Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.
It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money
Punishing instead of supporting.
Might be true but it’s hard to take that argument in good faith at this point.
And given how much of stock prices these days is purely dependent on stock traders believing they'll be able to sell those stocks on to some Greater Fool later, rather than based on the reality of the company the stock is about...well, they can keep the ball in the air for quite a while.
Personally, I suspect that the primary trigger for the big selloff is going to be the upcoming IPOs. Bigwigs get their big bucks, cash out, and leave everyone else holding the bag.
But if any of us knew when events like those were going to happen, we'd probably be rich from that already, hm?
This is similar situation to housing market. Prices are going up and supply is being restricted by whatever means.
It will be a bit of Catch 22.
Using red tape as some kind of prophylactic is ridiculous. If the state doesn't have the monitoring in place, you have to just trust the company, which is naive if not negligent. If you do have the monitoring, why require the extremely expensive song & dance? To protect corporations from negligently wasting money?
Answer: because the song & dance is primarily about extracting concessions, like union labor or even cash (e.g. promises to pay to fix someone else's pollution, or contributions to various interest groups). The friction and expense involved in today's development review processes are many times more costly to all involved than the social benefit.
That's hopelessly naïve.
If you let them build the facility that can pollute, they're going to pollute.
And if you point to the pollution coming out and tell them "you have to stop," they're going to say "make us."
And if you point to the pollution already in the environment and tell them "you have to clean that up, because you put it there," they're going to say "prove it."
And they're going to tie the government up in court for years or decades, and then oh, whoops, somehow the entity that actually did all the polluting has no more money and can't do anything about it :-( Good thing they were only a subsidiary that all the profit and assets can be moved out of!
And the people who actually live there are suffering from preventable diseases and dying of cancer at rates 5x the national average.
How do I know all this? Because this has been industry's playbook for over a century.
But even so, how does the song & dance prevent any of that? It's not like, e.g., a battery manufacturer submits a plan admitting that they're gonna dump stuff.
It raises the stakes, Obviously they can still cheat but now it's a matter of criminal negligence not civil law.
The maxim, "a nation of laws, not of men", is applicable here. If you don't have fixed goal posts or rules, governance becomes chaotic, not to mention unjust, inefficient, and ultimately corrupt (so many people like Trump because he promises to substitute his own judgement in place of democratic processes).
It would be nice if we could comprehensively hypothesis and address every possible manner in which things could wrong, but we can't. Most of the time you need to rely on broad rules, at least as a catchall, like don't harm someone or don't pollute, and ensure fast, consistent, and efficient accountability when injuries occur. The current state of development approval has become grossly degenerate in many places. In others it could definitely use some firming up. But let's not pretend that a project in California would get away with most of the stuff they can in Louisiana just because we reformed the review process. For one thing, California is much better about enforcing existing hazard codes at both the planning approval and operational stages.