising. - 1 West Coast shipyard that can build destroyers, 0 New automotive paint shops permitted in CA, 0 New oil refineries permitted in CA since 1969 => We don't build those for shits and giggles, is there any demand that would justify new factories for thoses ?
Basically, the website doesn't say anything. It just gives some context-less data and one guys opinion on what he perceives as not possible.
Not that I care, I am not from the US or live there, but let's not try to pass some dude rambling as a source of actual information.
It's difficult to transport petroleum over the rocky mountains, and California requires its own blend of gasoline for use in vehicles, so there is significant demand for oil refineries in the state. Fuel imports have increased significantly due to refinery closures.[3] Some companies are trying to build pipelines to connect the west coast to refineries in Texas, but it's unclear when or if that will happen.[4]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC_Arizona
3. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65704
4. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/california-refinery-...
Not sure what the point of the website is. To me it looks like a bad faith argument. The secular trend in the US has been to increase margins by moving manufacturing to other countries.
The tariffs are certainly not making it easier to manufacture domestically.
I think it's just informative. I found it interesting at least. I formed my own conclusions from it.
Context matters a lot. We haven’t built a lot of mercury based hat felting shops lately in California. What conclusion do you draw from that?
okay what’s different in Reno hmmm I could be like the website and try to imply it’s only environmental regulations… or I could acknowledge that land price and availability is drastically different and also labor costs…. But then that wouldn’t help my contrived argument that it’s all the pesky regulations.
Again, without apples to apples comparisons to other areas, wha are you actually able to conclude from the website other than stoking confirmation bias?
This places California somewhere between the north pole (produces no things) and replicators from Star Trek (produces all of the things) in terms of productivity. This is useful information because it makes the reader feel li
Out of context, incomplete single data points that feels like one’s already held view is how confirmation bias works.
The site isn't claiming regulations are the only factor, just that they're sufficient to make things impossible regardless of other factors.
Oh so Lies of omission don’t exist? Deception researchers will be very keen to hear how that works.
So if someone Mormon bubbles a photo of you that also has a kid in it, you’re fine being arrested for indecency and registering as a sex offender? After all, that’s just omitting a few pixels, not a lie or deception in your book.
I think I'm done with this conversation now you're comparing a website about manufacturing to child porn. That's in bad taste.
https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/EPA::epa-facility-registry-s...
I dislike how misleading and emotionally targeted this is and I understand the hate we get as tech people if this is the best we can do.
A separate but related topic is the warnings California requires of products. It's gotten a bit out of hand because every product you buy has the same warning, which completely dilutes what I hope was the intention. Even buying something as simple as an electric guitar comes with the "can cause cancer" warning because it can have nickel parts on it (usually for the bridge and tuners and frets).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
https://www.epa.gov/mo/town-flood-and-superfund-looking-back...
There was an EPA superfund site across the street (this all was adjacent to the beach).
The company also had a co-generator that they used to produce their own power (using natural gas) and sold excess power to the local electrical utility.
It's still in operation, though it changed owners ~4 times while he was there.
Edit: Now that I’m doing the research a partnership isn’t even needed, just a contract. Which makes sense, the feds cannot hire a private individual to do what would be illegal for them to do themselves… conversely, a company who is contracted to do federal business also enjoys supremacy by virtue of acting for the feds.
Why were old PCs beige? It turns out, Germany had workplace standards laws that mandated light, unobtrusive colors on office equipment. Because it was expensive to offer different SKUs for different regions, gray or beige PC cases became the only ones available worldwide.
If a jurisdiction as big or important as California passes a law mandating certain features on products available there, manufacturers may make those features part of their products worldwide to save on costs. OEMs may make bootloader-locked PCs which cannot run operating systems that don't do age check in order to comply with the law in California and Brazil, and decide it's not worth it to offer a bootloader-unlocked version.
If you think PC manufacturers are required to make bootloader-unlockable PCs, the only thing requiring them to do so is an edict from Microsoft, something they can and will reverse in order to comply with the law.
This website misses talking about all the Tesla Fremont paint shop violations (see https://www.baaqmd.gov/en/news-and-events/page-resources/202... ) and various OSHA violations:
- https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-11/tesla-fine... (2025)
- https://www.thedrive.com/news/26727/tesla-had-3-times-as-man... (2019)
Banned in California.. wait, I meant the Bay Area.
https://www.industryselect.com/blog/top-10-us-states-for-man...
There are only a handful of shipyards in the US that build ships for the Navy. What makes him think regulation has anything to do with only 1 being on the West Coast?
I doubt it is though, in these cases. Was probably just to make the measures more popular, as in not destroying existing investments / jobs.
It's not all of CA, it's just the Bay Area, and probably some other urbanized areas with a history of really bad air quality.
Surely the answer is not let's just allow to pillage, pollute and extort again to build a car, ship or phone.
I like clean air, and rivers. They are good for every being.
Why not invest in ways to make these processes more eco friendly?
How about the ban of asbestos and Chlorofluorocarbons?
> A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA.
Ah yes, the Bay Area, famously "all of California". And on top of that, the restrictions are mostly in highly populated areas.
I can't speak to permitting but the coating and coating voc stuff I know quite well and what they state is simply bullshit.
I can also say I know of a bunch of auto paint places that opened in the mountain view surrounding area alone in the 10 years I lived there.
So I suspect it's all bullshit
1) They forgot to list Kid Rock (https://x.com/GovPressOffice/status/1969256868364095868)
2) Good, I'm glad this toxic shit is banned.
3) I wish people that constantly complained about California's regulations/taxes/politics would just quietly see their way out rather than obsessively whine about it. Enjoy Texas/Florida/wherever you go. We'll be ok without you.
Top of the list is "sulfuric acid baths". The correct disposal of sulfuric acid is "dilute with water", or if about metal dissolved in it, yeah treat as waste to be cleaned up or compacted and stored into eternity at a cost. So even after skimming, this seems agenda driven, not a fact sheet.
This seems like a "we cannot do it cost efficiently, so we claim it is impossible since China underbids us"
https://github.com/MidnightBSD/src/commit/7d956a27123f2d77a0...
Just because it’s in GitHub doesn’t mean it’s more credible than the stuff my mother posts on Facebook about mark zuckerberg not having permission to use her photos.
People and businesses that are ok with being exploited and exploiting others, while externalizing the true cost of their products on to the environment and future generations by treating the air and land like an open sewer can do it elsewhere.
If this were real instead of dogshit lobbyist slop, you'd see the details, and there's be clear arguments and action plans.
But the action is that they're going to pay politicians off, and the politicians are going to give speeches that start "I went to a website the other day, and it was called Banned in California - you might like electric cars, think they're good, but because of bad regulation, we could never make them here." And that's going to provide cover as they vote for something horrible. And buy a boat with the money they made for doing it.
"compostable - except in CA"
It seems to me that there is a fundamental disconnect, between what society needs to function and what some societies are willing to tolerate. Almost everything we take for granted, like potable water, air conditioning, personal computers or long distance transportation, relies on industries generating some sort of externalities.
Regulating these industries is necessary. But we have reached the point, where the regulation makes many of them almost impossible. This has several effects.
First, the society is now dependent on delivery of these dirty products. This is obviously problematic if there is a major crisis that disrupts supply chains, or if those who manufacture them are no longer willing to deliver.
Second, working class collapses. Manufacturing jobs are one of the more stable available. They are generally unionized, or are conductive to unionization. This is unlike service sector jobs. White collar professions can mostly cope. But those who were already disadvantaged find themselves in an even worse position.
Third, the externalities move in locations with less oversight. This can, obviously, cause greater pollution and environmental degradation globally. Further, delivery of the manufactured goods across great distances adds to carbon footprint. This, again, leads to greater environmental toll.
Taken together, benefits of overregulating "polluting" industry to oblivion, are at best local and temporary.
I would also like to note, that the collapse of manufacturing jobs can be easily linked to increased political radicalization.
That being said, it's not all gloom and doom. I firmly believe, that as the impacts of this approach are felt more and more, there will be a push for sensible deregulation. Europe is already leading the way, weakening or delaying some of the more absurd regulation schemes.[1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-04/chevron...
The guy who made this site is selling a $7k stove? Good luck with that, my dude.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/02/16/gasoline-starved-cali...
I appreciate some of the arguments here about pushing pollution outside the state, but this is madness.
What if you ... don't dump your waste in the river? Is it legal if you dispose of your waste properly?
That’s why so many solutions feel like de facto bans: not because the environmental goal isn’t valid, but because the cost of compliance in time, paperwork, and legal risk creates a barrier that only well-resourced actors can navigate. The real economic deadweight loss isn’t always in the policy text — it’s in the thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars spent just to prove you did the minimum.
There’s enormous opportunity right now with data tools and AI agents for qualitative assessment. We don’t have to keep defaulting to rigid checklists that presume every context is the same. With modern sensors, realtime monitoring, and AI that can synthesize qualitative evidence with quantitative data, we can finally shift toward performance-based permits that look at actual impacts rather than adherence to outdated procedural triggers.
Imagine a system where:
Sensors and connected data streams show real emissions or ecological outcomes,
AI agents help translate diverse evidence into risk profiles,
Permits adapt based on performance instead of fixed thresholds divorced from context.
That’s not just a tech fantasy — that’s a pathway to reducing administrative drag while improving environmental protection. The status quo isn’t sustainable environmentally or economically. If we cling to 20th-century process dogma, we’ll keep seeing well-intentioned policies backfire into de facto bans, regulatory bottlenecks, and inequitable access to compliance.
Just look at what they've done about rebuilding the Palisades, and the nonsense they've perpetrated, allowing people to live and build in places that are completely impossible to make safe to live because of incredibly stupid bureacratic policy conflicts. And then the staggering mismanagement of water resources, allowing huge tax breaks and claims on water rights to giant corporations, then completely taxing and running out farmers and landowners with legacy rights, making it impossible for them to live there.
At least if they drive everyone productive out of the state, the environment will be pristine.
It's like some insanely scaled up version of gentrification, but in the most aggressively, offensively stupid way possible. California is a tasteless joke.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2026/demo/stat...
And that doesn't even take in to account the major businesses fleeing the state as well.
Most of what you said has been going on for >100 years. That's sure driven people out!