Plating operations are a huge headache. They have corrosive plating baths. They have to do some chemical processing on site to neutralize the corrosive chemicals and get them down to a neutral pH.
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.
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
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.
Nuclear power plants have secondary and tertiary overflow reservoirs, intended to capture any uncontrolled dangerous outflow if things go wrong.
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.
Yes. In Silicon Valley, if you go to Bedwell Bayfront Park, which is behind Meta/Facebook HQ, there is, on the bay side, a small sewerage treatment plant. There's a fenced concrete-lined pond, usually empty. That is a sewerage overflow containment pond. It's next to a hiking trail, so it's easily visible to the public. That whole park, by the way, is a recycled garbage dump. So is the bay side park behind Google HQ.
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.
When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our ocean visits were to the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, and you would grab little alcohol wipes for when you got out of the ocean, to wipe the oil off.
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).
Crude oil floating in the ocean used to be a big nuisance in parts of California. It is a natural phenomenon, created by oil deposits on the ocean floor leaking into the environment. Santa Barbara was particularly famous for it.
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.
To this day if you walk on the beach your soles or the soles of your shoes will get sticky tar spots. You need baby oil wipes to clean them up before entering your home.
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.
For what it's worth you still need the alcohol wipes (mineral oil works well too) when swimming off the coast of Santa Barbara. It's naturally occurring oil that gets all over your feet in little annoying sticky spots.
yeah same for the Gulf Coast, oil just seeps right out of the ground at some beaches or at some times. There's plenty of man-made pollution to go around though.
Growing up on the Atlantic coast of Florida, we kept a can or Renuzit solvent in the garage to wipe tar spots off our feet after coming home from the beach. I'm sure that stuff was toxic. The tar was everywhere for a few weeks, then gone for a while.
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.
Half-ish (don't get hung up on being exact, they are at least of similar orders of magnitude) of the oil that makes its way into the ocean is natural. That is, leaking out of the ground into the water not at all as a result of human activity. Obviously enormous anthropogenic oil spills make this a very spiky statistic one way or the other.
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.
Thanks for confirming my suspicion! When I read phrases like "Battery cells require electrode coating with toxic solvents (NMP), electrolyte handling, and formation cycling. This is exactly why Tesla's Gigafactory went to Reno." I (as someone not very familiar with the subject) thought it's strange that California should regulate what kind of chemicals can be used in an industrial process. Of course, they don't - but they regulate that industry can't release toxic chemicals into the environment. But because Elon thinks it's too expensive to make sure that no NMP gets out of his factory, he goes to his Republican pals in Texas or Nevada who don't worry about pollution...
That's certainly one interpretation. Most of the workers there keep doing what they do to protect the environment though, so it's entirely plausible that they are taking precautions to save the environment, but find the method in which the regulations are implemented to be slow or arcane. If it's anything like cybersecurity in the government, the laborious process of filling out irrelevant paperwork is orthogonal to actually accomplishing the initial goals.
The regulatory bureaucracy is a real hurdle. Even if you want to comply with the regulations, navigating the regulatory bureaucracy is a killer. Super slow, super expensive, quite opaque, somewhat arbitrary, and highly punitive.
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.
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.
Yeah, everyone wants faster bureaucracy until they see the cost estimate for proper staffing, then just pretending there wasn't any harm to regulate in the first place becomes the preferred option.
I think that one solution might be making it much easier to sue companies for their externalities and then loosen the regulation. IMHO, all that regulation is necessary primarily because methods of controlling the corpos and the rich have broken down.
China has reduced its pollution massively since the 90s while aggressively expanding its industrial output. And they have done it without excessive bureaucracy and delays in construction. In the US environmental laws are not about the environment at all. They are there to enrich lawyers who profit from multi year permitting processes and lawsuits.
> China has reduced its pollution massively since the 90s while aggressively expanding its industrial output. And they have done it without excessive bureaucracy
China's system is authoritarian state-capitalism. It is precisely the bureaucracy that steered it's industries toward this outcome.
The phones might not even be more expensive in the long term, if we’re just in an easier-to-discover local maximum in efficacy x cost x pollution space.
> What would fix that is enforcing the regulations nation wide, then applying tariffs on imported products that don't enforce the same regulations.
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.
I don't think that will work. There's simply no viable path towards that much coordination; especially when late stage capitalism ensures that most people are living too hand to mouth to be able to worry about stuff like the environment.
We've kicked the can down the road. Stuff used to cost more; now we make everything out of plastic overseas. Once all of those economies are wealthy enough to start caring about the environment (and I'm convinced we'll get there), pollution will have to be dealt with globally.
Maybe by then we'll have returned to building products which last (although I'm not holding my breath).
By “these people” do you mean the people who actually make things?
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.
Listen y’all, it’s not just that we aren't letting companies spew chemicals into the air. The permitting and regulatory process is so extremely hostile that even when you want to and are able to do so safely and without emissions, it’s impossible.
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.
- 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
Yeah. It's especially relevant for the author's focus on shipbuilding. The old shipyard at Hunter's Point in San Francisco is horribly polluted, and they've been working to decontaminate it for more than three decades in order to reclaim the land for other uses (in particular, housing). Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island also have a lot of pollution from the former naval base there. There is a cost to overregulation, and there is a cost to underregulation.
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).
That's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this website. The Bay Area is famous for its numerous superfund sites (among many other things, thankfully).
Non sequitur. Superfund sites come from poor industrial process byproduct controls. They can still happen from highly regulated industries that are approved.
Posting a list of them as a justification for red tape that blocks industries does not make sense.
That might be true, but this article does not show how, nor does your own comment. Without citations the only proper way to respond to this article is to presume it's 100% false and ignore it.
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.
There is a lot of manufacturing in California. There are a lot of new factories in California. California manufactures almost as much as most of the Southeast combined. (Note that CA manufacturing is spread across dozens of industries.)
The difference is that successful businesses in California just do. They don't whine about problems caused by their own incompetence.
> The permitting and regulatory process is so extremely hostile that even when you want to and are able to do so safely and without emissions, it’s impossible.
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.
Now the regulatory industry is fighting to destroy productive society in the pursuit of profit. The value-added is fairly stagnant, but the costs have been growing dramatically.
I obviously mean that you can filter out and properly dispose of and neutralize what would be emissions, so that they are not emitted. I cant see your comment as anything but bad faith, why are you responding like this?
But you’ll incur heavy taxes, huge COB increases, tightening regulatory scrutiny and all for nothing compared to being just one or two states over. It’s has been one economically and morally disadvantageous to do manufacturing in California due to hypernanny regulation. What’s worse is that generational and heritage firms that have lived in California for 50+ years are effectively put out of business because of these policies… and that’s just at the national level. No one has even mentioned how CA based businesses can’t compete with China.
I get what you’re protective over though. We all like clean air and streams. No one is voting for more superfund sites. We can agree on that.
Your response seems to either woefully uninformed or bad faith. I’m assuming the former.
There's an important distinction here, between "banned" and "has far cheaper alternatives".
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.
You can just look at examples in the article. For example "Lithium-Ion Cell Manufacturing"
> 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
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.
It's like the death sentence in CA. The minority who wanted to abolish it couldn't get enough votes, so the actual process was systemically altered until it became too cost-prohibitive.
*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.
if you own a factory and the legislators make your factory illegal, that's a ban. "well you can just upgrade" is no consolation. one day your factory is allowed, the next day it's not.
I was advocating specifically against mincing words so that appropriate remedies can be pursued. "Unbanning" coal isn't going to make coal appear again!
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.
The Grandfatherd-in section is incredibly misleading. Look at the Semiconductor Fabrication section, for example. The implication is that these are the only fabs in the state, they wouldn't be able to get new permits today, and the red dots indicate that it would be "effectively impossible" to open any other ones. In fact (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...) there are at least 18 fabs in California, and these are just two random examples of particularly old ones. Obviously they couldn't reopen under the same permits they got in the 60s, why would anyone expect that to be the case?
A lot of these are actually grandfathered in. Vulcanization, electrolysis, auto painting, etc. I think the emphasis is that CA has effectively made it difficult to get regulatory authorities to agree to issue new permits. That was the part that stood out to me.
The site is wrong though. I believe it's more of a it's hard and I shouldn't have to do it. I found a company called statevolt (founded August 2021) that plans to build a lithium ion cell factory the Imperial Valley (Southern California). I did see a press release saying it is delayed, but the company maintains that it plans on building it. On the banned website, it's claimed lithium battery cells are impossible to manufacture in California. That doesn't appear to be factual. With no references, it's just a California bashing site based on easily disproven falsehoods.
I wouldn't expect it to be impossible, and it isn't, but I would expect the permits to be different than they were 60 years ago. You can still build a house today, but that doesn't mean you can build one using the same permits you received in 1965. This is true for everything.
Oh I didn’t realize pineapple farms were banned in California and Alaska.
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
California is mismanaged and you don’t need to vote Red to fix it. We can do better as Blue State. Wake up. We’re losing to ourselves like an obese patient anemic to a diet.
You kind of do need to vote Red - or, more precisely, make Red competitive again. Because Californians don't vote Red often enough, most of the candidates in the Republican Party in California are completely unserious. This has allowed the more impractical progressive side of the Democratic Party to increasing set the direction of the Democratic Party in California, to the detriment of governance for everyone.
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.
I think it could be better run for sure. We need to look at things other states seem to do well (Utah - homelessness, Texas - K12) and push to improve.
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.
I think a nuclear plant in Manhattan would cost far more than just building the plant in outer NY, and then running a big power line in to Manhattan. Sure, the power line would take up space, but so would the nuclear plant's cooling system.
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.
They are playing a bit fast and loose with the word "banned".
> 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.
Being unable to start a project without doing 5 years of legal wrangling once you put shovel to earth may not be a "ban", but it sure doesn't encourage development.
There are other states without the regulations that these businesses apparently find offensive. Why can't the manufacturing be spun up in those states?
> But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right?
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.
Agreed, words matter.
There are a lot of smart people out there, and the writer of this site makes me skeptical when he/she exaggerates, omits or spins info. Tell us all the facts at least, so we can trust you.
There is a reason these kind of things are no longer possible in much of the western world and especially Europe-like US states like California:
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.
Those are the incorrect choices. You CAN actually do these processes, and still keep the environment clean.
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.
> The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer
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.
USA is already effectively priced out of manufacturing due to high labor costs. Doing things with the "correct choices" simply makes the impossible even more so.
The trade-off to safety and caring about people and the environment is very often cost. Caring about the environment is not a binary concept, it is a matter of where your break-even point is between caring about the environment and absorbing higher costs.
You can also use pigouvian taxation to make polluting expensive. Cost savings is generally the motivation for allowing negative externalities like pollution, so a natural way to reverse it in many cases while allowing flexibility when there is no practical alternative.
"So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment?"
- 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!".
> I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing
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.
> 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.
The idea that people setting pollution rules secretly don't care is silly.
FWIW, California can't restrict the importation and sale of items manufactured legally in other states if the item itself (after manufacture) is safe. CA can't tell other states to ban various manufacturing techniques.
> You CAN actually do these processes, and still keep the environment clean.
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
> The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer, not through regulation, but through process.
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.
Housing and medicine is largely a political decision with little relation to environmental concerns. The political party that favours deregulation is the same one that wants to keep private health care.
Food is slightly different, judging by the rates of obesity people can afford more than they need.
It’s an inconvenient truth that the better off don’t want to face up to. Your environmental impact is going to be correlated to your consumption. More spending == more damage.
Something to bear in mind when you are being told environmental damage is being caused by the poor or some foreign country.
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.
There a lot of processes like those done in other states and in europe. PCB etching, cnc milling, allumunium anodizing are some of the ones that I order on a regular basis from european manufacturers.
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)
All true. But these are done in areas where the required resources are available.
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?".
Well than it’s good that none of this is literally forbidden despite the dramatics.
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.
Right now, there are Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAMs) going into place that put a price on the externality of carbon pollution in other countries with lower standards than your own. It's basically a carbon tax, the EU's just went into force. All the recordkeeping is probably not going to be cheap, but it seems like in theory, you could do something similar with other industrial emissions, and try to bring others onto the same level playing field, so that there's not that same pressure to cut corners.
I'm not judging here. From my experiences in California I would say that the general mindset and cultural approach to life is comparable to that of south-western Europe.
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.
> 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).
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?
What we actually need to get to is a world where countries have somewhat equal quality of life. This would allow a country to invest in processes that reduce pollution without fundamentally making them uncompetitive.
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.
> Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.
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.
In a modern money/fiat money regime, the federal government can afford anything in nominal terms. As such, the solution would be to subsidize the industries that make the most sense for standard of living and national security so they can participate in the market. Use government subsidies to offset the costs of environmental remediation .
Who can forget when China closed some factories in 2008 and 2022 so the smog would clear out before the Olympic games could begin? Could we potentially have "clean" factories built in America, maybe. But then could we afford the products they produced, hell no! If it was affordably possible, it would have already happened.
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?)
> 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.
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)
All these things can be done with healthy air and clean water, but the cost goes up, and people don't want to pay that cost. So we send them elsewhere instead.
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.
In the US, you could work 400 hours per day, and still nothing would change in regards of wealth concentration.
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!
Wealth concentrates because of shitty tax policy and lack of enforcement of existing, on the books regulation to enforce a competitive market.
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.
Gen Z spends less than 30 minutes outside a day, that's with 1/5 having no job/school at all. The choice is obvious, they aren't swimming either way.
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?
This is the conclusion anyone who look at things rationally must come to. The problem is, there's an endless influx of people, drunk on space-age optimism from their K-12 education system, that think "I reject that reality, there MUST be a way to have it all". They haven't learned that the universe hates us and wants us to suffer, not the opposite.
As someone born in a socialist country that doesn't exist anymore (i'm still here), a very common progress of time over here was:
- 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.
Yea, this romantizing of a past is doing no good to us. For example, It's weird how people romantize back breaking work on farm as "simple life". But I guess this was here with us every time. Grass is greener somewhere else and was greener in good old times.
hah yeah same goes for blue collar trades type jobs, it's weirdly romanticized here. My mom's side of my extended family were all blue collar types in West Texas, ranch hands, truckers, welders, that sort of thing. All of the men were basically crippled by 55 from using their bodies to make money and died in their 60s of various diseases. My father's side is all white collar and they're all still around, my dad is a minor pickleball celebrity in FL at age 80.
Wasn't there some magical thinking about how by outsourcing industries to those poor countries will bring them money and raise their standard of living to a point where they care just as much about their environment as us and it will all eventually equalize. Didn't quite pan out like that, did it.
Actually it did pan out. You just weren't paying attention.
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.
They are not quite there yet. China now has a huge middle class, but they also still have a massive underclass. It’s too early to claim these projections were wrong. I think they are misguided, but there is no denying that China now pays more attention to pollution than it did a decade or two ago. There are massive investments to clean the air in large cities. Same in India: the situation is dire but the political cost of supporting the status quo keeps increasing.
It's not magical thinking; it just doesn't happen overnight. The real question is as we get relatively less wealthy in the West, will we start moving the other direction?
If it is not profitable, then it must be subsidized. Trump could have supercharged the EPA and expanded the grants for clean manufacturing, but he destroyed it instead. Now we get the worst of both worlds and our higher taxes go to his own pocket.
>than have a look on how the environment in the countries you will be competing with looks like,
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.
No, China wasn't "on my mind". Last been there two weeks ago. I am well aware that China in most areas is lightyears ahead of the Western world. I like highspeed trains ;)
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.
>But the industry and the jobs have shrunken a lot
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.
Just to clarify: When it comes to myself, my post has been a provocative hypothetical scenario in which I would need to make that choice.
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'd choose to be the powerful and rich industrial country every single time. If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it. Clean water to swim in? Build a pool.
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.
> If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it.
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.
> If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it.
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.
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.
These explanations have no citations, and even the explanations frequently conflict with the category labels. It seems much more like an elaborate propaganda infographic than a useful source of information.
"Hey AI, tell me what manufactured phone components require permitting in California." ... Copy paste copy paste copy paste
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.
But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy. There needs to be a path towards doing things other than foisting them on people who are out of sight.
Texans seem more than happy to host these industries. Let them, they have no public land left to protect anyway. The environment is arguably California’s most valuable asset. May as well preserve it so people continue to want to actually live here.
Maps of California are dotted with SuperFund sites where these companies left the taxpayers with the bill to clean up their toxic messes. We don’t “foist” these externalities on other people; they choose to hold lower value on a clean environment than regions which regulate pollutants and other negative externalities.
Most of the complaints from this website aren't about things being outright banned. It's mostly stuff where the regulation is so strict that's it's "nearly impossible". But the regulation seems fair to me wrt what's actually required to keep TCE, asbestos, Freon, chloroform, etc out of our soil and water.
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
But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy
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.
> But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy.
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'm not from California but this to me seems like a great case to move to California. Why not ship your externality creating activities elsewhere? Its not like they pay more for the iPhone.
Some of these items actually net improve clean air and clean water, but you’re instead happy to export those pollutants to another country to feel better yourself
It's always hilarious when a bunch of people in Texas who hate government and government regulations get screwed so hard by the corporations that move in that they start incorporating to form governments so that they can pass government regulation to stop those corporations. See for example Webberville or the efforts to create Mitchell Bend in Hood County. Some people have to learn the hard way. Some never do.
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.
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.
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.
You might be right, but the site is explicit about the Fremont plant being exempted, and opens with the claim that there are facilities grandfathered in.
The concept of "grandfathering" rule breakers has always seemed like naked corruption to me. OK, we think this thing is so bad, that we're passing a law to ban it, BUT everyone who was already doing this bad thing can keep doing it forever because... because... because putting an existing company out of business is apparently the worst thing in the world. If our elected officials think something is bad enough to ban outright, then it should go whole hog and actually ban it. Not just prevent upstart competitors to existing legacy industry.
> Tesla's Fremont factory was the former NUMMI plant (GM/Toyota, operating since 1962). It was grandfathered in. When Tesla needed to expand battery production, they built the Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada — not California — because the permitting for battery cell manufacturing was effectively impossible. The Cybertruck factory went to Austin, Texas.
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]
> Tesla's Fremont factory was the former NUMMI plant (GM/Toyota, operating since 1962). It was grandfathered in. When Tesla needed to expand battery production, they built the Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada — not California — because the permitting for battery cell manufacturing was effectively impossible. The Cybertruck factory went to Austin, Texas.
What part am I misreading? How is it that tesla expanded their cell manufacturing in 2023 in California when it was "effectively impossible"?
On the website, it claims you cannot manufacture lithium battery cells in California unless you are grandfathered in. A relatively minimal search found statevolt.com. They are building a factory in the Imperial Valley. While I did see the project is on hold. It seems implausible that they bought the site, not having researched whether you could actually build lithium battery cells in California. Considering the banned website claims it's impossible, I can't trust anything on that website without citations.
You can thank the fine people who figured it was cheaper/easier/faster to just dump the toxic waste out back (or offshore [0]) for many of these processes being outlawed. If I'm not mistaken, CA has the 2nd most Superfund sites in the US.[1]
For instance, NC milling is done in California. Printed circuit board manufacturing is done in California. Small-scale integrated circuit fabrication is done.
Everyone wants heavy industry outcomes, no one wants heavy industry side-effects;
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?
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.
Should California be treated differently than the rest of the world?
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.
this does happen to some extent for example with auto emissions and other things. CA is such a large market when it alone makes a change, it often drags along other states or the nation.
Not really. CA can regulate import and sales of items based on the what the item does once in CA. They can't really regulate how it was made somewhere else.
I live in Santa Clara where the first chip fans in the world existed. In places like Santa Clara (home to Intel, AMD, Nvidia), and neighboring Sunnyvale and Mountain View there are maps of chemical leakage of industrial solvents which had contaminated the groundwater.
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.
Elon Musk and Colossus have generated 3000 jobs in Memphis, according to Tesla propaganda (I mean "propaganda" in the original neutral term, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda).
But, locals don't love that because of the environmental concerns.
I find it disingenuous to talk about construction jobs as being "generated". Construction jobs are contracts. Building a datacenter might put 3000 people under contract temporarily but it doesn't "generate" jobs. Once the contract is complete those contractors they're no longer paid by the builder.
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.
Now compared that to this map of superfund sites and the pollutants they've left in our soils and groundwater. Statistically speaking, an average American lives within 10 miles of one of these sites
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
I don't have experience in basically all of these industrial processes, so I can't really comment there. I strongly support environmental protections, but I have no idea if what California does actually does that.
But 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).
Let's be honest: People have no problem polluting elsewhere as long as they can consume the final product without suffering the consequences. TFA isn't important to the people of California.
It would be nice if the site cited the regulations and costs that make the different facilites impossible — are they outright banned? Are there environmental regulations that don’t exist elsewhere? Is it a long process for permitting with tons of inspections?
It's interesting, but is there some conflation of regional restrictions with the state of California?
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.
I'm not in the US, but isn't the Bay Area quite specifically very polluted, very densely populated, and has some weird geographical/meteorological quirk that makes it very hard to get air pollution to blow away?
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?
This website gets a "very difficult" to "impossible" rating for usability: tiny, dense text, dim & blurry fonts and the modern UX that insists on reinventing how people navigate a webpage. Ironically it WAS made in California.
They lost me at "vacuum deposition - impossible" without justification. As far as processes go it's one of the safest (everything happens in a sealed vacuum chamber). Maybe the solvents used to clean prior to coating?
Yeah, it’s the solvents used for cleaning the chambers and parts. Very nasty stuff, and it’s probably the biggest concern for this type of facility anywhere, not just in California.
The stuff my dad used for cleaning down beryllium copper sheets that then had silicon, gold, and nichrome deposited onto them to make tiny medical pressure sensors was generally various stages of xylene, amyl acetate, freon, and - on one notable occasion when a shipment of the sheet stock came heavily contaminated with tractor oil - plain ordinary petrol.
The site would be better if it linked to the actual regulation that prohibits each type of business instead of just making the claim “0 new factories of this type have been built”.
Oil refineries in particular are interesting because the sources for the blend of gasoline California requires[0] are either in CA itself or are few and far away. This means that gasoline prices are susceptible to greater supply shocks and so on. Many US regulations follow from California exercising its large market to induce companies to change their policies (electronic one-click cancel, CCPA, No Surprises in healthcare billing) but this one hasn't quite had the same effect.
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.
Paint VOCs sounds fine, until it's done at industrial scale, and it's also your neighbor, and also all the children in the neighborhood have asthma, and also healthcare is a lot more expensive...
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.
Most of this stuff could be done in compliance with the laws but it’s just cheaper to do it somewhere else where you allowed to vent poison in the air rather than having to filter it out.
Are they only banned in the cities, or are they banned in the state, which -- even in California, should have rural areas far enough away from cities to be tenable?
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
I do not care to try to make things ethically fair for oil refineries. Call me a hypocrite, I do not care, as these companies similarly do not care. "Ya got me!", yup, moving on, I am still glad oil refineries are effectively banned.
I think if we consolidate those operations the better, and then we can improve an regulate legislative or as a market more easily than if everyone is spread all over.
I've been following Sam for awhile, his business model makes heavy use of outsourcing production of components to skilled partners. It's no sweat off him if he makes the Impulse stove in California or not.
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.
What should be the basis for comparison? The locality with the most permissive rule on each aspect of manufacturing? Is there any absolute floor on the morality? Should California allow slavery to be used in factories if some other locality allows it?
To be fair, it would be very hard to argue against this website since it stays very vague.
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 proves it's pointlessness. CA doesn't want manufacturing like that in their state. Period. They're saying you are not welcome to destroy our environment, go to Texas, they love that shit. States Rights, right?
Really difficult to say because it doesn't make many concrete claims. It doesn't mention any regulations or say what chemicals or processes are actually banned. These are not easy things to look up. I can tell you that at least the semiconductor fabrication stuff is false, there are many fabs in California and here's a new one as of a few days ago: https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/02/19/san-jose-tech-nokia-i....
I realize it isn't completed yet but I don't think anyone is buying sites for something that's impossible to build.
> 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.
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".
Yes. They lump in sheet metal stamping with giga casting. They are completely different techs with different energy footprints. Banning aluminum casting does not implicitly ban stamping.
I don't think it makes a good case for itself. No automotive paint shops sounds kind of ridiculous. I don't know anything about that industry but there has to be a way to paint cars in a safe way, right??
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.
Man, this guy has his head all the way up his anus. A guy who thinks that whether or not the math classes in San Francisco high schools are literally titled "algebra" is an important question, who doesn't realize that Noah Smith is a raging moron, and who considers Elon Musk to be the greatest industrialist in history, has been listening to a tad too much Garry Tan. No wonder he can't figure out how to market appliances. He's just disconnected from the real world.
I work in manufacturing. I don't think regulations are the only barrier. The other one is attracting investment. Manufacturing is simply second class compared to IT, the finance industry, healthcare, etc.
I wonder if there's a law+econ analysis of comparing the current framework (regulations and upfront permitting) vs having the regulations but then enforcement via combination of randomized gov't inspections and private lawsuits. The motivation would be to allow things to move faster while also requiring the same degree of compliance, but without the massive red tape upfront with administrators having no real incentive to approve projects or move fast. One obvious downside is that it effectively creates an economic incentive to try and skirt the law and/or find loopholes, but that arguably exists to the same degree in the existing system.
My dad spent 40+ years working at a unionized industrial facility in California that recycled paper and cardboard waste into the paper layer used to make the corrugated interior of cardboard boxes. There were some local regulations on waste water runoff that I'm aware of, but he never mentioned much else.
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.
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.
If California made the products illegal that couldn't be produced here I wonder how many of these laws would suddenly be removed because the issues associated with the laws were suddenly considered "acceptable".
Are other states building all this manufacturing/semiconductor capacity? I think it's an overall USA thing, we just don't do manufacturing anymore because it's cheaper to do it in another country.
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.
Really? Since it’s lacking any comparison to other states and because many of these complaints single out metropolitan areas comparison to nationwide census of metro areas, what actual conclusions are you drawing that are valid?
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?
" Building an EV requires metal forging, battery manufacturing, painting, and chip fabrication — all processes that drove Tesla to build in Nevada and Texas.
Tesla's Fremont factory was the former NUMMI plant (GM/Toyota, operating since 1962). It was grandfathered in."
I would like to read this website but the font and colors are so poorly selected (read and grey for most of the text) that I'm not willing to struggle to do so. I guess my eyes are just old.
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?
While I do tend to feel it is important that superpower-level countries be capable of producing within their political borders most/all of what they consume, for reasonable prices; I do not tend to feel that everything we produce needs to be produced everywhere within those political borders. California is the most beautiful and hospitable land on the entire planet. There's nothing wrong with putting the toxic chemical factories in a desert or tundra somewhere.
> 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.
Banned in California.. wait, I meant the Bay Area.
This is deeply hypocritical, since Californians consume products built with these forbidden processes. They just have them made elsewhere so they can feel like they are ambassadors of environmental protection.
I confess I don't know what to make of this. Without seeing the reasons why these are banned, what is the point? Would be like lamenting how you can't use asbestos. Sure, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
Yeah, I don't think that is generally viewed as a good thing, though? And I would not be surprised to learn California has some stricter rules on it. (Would honestly not be surprised to find out some of these "banned" items are due to asbestos level concerns.)
Great! Considering you can’t swing a dead cat around Silicon Valley without hitting a superfund site, this seems ok.
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.
This site is limiting its focus to environmental permitting concerns, it seems. The problem is that one of the biggest barriers to manufacturing in the US is labor: cost and protections of various sorts.
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.
I claim BS: labs can operate with these and more dangerous chemicals.
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"
You could make similar site about much of Europe to be honest.
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]
A lot of these are stretches or remove nuance. I get the point they are trying to make, but it's a lot weaker than they think and undermined by their own "hero" example: painting cars in California
> 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.
Oh it's worse bullshit. Modern paint shops don't emit meaningful VOCs. Even in Texas, for example. Nobody's even making non voc compliant auto paint anymore because there is no market for it.
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.
Lot of things could be added to this list. Good luck getting permission to start a hospital, or permission to mine/refine anything with a slightly messy process (e.g. rare earth metals). You can't build a new port. The California Coastal Commission won't let you open a new hotel anywhere on the water. You can't even keep a bar open late in San Francisco.
I just searched "new hospital opened in CA" on Google and see that there were two new hospitals opened in Irvine in December, half of a new hospital complex in Santa Clara opened in October, more being built and slated to open this year or next...
The author equates "you need a permit, which you obtain by making proof you follow the law and best practices re: handling dangerous substances" with "BANNED!!!!!!".
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.
i hear that's why Tesla paint is so soft, and why it's so popular for Tesla buyers to apply expensive protective film to their paint. I didn't believe anyone when they told me, and now i have more scratches after 1 year than my mazda did after 5+ years
Got a new one. In California—the only place that matters in tech—all operating systems must implement age verification by Jan 1, 2027. Which means this is coming to a computer near you, worldwide.
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.
The claim that aluminum anodizing is "banned in California" because of the sulfuric acid waste it produces is patently absurd. There are no shortage of labs, factories, and more in California that use sulfuric acid, and they all figure out how to dispose of their waste without going "fuck it, YOLO it into the river".
A lot of people on this site clearly have never tried doing anything in California that involves more infrastructure than a laptop. Can easily be 18 months or more to get a permit to 'do things the right way'. If they'll even deign to give you one.
So most of these are just saying "you can't do this because they won't let you dump your waste in the river" and some are just "nobody's doing this in California yet"
What if you ... don't dump your waste in the river? Is it legal if you dispose of your waste properly?
California can do a lot to private companies, but the supremacy clause allows the federal government to do what it wants. If a business wants to engage in these illegal-in-California practices, they could partner with the federal government.
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.
It's because CA has stricter regulations about what can be labeled compostable. Whatever had this label was never compostable to begin with, but called itself that on a technicality.
This website has no content at all. It doesn't mention a single regulation or law. It's just something for politicians to cite from the floor or in reports when they're demanding deregulation or subsidy, and a url that sounds like a slogan.
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.
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.
Ya a lot of people on this site are ideologically positioned in a way that required demonizing CA. I don’t have any skin in that game but it seems pretty clearly A Thing to me from the other side of the country.
A lot of people on this site do or used to live in CA. It is especially galling to have people who have never lived there tell those that have what it is like there. Especially people who have tried to build or run a business in CA.
The Silicon Valley founderati is chock-full of (right wing) libertarians. I can't tell if they were always that way, or are increasingly disgruntled by state-taxes the wealthier they get.
> This has 70 upvotes within 30 minutes. This feels like an astroturf.
Not really surprising given the audience, HN has an awful lot of neo-Technolibertarian types.
The kind who used to complain about government regulation of free speech, and now complain about anything that gets in the way of amassing massive amounts of capital at any social/environmental/political cost.
It's unfortunate that folks who complain incessantly about "facts not feelings" don't appear to be using their critical thinking skills here. But I guess it's not too surprising.
Please don't post generic flamebait involving comparisons between nations/regions on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47165849 and marked it off topic.
What is the 'INSERTNAME' law that explains how all conversations on HN, which is ostensibly focused on tech, devolve (evolve) into the realm of the humanities?
UK isn't EU, especially when it comes to health system. I lived in the US for quite some time (from Fr), the healthcare is great... if you can afford an expensive health insurance AND pay some extra money when required. The avg US people can not pay and when you can not pay the experience is just far worth than terrible.
One of the big reasons we have no universal healthcare is because we socialized defense for other countries like your country. You guys are years if not decades away from being able to defense yourselves.
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.
I don’t know, 39.5m with net growth might disagree with you. Are you living in California at present? If not, do any of the deregulation in laws where you are trouble you. If so, when do you plan on leaving and where to?
Reading through this discussion and speaking from professional experience I have to say that the real challenge isn’t just specific bans, it’s the administrative cost and the inertia of a permitting paradigm designed in the 1960s and 70s. We’re still managing complexity with relics of a regulatory architecture built for a different era — one with paper files, siloed agencies, and a bias toward “check-the-box” compliance rather than real world outcomes.
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.
Plating operations are a huge headache. They have corrosive plating baths. They have to do some chemical processing on site to neutralize the corrosive chemicals and get them down to a neutral pH.
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...
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
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.
Nuclear power plants have secondary and tertiary overflow reservoirs, intended to capture any uncontrolled dangerous outflow if things go wrong.
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.
Yes. In Silicon Valley, if you go to Bedwell Bayfront Park, which is behind Meta/Facebook HQ, there is, on the bay side, a small sewerage treatment plant. There's a fenced concrete-lined pond, usually empty. That is a sewerage overflow containment pond. It's next to a hiking trail, so it's easily visible to the public. That whole park, by the way, is a recycled garbage dump. So is the bay side park behind Google HQ.
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...
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> BTW this likely means quite a bit of land used up by such a reservoir which is ideally never needed, but must be present
This is enough to earn chemical plants a spot on a future "BANNED in California 2" article, because it's "clearly" overregulation.
[flagged]
> He wants this problem to happen to other people…
I think he wants them not to dump the chemicals straight down the sewer?
FWIW, I don't see anywhere that the parent post said that there shouldn't be plating plants in San Jose, just that they are dangerous.
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https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our ocean visits were to the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, and you would grab little alcohol wipes for when you got out of the ocean, to wipe the oil off.
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).
Crude oil floating in the ocean used to be a big nuisance in parts of California. It is a natural phenomenon, created by oil deposits on the ocean floor leaking into the environment. Santa Barbara was particularly famous for it.
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.
To me this "drilling is good for the environment narrative" sounded a bit misleading.
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?
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So you’re saying drilling destroyed crude oil’s natural habitat?
Wtf I love Exxon now.
I remember swimming in Santa Barbara growing up (well closer to the Ventura side really) and having to dodge oil on the sand and water.
How did the wildlife adapt to that? There must be some cool species there
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There is still tons of tar on beaches in Santa Barbara county, mostly all from natural seeps.
Natural seepage is still just as big of an issue now as it was back then in those areas, including Santa Barbara.
To this day if you walk on the beach your soles or the soles of your shoes will get sticky tar spots. You need baby oil wipes to clean them up before entering your home.
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)
For what it's worth you still need the alcohol wipes (mineral oil works well too) when swimming off the coast of Santa Barbara. It's naturally occurring oil that gets all over your feet in little annoying sticky spots.
yeah same for the Gulf Coast, oil just seeps right out of the ground at some beaches or at some times. There's plenty of man-made pollution to go around though.
Growing up on the Atlantic coast of Florida, we kept a can or Renuzit solvent in the garage to wipe tar spots off our feet after coming home from the beach. I'm sure that stuff was toxic. The tar was everywhere for a few weeks, then gone for a while.
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.
Ha, yeah I remember the Galveston beaches as a kid. Left when I was 9, I can't imagine things have improved much since then...
Half-ish (don't get hung up on being exact, they are at least of similar orders of magnitude) of the oil that makes its way into the ocean is natural. That is, leaking out of the ground into the water not at all as a result of human activity. Obviously enormous anthropogenic oil spills make this a very spiky statistic one way or the other.
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.
This is whining from someone that doesn't want to be responsible for the externality of pollution that these manufacturing facilities generate.
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.
Thanks for confirming my suspicion! When I read phrases like "Battery cells require electrode coating with toxic solvents (NMP), electrolyte handling, and formation cycling. This is exactly why Tesla's Gigafactory went to Reno." I (as someone not very familiar with the subject) thought it's strange that California should regulate what kind of chemicals can be used in an industrial process. Of course, they don't - but they regulate that industry can't release toxic chemicals into the environment. But because Elon thinks it's too expensive to make sure that no NMP gets out of his factory, he goes to his Republican pals in Texas or Nevada who don't worry about pollution...
That's certainly one interpretation. Most of the workers there keep doing what they do to protect the environment though, so it's entirely plausible that they are taking precautions to save the environment, but find the method in which the regulations are implemented to be slow or arcane. If it's anything like cybersecurity in the government, the laborious process of filling out irrelevant paperwork is orthogonal to actually accomplishing the initial goals.
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...because dumping stuff into the middle of what is already a barren wasteland isn't actually a problem.
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The regulatory bureaucracy is a real hurdle. Even if you want to comply with the regulations, navigating the regulatory bureaucracy is a killer. Super slow, super expensive, quite opaque, somewhat arbitrary, and highly punitive.
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.
Yeah I think there are two problems
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.
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Yeah, everyone wants faster bureaucracy until they see the cost estimate for proper staffing, then just pretending there wasn't any harm to regulate in the first place becomes the preferred option.
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I think that one solution might be making it much easier to sue companies for their externalities and then loosen the regulation. IMHO, all that regulation is necessary primarily because methods of controlling the corpos and the rich have broken down.
China has reduced its pollution massively since the 90s while aggressively expanding its industrial output. And they have done it without excessive bureaucracy and delays in construction. In the US environmental laws are not about the environment at all. They are there to enrich lawyers who profit from multi year permitting processes and lawsuits.
> China has reduced its pollution massively since the 90s while aggressively expanding its industrial output. And they have done it without excessive bureaucracy
China's system is authoritarian state-capitalism. It is precisely the bureaucracy that steered it's industries toward this outcome.
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Don't forget Insurance companies! They define and enforce a lot of the requirements too, it's also why all the new parks look the same.
It really helps when the government can just disappear someone when they don't play along with government edicts.
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> In the US environmental laws are not about the environment at all.
that is literally nonsense .. lazy nonsense, ill-willed nonsense.. Ignorant nonsense.
literally four seconds to search " history of us environmental law"
The phones might not even be more expensive in the long term, if we’re just in an easier-to-discover local maximum in efficacy x cost x pollution space.
> What would fix that is enforcing the regulations nation wide, then applying tariffs on imported products that don't enforce the same regulations.
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.
I want a more efficient truck!
I don't think that will work. There's simply no viable path towards that much coordination; especially when late stage capitalism ensures that most people are living too hand to mouth to be able to worry about stuff like the environment.
We've kicked the can down the road. Stuff used to cost more; now we make everything out of plastic overseas. Once all of those economies are wealthy enough to start caring about the environment (and I'm convinced we'll get there), pollution will have to be dealt with globally.
Maybe by then we'll have returned to building products which last (although I'm not holding my breath).
And starts out with a Musk quote, to boot. (Assuming it's not made up wholesale; could not verify.)
We need to push these people out of California.
By “these people” do you mean the people who actually make things?
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.
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Listen y’all, it’s not just that we aren't letting companies spew chemicals into the air. The permitting and regulatory process is so extremely hostile that even when you want to and are able to do so safely and without emissions, it’s impossible.
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.
Here's a map of superfund sites in the US. https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/EPA::superfund-national-prio...
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
Yeah. It's especially relevant for the author's focus on shipbuilding. The old shipyard at Hunter's Point in San Francisco is horribly polluted, and they've been working to decontaminate it for more than three decades in order to reclaim the land for other uses (in particular, housing). Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island also have a lot of pollution from the former naval base there. There is a cost to overregulation, and there is a cost to underregulation.
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).
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That's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this website. The Bay Area is famous for its numerous superfund sites (among many other things, thankfully).
Non sequitur. Superfund sites come from poor industrial process byproduct controls. They can still happen from highly regulated industries that are approved.
Posting a list of them as a justification for red tape that blocks industries does not make sense.
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That might be true, but this article does not show how, nor does your own comment. Without citations the only proper way to respond to this article is to presume it's 100% false and ignore it.
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.
There is a lot of manufacturing in California. There are a lot of new factories in California. California manufactures almost as much as most of the Southeast combined. (Note that CA manufacturing is spread across dozens of industries.)
The difference is that successful businesses in California just do. They don't whine about problems caused by their own incompetence.
Trust me I know. If you've ever talked to any of them they absolutely whine about California if you let them.
There is also a good framework of shadow organizations that will take cash and some of your problems away.
> The permitting and regulatory process is so extremely hostile that even when you want to and are able to do so safely and without emissions, it’s impossible.
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.
Now the regulatory industry is fighting to destroy productive society in the pursuit of profit. The value-added is fairly stagnant, but the costs have been growing dramatically.
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When you read a paragraph you have to read all the sentences in that paragraph.
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I obviously mean that you can filter out and properly dispose of and neutralize what would be emissions, so that they are not emitted. I cant see your comment as anything but bad faith, why are you responding like this?
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“Yes you can” misses the point.
But you’ll incur heavy taxes, huge COB increases, tightening regulatory scrutiny and all for nothing compared to being just one or two states over. It’s has been one economically and morally disadvantageous to do manufacturing in California due to hypernanny regulation. What’s worse is that generational and heritage firms that have lived in California for 50+ years are effectively put out of business because of these policies… and that’s just at the national level. No one has even mentioned how CA based businesses can’t compete with China.
I get what you’re protective over though. We all like clean air and streams. No one is voting for more superfund sites. We can agree on that.
Your response seems to either woefully uninformed or bad faith. I’m assuming the former.
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There's an important distinction here, between "banned" and "has far cheaper alternatives".
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.
You can just look at examples in the article. For example "Lithium-Ion Cell Manufacturing"
> 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...
That's a good story to consider.
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.
It's like the death sentence in CA. The minority who wanted to abolish it couldn't get enough votes, so the actual process was systemically altered until it became too cost-prohibitive.
*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.
if you own a factory and the legislators make your factory illegal, that's a ban. "well you can just upgrade" is no consolation. one day your factory is allowed, the next day it's not.
Why mince words?
I was advocating specifically against mincing words so that appropriate remedies can be pursued. "Unbanning" coal isn't going to make coal appear again!
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.
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The Grandfatherd-in section is incredibly misleading. Look at the Semiconductor Fabrication section, for example. The implication is that these are the only fabs in the state, they wouldn't be able to get new permits today, and the red dots indicate that it would be "effectively impossible" to open any other ones. In fact (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...) there are at least 18 fabs in California, and these are just two random examples of particularly old ones. Obviously they couldn't reopen under the same permits they got in the 60s, why would anyone expect that to be the case?
A lot of these are actually grandfathered in. Vulcanization, electrolysis, auto painting, etc. I think the emphasis is that CA has effectively made it difficult to get regulatory authorities to agree to issue new permits. That was the part that stood out to me.
The site is wrong though. I believe it's more of a it's hard and I shouldn't have to do it. I found a company called statevolt (founded August 2021) that plans to build a lithium ion cell factory the Imperial Valley (Southern California). I did see a press release saying it is delayed, but the company maintains that it plans on building it. On the banned website, it's claimed lithium battery cells are impossible to manufacture in California. That doesn't appear to be factual. With no references, it's just a California bashing site based on easily disproven falsehoods.
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Without sources all of this is…suspicious at best.
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.
> why would anyone expect that to be the case?
Why would you expect it to be impossible?
I wouldn't expect it to be impossible, and it isn't, but I would expect the permits to be different than they were 60 years ago. You can still build a house today, but that doesn't mean you can build one using the same permits you received in 1965. This is true for everything.
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Oh I didn’t realize pineapple farms were banned in California and Alaska.
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
California is mismanaged and you don’t need to vote Red to fix it. We can do better as Blue State. Wake up. We’re losing to ourselves like an obese patient anemic to a diet.
You kind of do need to vote Red - or, more precisely, make Red competitive again. Because Californians don't vote Red often enough, most of the candidates in the Republican Party in California are completely unserious. This has allowed the more impractical progressive side of the Democratic Party to increasing set the direction of the Democratic Party in California, to the detriment of governance for everyone.
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.
I think it could be better run for sure. We need to look at things other states seem to do well (Utah - homelessness, Texas - K12) and push to improve.
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.
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> Why can’t we build a new nuclear plant in Manhattan
We should, it would replace significant amounts of natural gas usage for space heating. Not doing so is literally cooking the planet.
I think a nuclear plant in Manhattan would cost far more than just building the plant in outer NY, and then running a big power line in to Manhattan. Sure, the power line would take up space, but so would the nuclear plant's cooling system.
Your comment was better without that edit.
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.
They are playing a bit fast and loose with the word "banned".
> 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.
Being unable to start a project without doing 5 years of legal wrangling once you put shovel to earth may not be a "ban", but it sure doesn't encourage development.
Just Devil's Advocate..
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.
> But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right?
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.
What's so bad about negative externalities? Instead of thinking about that think of the profits (for me)!
/s
He's talking about taking the government to court to force it to follow the law, not "maybe we'll get sued later."
Agreed, words matter. There are a lot of smart people out there, and the writer of this site makes me skeptical when he/she exaggerates, omits or spins info. Tell us all the facts at least, so we can trust you.
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There is a reason these kind of things are no longer possible in much of the western world and especially Europe-like US states like California:
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?
Those are the incorrect choices. You CAN actually do these processes, and still keep the environment clean.
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.
> The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer
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.
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USA is already effectively priced out of manufacturing due to high labor costs. Doing things with the "correct choices" simply makes the impossible even more so.
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The trade-off to safety and caring about people and the environment is very often cost. Caring about the environment is not a binary concept, it is a matter of where your break-even point is between caring about the environment and absorbing higher costs.
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You can also use pigouvian taxation to make polluting expensive. Cost savings is generally the motivation for allowing negative externalities like pollution, so a natural way to reverse it in many cases while allowing flexibility when there is no practical alternative.
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"So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment?"
- 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!".
> I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing
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.
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> 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.
The idea that people setting pollution rules secretly don't care is silly.
California can't fix the whole world's problems.
The person you are replying to mentioned their personal experience. Have you seen this work in person? It might help to talk about those facts.
Also: I suggest rethinking your opening line. It's not very endearing.
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> But people don't actually care about the environment.
They probably do if it's near their backyard
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> So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment? Put high tariffs on dangerous process products
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!)
FWIW, California can't restrict the importation and sale of items manufactured legally in other states if the item itself (after manufacture) is safe. CA can't tell other states to ban various manufacturing techniques.
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> You CAN actually do these processes, and still keep the environment clean.
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
You keep saying reduce regulation and then bring up things like adding permitting and taxing certain processes which is regulation.
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.
> The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer, not through regulation, but through process.
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.
A lot of people are poor. The cheap Chinese shit keeps them alive and relatively happy.
In your proposal you'd also cede the global market to China- because nobody in Angola cares about how those solar panels were made.
I’m sure it’s possible to do both in theory but I find it hard to believe that it’s possible in practice.
If it was California wouldn’t be covered in superfund sites that originated from industrial activities that took place decades ago.
When people can't afford homes, food and medicine, environment ceases to be a priority.
It's mostly a question of when, not if.
Housing and medicine is largely a political decision with little relation to environmental concerns. The political party that favours deregulation is the same one that wants to keep private health care.
Food is slightly different, judging by the rates of obesity people can afford more than they need.
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> What would be your choice?
Less stuff and less pollution everywhere.
It’s an inconvenient truth that the better off don’t want to face up to. Your environmental impact is going to be correlated to your consumption. More spending == more damage.
Something to bear in mind when you are being told environmental damage is being caused by the poor or some foreign country.
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Yes, I fully agree.
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.
There a lot of processes like those done in other states and in europe. PCB etching, cnc milling, allumunium anodizing are some of the ones that I order on a regular basis from european manufacturers.
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)
All true. But these are done in areas where the required resources are available.
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?".
Well than it’s good that none of this is literally forbidden despite the dramatics.
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.
Right now, there are Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAMs) going into place that put a price on the externality of carbon pollution in other countries with lower standards than your own. It's basically a carbon tax, the EU's just went into force. All the recordkeeping is probably not going to be cheap, but it seems like in theory, you could do something similar with other industrial emissions, and try to bring others onto the same level playing field, so that there's not that same pressure to cut corners.
> "Europe-like US states like California"
This statement makes me smile. Although I see where this comes from...
I'm not judging here. From my experiences in California I would say that the general mindset and cultural approach to life is comparable to that of south-western Europe.
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'd pick the advanced components and find ways to protect the environment as well, both can co-exist together, Why not Fischgericht?
> 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).
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.
Yes, it is crazy.
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?
What we actually need to get to is a world where countries have somewhat equal quality of life. This would allow a country to invest in processes that reduce pollution without fundamentally making them uncompetitive.
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.
> Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.
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.
In a modern money/fiat money regime, the federal government can afford anything in nominal terms. As such, the solution would be to subsidize the industries that make the most sense for standard of living and national security so they can participate in the market. Use government subsidies to offset the costs of environmental remediation .
Who can forget when China closed some factories in 2008 and 2022 so the smog would clear out before the Olympic games could begin? Could we potentially have "clean" factories built in America, maybe. But then could we afford the products they produced, hell no! If it was affordably possible, it would have already happened.
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?)
It would have worked out fine. We would have just bought less useless junk.
> 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.
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)
My choice would be, if banning a particular process, also ban imports of products made with this process.
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.
The EU started charging carbon tariffs from 1 January- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Me...
All these things can be done with healthy air and clean water, but the cost goes up, and people don't want to pay that cost. So we send them elsewhere instead.
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.
It's not black and white - do things smarter. But make jobs - top priority. We need jobs otherwise wealth concentrates.
In the US, you could work 400 hours per day, and still nothing would change in regards of wealth concentration.
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
Wealth concentrates because of shitty tax policy and lack of enforcement of existing, on the books regulation to enforce a competitive market.
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.
Gen Z spends less than 30 minutes outside a day, that's with 1/5 having no job/school at all. The choice is obvious, they aren't swimming either way.
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?
This is the conclusion anyone who look at things rationally must come to. The problem is, there's an endless influx of people, drunk on space-age optimism from their K-12 education system, that think "I reject that reality, there MUST be a way to have it all". They haven't learned that the universe hates us and wants us to suffer, not the opposite.
As someone born in a socialist country that doesn't exist anymore (i'm still here), a very common progress of time over here was:
- 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...
You can avoid this scenario with trains.
Yea, this romantizing of a past is doing no good to us. For example, It's weird how people romantize back breaking work on farm as "simple life". But I guess this was here with us every time. Grass is greener somewhere else and was greener in good old times.
hah yeah same goes for blue collar trades type jobs, it's weirdly romanticized here. My mom's side of my extended family were all blue collar types in West Texas, ranch hands, truckers, welders, that sort of thing. All of the men were basically crippled by 55 from using their bodies to make money and died in their 60s of various diseases. My father's side is all white collar and they're all still around, my dad is a minor pickleball celebrity in FL at age 80.
Simple != easy
Wasn't there some magical thinking about how by outsourcing industries to those poor countries will bring them money and raise their standard of living to a point where they care just as much about their environment as us and it will all eventually equalize. Didn't quite pan out like that, did it.
Actually it did pan out. You just weren't paying attention.
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.
They are not quite there yet. China now has a huge middle class, but they also still have a massive underclass. It’s too early to claim these projections were wrong. I think they are misguided, but there is no denying that China now pays more attention to pollution than it did a decade or two ago. There are massive investments to clean the air in large cities. Same in India: the situation is dire but the political cost of supporting the status quo keeps increasing.
It's not magical thinking; it just doesn't happen overnight. The real question is as we get relatively less wealthy in the West, will we start moving the other direction?
China
China deploys more solar and wind power then the US.
Americans seem to love to count their past successes and then declare the game is over and they won.
History doesn't end though.
If it is not profitable, then it must be subsidized. Trump could have supercharged the EPA and expanded the grants for clean manufacturing, but he destroyed it instead. Now we get the worst of both worlds and our higher taxes go to his own pocket.
>than have a look on how the environment in the countries you will be competing with looks like,
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.
No, China wasn't "on my mind". Last been there two weeks ago. I am well aware that China in most areas is lightyears ahead of the Western world. I like highspeed trains ;)
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.
It's not about clean inputs, its about industrial outputs and waste product. China is NOT a leader in that field. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-57853-z
>But the industry and the jobs have shrunken a lot
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.
Just to clarify: When it comes to myself, my post has been a provocative hypothetical scenario in which I would need to make that choice.
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".
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I'd choose to be the powerful and rich industrial country every single time. If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it. Clean water to swim in? Build a pool.
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.
> If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it.
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.
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> If I had a button that would wipe out the entire Amazon jungle and replace it with a world class high technology industry, I wouldn't even think twice before pressing it.
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.
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> Build a pool.
How does this work without water?
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> Clean water to swim in? Build a pool.
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.
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> What would be your choice?
Stop promoting overpopulation. The USA adds ~1.8 million of people every year. That's one more Phoenix city, every year.
These explanations have no citations, and even the explanations frequently conflict with the category labels. It seems much more like an elaborate propaganda infographic than a useful source of information.
"Hey AI, tell me what manufactured phone components require permitting in California." ... Copy paste copy paste copy paste
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.
I confuses “it’s hard” with “it’s banned”
It’s…not even wrong it is detached from any effort at truth.
As a resident who likes to breathe clean air and drink clean water, none of that seems all that bad.
I guess there should be an ability to do this farther from the population centers though.
But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy. There needs to be a path towards doing things other than foisting them on people who are out of sight.
Texans seem more than happy to host these industries. Let them, they have no public land left to protect anyway. The environment is arguably California’s most valuable asset. May as well preserve it so people continue to want to actually live here.
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Maps of California are dotted with SuperFund sites where these companies left the taxpayers with the bill to clean up their toxic messes. We don’t “foist” these externalities on other people; they choose to hold lower value on a clean environment than regions which regulate pollutants and other negative externalities.
Plenty of states and countries are okay with having this stuff in their backyard. Most of them encourage it. Let them build it.
Most of the complaints from this website aren't about things being outright banned. It's mostly stuff where the regulation is so strict that's it's "nearly impossible". But the regulation seems fair to me wrt what's actually required to keep TCE, asbestos, Freon, chloroform, etc out of our soil and water.
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
But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy
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.
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> But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy.
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).
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What if, hear me out, what if we did these things… in space?!
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That’s ok, Texans don’t mind having to drink bottled water
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I'm not from California but this to me seems like a great case to move to California. Why not ship your externality creating activities elsewhere? Its not like they pay more for the iPhone.
Consider housing price and state tax as well
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They do pay more for the iPhone, they have the highest state sales tax in the US.
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> Why not ship your externality creating activities elsewhere?
Like where?
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Some of these items actually net improve clean air and clean water, but you’re instead happy to export those pollutants to another country to feel better yourself
the plurality of this website are californians so this whole discourse is about as predictable as can be
Export the externalities baby!
> I guess there should be an ability to do this farther from the population centers though.
Maybe Texas is far enough? The [l]one-star state has laissez-faire regulations, and may be more to author's speed.
It's always hilarious when a bunch of people in Texas who hate government and government regulations get screwed so hard by the corporations that move in that they start incorporating to form governments so that they can pass government regulation to stop those corporations. See for example Webberville or the efforts to create Mitchell Bend in Hood County. Some people have to learn the hard way. Some never do.
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.
lol. yeah there is but instead of "farther from the population centers" it is "farther from YOUR population centers"
Yes, exactly. That's fine - live and let live.
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.
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The article is just factually incorrect.
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.
You might be right, but the site is explicit about the Fremont plant being exempted, and opens with the claim that there are facilities grandfathered in.
The concept of "grandfathering" rule breakers has always seemed like naked corruption to me. OK, we think this thing is so bad, that we're passing a law to ban it, BUT everyone who was already doing this bad thing can keep doing it forever because... because... because putting an existing company out of business is apparently the worst thing in the world. If our elected officials think something is bad enough to ban outright, then it should go whole hog and actually ban it. Not just prevent upstart competitors to existing legacy industry.
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The site is wrong about the Fremont plant being exempted as detailed here:
https://dailykanban.com/2016/09/29/docs-reveal-teslas-produc...
(With things like…links to their permit applications, I.e., sources)
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> Tesla's Fremont factory was the former NUMMI plant (GM/Toyota, operating since 1962). It was grandfathered in. When Tesla needed to expand battery production, they built the Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada — not California — because the permitting for battery cell manufacturing was effectively impossible. The Cybertruck factory went to Austin, Texas.
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...
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Tesla famously has to use horse drawn carriages to move new Teslas to their paint shop in Nevada. This is why they do not paint the cybertruck. /s
That isn’t what it says. Read again.
> Tesla's Fremont factory was the former NUMMI plant (GM/Toyota, operating since 1962). It was grandfathered in. When Tesla needed to expand battery production, they built the Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada — not California — because the permitting for battery cell manufacturing was effectively impossible. The Cybertruck factory went to Austin, Texas.
What part am I misreading? How is it that tesla expanded their cell manufacturing in 2023 in California when it was "effectively impossible"?
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On the website, it claims you cannot manufacture lithium battery cells in California unless you are grandfathered in. A relatively minimal search found statevolt.com. They are building a factory in the Imperial Valley. While I did see the project is on hold. It seems implausible that they bought the site, not having researched whether you could actually build lithium battery cells in California. Considering the banned website claims it's impossible, I can't trust anything on that website without citations.
You can thank the fine people who figured it was cheaper/easier/faster to just dump the toxic waste out back (or offshore [0]) for many of these processes being outlawed. If I'm not mistaken, CA has the 2nd most Superfund sites in the US.[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_ocean_dumps_off_Southern...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
Some points on this page are simply incorrect.
For instance, NC milling is done in California. Printed circuit board manufacturing is done in California. Small-scale integrated circuit fabrication is done.
> No new fabs have been built in CA in over a decade. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all build elsewhere.
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.
Everyone wants heavy industry outcomes, no one wants heavy industry side-effects;
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...
Interesting website.
"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.
And there’s still mercury contamination from the gold rush in San Jose.
Should California be treated differently than the rest of the world?
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.
this does happen to some extent for example with auto emissions and other things. CA is such a large market when it alone makes a change, it often drags along other states or the nation.
Not really. CA can regulate import and sales of items based on the what the item does once in CA. They can't really regulate how it was made somewhere else.
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For example, the ubiquity of backup cameras in cars is because it is a requirement in CA.
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I live in Santa Clara where the first chip fans in the world existed. In places like Santa Clara (home to Intel, AMD, Nvidia), and neighboring Sunnyvale and Mountain View there are maps of chemical leakage of industrial solvents which had contaminated the groundwater.
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.
There was a fairly recent case on Apple about this in the Santa Clara California area: https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-takes-action-against-ap... (EPA, 2025)
See also https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232 (Ashley M. Gjøvik , 2024)
IIRC Google mountain view had to get evacuated once for fumes seeping through the ground
Elon Musk and Colossus have generated 3000 jobs in Memphis, according to Tesla propaganda (I mean "propaganda" in the original neutral term, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda).
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.
I find it disingenuous to talk about construction jobs as being "generated". Construction jobs are contracts. Building a datacenter might put 3000 people under contract temporarily but it doesn't "generate" jobs. Once the contract is complete those contractors they're no longer paid by the builder.
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.
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Now compared that to this map of superfund sites and the pollutants they've left in our soils and groundwater. Statistically speaking, an average American lives within 10 miles of one of these sites
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
I don't have experience in basically all of these industrial processes, so I can't really comment there. I strongly support environmental protections, but I have no idea if what California does actually does that.
But 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).
Let's be honest: People have no problem polluting elsewhere as long as they can consume the final product without suffering the consequences. TFA isn't important to the people of California.
It would be nice if the site cited the regulations and costs that make the different facilites impossible — are they outright banned? Are there environmental regulations that don’t exist elsewhere? Is it a long process for permitting with tons of inspections?
It's interesting, but is there some conflation of regional restrictions with the state of California?
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.
I'm not in the US, but isn't the Bay Area quite specifically very polluted, very densely populated, and has some weird geographical/meteorological quirk that makes it very hard to get air pollution to blow away?
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?
This website gets a "very difficult" to "impossible" rating for usability: tiny, dense text, dim & blurry fonts and the modern UX that insists on reinventing how people navigate a webpage. Ironically it WAS made in California.
They lost me at "vacuum deposition - impossible" without justification. As far as processes go it's one of the safest (everything happens in a sealed vacuum chamber). Maybe the solvents used to clean prior to coating?
Yeah, it’s the solvents used for cleaning the chambers and parts. Very nasty stuff, and it’s probably the biggest concern for this type of facility anywhere, not just in California.
The stuff my dad used for cleaning down beryllium copper sheets that then had silicon, gold, and nichrome deposited onto them to make tiny medical pressure sensors was generally various stages of xylene, amyl acetate, freon, and - on one notable occasion when a shipment of the sheet stock came heavily contaminated with tractor oil - plain ordinary petrol.
This was back in the 80s.
You are very much Not Allowed To Do That Now.
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The site would be better if it linked to the actual regulation that prohibits each type of business instead of just making the claim “0 new factories of this type have been built”.
So no new car paint shops or oil refineries? I'm okay with that.
Oil refineries in particular are interesting because the sources for the blend of gasoline California requires[0] are either in CA itself or are few and far away. This means that gasoline prices are susceptible to greater supply shocks and so on. Many US regulations follow from California exercising its large market to induce companies to change their policies (electronic one-click cancel, CCPA, No Surprises in healthcare billing) but this one hasn't quite had the same effect.
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.
0: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65184
They are wrong about paint shops.or at least the reason.
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.
Paint VOCs sounds fine, until it's done at industrial scale, and it's also your neighbor, and also all the children in the neighborhood have asthma, and also healthcare is a lot more expensive...
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.
Most of this stuff could be done in compliance with the laws but it’s just cheaper to do it somewhere else where you allowed to vent poison in the air rather than having to filter it out.
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Are they only banned in the cities, or are they banned in the state, which -- even in California, should have rural areas far enough away from cities to be tenable?
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
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Are you okay with not using products that have an oil refinery in their supply chain?
I do not care to try to make things ethically fair for oil refineries. Call me a hypocrite, I do not care, as these companies similarly do not care. "Ya got me!", yup, moving on, I am still glad oil refineries are effectively banned.
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I think if we consolidate those operations the better, and then we can improve an regulate legislative or as a market more easily than if everyone is spread all over.
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The creator of the website is the CEO of a battery-powered induction cooktop company. (https://x.com/sdamico)
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
I've been following Sam for awhile, his business model makes heavy use of outsourcing production of components to skilled partners. It's no sweat off him if he makes the Impulse stove in California or not.
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.
I'm not sure I agree.
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.
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What should be the basis for comparison? The locality with the most permissive rule on each aspect of manufacturing? Is there any absolute floor on the morality? Should California allow slavery to be used in factories if some other locality allows it?
This is a non-argument, and it does not even in the slightest counter anything claimed on the site.
To be fair, it would be very hard to argue against this website since it stays very vague.
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.
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It isn't claiming to be an argument. It's context.
It proves it's pointlessness. CA doesn't want manufacturing like that in their state. Period. They're saying you are not welcome to destroy our environment, go to Texas, they love that shit. States Rights, right?
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Oh the smell of freshly groomed Astroturf. They should call it neighbors for a more profitably toxic environment or something like that.
ad hominem? Please explain what makes the regulatory burdens onerous instead of impossible.
That’s good to know, but it’s still interesting information.
> has an agenda
Everyone has an agenda. Is anything on this site false? Is it incorrect information?
Really difficult to say because it doesn't make many concrete claims. It doesn't mention any regulations or say what chemicals or processes are actually banned. These are not easy things to look up. I can tell you that at least the semiconductor fabrication stuff is false, there are many fabs in California and here's a new one as of a few days ago: https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/02/19/san-jose-tech-nokia-i....
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/
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I don't know. He didn't provide anything to backup his claims. Without data that site is worthless.
Maybe reworded as “He has skin in the game”
> 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.
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> Aluminum Anodizing & CNC Machining
There are a ton of CNC machining (AL and otherwise) and anodizing shops in the Bay Area.
Lies can be either by commission or omission.
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It isn't even information – it's noise.
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".
Yes. They lump in sheet metal stamping with giga casting. They are completely different techs with different energy footprints. Banning aluminum casting does not implicitly ban stamping.
I don't think it makes a good case for itself. No automotive paint shops sounds kind of ridiculous. I don't know anything about that industry but there has to be a way to paint cars in a safe way, right??
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.
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Feel free to point out any inaccuracies.
Feel free to provide sources for the claims
I’m happy this is coming from a real person with skin in the game and not just a veiled PAC with murky intentions.
Man, this guy has his head all the way up his anus. A guy who thinks that whether or not the math classes in San Francisco high schools are literally titled "algebra" is an important question, who doesn't realize that Noah Smith is a raging moron, and who considers Elon Musk to be the greatest industrialist in history, has been listening to a tad too much Garry Tan. No wonder he can't figure out how to market appliances. He's just disconnected from the real world.
I work in manufacturing. I don't think regulations are the only barrier. The other one is attracting investment. Manufacturing is simply second class compared to IT, the finance industry, healthcare, etc.
I wonder if there's a law+econ analysis of comparing the current framework (regulations and upfront permitting) vs having the regulations but then enforcement via combination of randomized gov't inspections and private lawsuits. The motivation would be to allow things to move faster while also requiring the same degree of compliance, but without the massive red tape upfront with administrators having no real incentive to approve projects or move fast. One obvious downside is that it effectively creates an economic incentive to try and skirt the law and/or find loopholes, but that arguably exists to the same degree in the existing system.
My dad spent 40+ years working at a unionized industrial facility in California that recycled paper and cardboard waste into the paper layer used to make the corrugated interior of cardboard boxes. There were some local regulations on waste water runoff that I'm aware of, but he never mentioned much else.
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.
Probably helpful to add why, otherwise this is just seems intended to trigger biases
Operating systems are now updating legal docs so people in california can't use them. California has gone full retard.
https://github.com/MidnightBSD/src/commit/7d956a27123f2d77a0...
This will come to other states soon enough.
Or the person writing this has?
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.
If California made the products illegal that couldn't be produced here I wonder how many of these laws would suddenly be removed because the issues associated with the laws were suddenly considered "acceptable".
Are other states building all this manufacturing/semiconductor capacity? I think it's an overall USA thing, we just don't do manufacturing anymore because it's cheaper to do it in another country.
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.
> Not sure what the point of the website is
I think it's just informative. I found it interesting at least. I formed my own conclusions from it.
Really? Since it’s lacking any comparison to other states and because many of these complaints single out metropolitan areas comparison to nationwide census of metro areas, what actual conclusions are you drawing that are valid?
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?
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This kinda makes me wanna move to CA. someone should take these list items and make a map of those fabs in the US so we can avoid moving near them.
" Building an EV requires metal forging, battery manufacturing, painting, and chip fabrication — all processes that drove Tesla to build in Nevada and Texas. Tesla's Fremont factory was the former NUMMI plant (GM/Toyota, operating since 1962). It was grandfathered in."
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)
To be clear ….violations of their, repeatedly update, permit to paint cars. Something the website labels impossible.
yet oddly California is the #1 manufacturing state by a wide margin.
https://www.industryselect.com/blog/top-10-us-states-for-man...
I would like to read this website but the font and colors are so poorly selected (read and grey for most of the text) that I'm not willing to struggle to do so. I guess my eyes are just old.
> 1 West Coast shipyard that can build destroyers
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?
While I do tend to feel it is important that superpower-level countries be capable of producing within their political borders most/all of what they consume, for reasonable prices; I do not tend to feel that everything we produce needs to be produced everywhere within those political borders. California is the most beautiful and hospitable land on the entire planet. There's nothing wrong with putting the toxic chemical factories in a desert or tundra somewhere.
> 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.
Banned in California.. wait, I meant the Bay Area.
The line about auto paint shops is out of place / misleading.
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.
This is deeply hypocritical, since Californians consume products built with these forbidden processes. They just have them made elsewhere so they can feel like they are ambassadors of environmental protection.
California has some deep trauma from all of the superfund sites the semis left behind.
Poorly written site. Javascript-only, no references, no sources.
"Grandfathered in"? Isn't that how you create monopolies?
If geographic location is a serious advantage, then yes, kind of. Competitors would have an uphill battle against the grandfathered incumbents.
I doubt it is though, in these cases. Was probably just to make the measures more popular, as in not destroying existing investments / jobs.
Half the states in the country are actively deregulating all of this stuff. Why not take your factories there? California is anyways too expensive.
I confess I don't know what to make of this. Without seeing the reasons why these are banned, what is the point? Would be like lamenting how you can't use asbestos. Sure, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
apparently you can use asbestos and they have been and will continue until 2030-ish. It's now in the wild in all kinds of unexpected places.
Yeah, I don't think that is generally viewed as a good thing, though? And I would not be surprised to learn California has some stricter rules on it. (Would honestly not be surprised to find out some of these "banned" items are due to asbestos level concerns.)
I guess Tesla’s paint shop in Fremont is virtual.
Great! Considering you can’t swing a dead cat around Silicon Valley without hitting a superfund site, this seems ok.
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.
> California has outsourced its industrial base while still consuming the products.
America did that. If it was just California then they could import iPhone parts from Alabama, but they don't do that do they?
This site is limiting its focus to environmental permitting concerns, it seems. The problem is that one of the biggest barriers to manufacturing in the US is labor: cost and protections of various sorts.
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.
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I claim BS: labs can operate with these and more dangerous chemicals.
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"
Is this a lobbying initiative?
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.
I don't want to make a mess in my yard but I don't care if your yard is a mess and I'll buy it
Why not invest in ways to make these processes more eco friendly?
Lot of unsupported "impossibles" in there.
At least the New Republic is clean and healthy... on paper...
My favorite banned in CA is the "off roster" handguns that the police can buy and sell to the people of CA at a markup.
Make sure not to list the things that are easy to build or permit because California will find a way to make it impossible.
Page seems to be blocked from EU.
You could make similar site about much of Europe to be honest.
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...
How do the new manufacturing startups in the Bay Area and El Segundo deal with these limitations?
A lot of these are stretches or remove nuance. I get the point they are trying to make, but it's a lot weaker than they think and undermined by their own "hero" example: painting cars in California
> 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.
Oh it's worse bullshit. Modern paint shops don't emit meaningful VOCs. Even in Texas, for example. Nobody's even making non voc compliant auto paint anymore because there is no market for it.
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
Lot of things could be added to this list. Good luck getting permission to start a hospital, or permission to mine/refine anything with a slightly messy process (e.g. rare earth metals). You can't build a new port. The California Coastal Commission won't let you open a new hotel anywhere on the water. You can't even keep a bar open late in San Francisco.
A new 22 floor hotel is on the way in less than a mile from the ocean in Newport Beach.
I just searched "new hospital opened in CA" on Google and see that there were two new hospitals opened in Irvine in December, half of a new hospital complex in Santa Clara opened in October, more being built and slated to open this year or next...
Now look up when those projects were started...I will wait.
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The author equates "you need a permit, which you obtain by making proof you follow the law and best practices re: handling dangerous substances" with "BANNED!!!!!!".
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.
Fuck oil refineries though. That's what you want to lead with?
I grew up in the 80s, not far from Times Beach, Missouri, so I'm a huge supporter of environmental protection. Hooray for California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
https://www.epa.gov/mo/town-flood-and-superfund-looking-back...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ElM_xAtbAY
i hear that's why Tesla paint is so soft, and why it's so popular for Tesla buyers to apply expensive protective film to their paint. I didn't believe anyone when they told me, and now i have more scratches after 1 year than my mazda did after 5+ years
Without the list of environmental side effects those things have it’s not a neutral list.
How about the ban of asbestos and Chlorofluorocarbons?
I love that "The Grandfathered In" section. Here's just one sample of a place that presumably this stupid website wants to keep up and running:
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.
There is a difference between banned and you can't just pump it into the next water stream.
CA is currently importing gas from Bermuda via the Panama Canal:
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.
Got a new one. In California—the only place that matters in tech—all operating systems must implement age verification by Jan 1, 2027. Which means this is coming to a computer near you, worldwide.
Not in the free states they won’t.
The free states that demand it of Pornhub causing it to withdraw services from those states?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1skbgEGEn80
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.
But don't you get it? We're moving up the value chain to things only WE can do.
The claim that aluminum anodizing is "banned in California" because of the sulfuric acid waste it produces is patently absurd. There are no shortage of labs, factories, and more in California that use sulfuric acid, and they all figure out how to dispose of their waste without going "fuck it, YOLO it into the river".
A lot of people on this site clearly have never tried doing anything in California that involves more infrastructure than a laptop. Can easily be 18 months or more to get a permit to 'do things the right way'. If they'll even deign to give you one.
So most of these are just saying "you can't do this because they won't let you dump your waste in the river" and some are just "nobody's doing this in California yet"
What if you ... don't dump your waste in the river? Is it legal if you dispose of your waste properly?
California can do a lot to private companies, but the supremacy clause allows the federal government to do what it wants. If a business wants to engage in these illegal-in-California practices, they could partner with the federal government.
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.
The newest thing I've seen:
"compostable - except in CA"
Why? The microbes don't get along with sourdough starter bacteria?
It's because CA has stricter regulations about what can be labeled compostable. Whatever had this label was never compostable to begin with, but called itself that on a technicality.
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Guess we can add free (from age verification) operating systems to that list now as well.
This website has no content at all. It doesn't mention a single regulation or law. It's just something for politicians to cite from the floor or in reports when they're demanding deregulation or subsidy, and a url that sounds like a slogan.
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.
honestly, you couldn't even build your own house.
As a Californian:
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.
They are: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2026/demo/stat...
Is hosting a website in California banned? /s
https://check-host.net/ip-info?host=bannedincalifornia.org
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Ya a lot of people on this site are ideologically positioned in a way that required demonizing CA. I don’t have any skin in that game but it seems pretty clearly A Thing to me from the other side of the country.
A lot of people on this site do or used to live in CA. It is especially galling to have people who have never lived there tell those that have what it is like there. Especially people who have tried to build or run a business in CA.
The Silicon Valley founderati is chock-full of (right wing) libertarians. I can't tell if they were always that way, or are increasingly disgruntled by state-taxes the wealthier they get.
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> This has 70 upvotes within 30 minutes. This feels like an astroturf.
Not really surprising given the audience, HN has an awful lot of neo-Technolibertarian types.
The kind who used to complain about government regulation of free speech, and now complain about anything that gets in the way of amassing massive amounts of capital at any social/environmental/political cost.
It's unfortunate that folks who complain incessantly about "facts not feelings" don't appear to be using their critical thinking skills here. But I guess it's not too surprising.
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Please don't post generic flamebait involving comparisons between nations/regions on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47165849 and marked it off topic.
I’m married to a Brit and she is constantly in awe of how much better our healthcare is here in the US. And she paid for private insurance there too.
Quality of facilities, low wait times, quality of staff interactions, organization, etc.
She even freaks out about how we have free parking at our doctors and hospitals here!
We’re on corporate insurance.
So why are so many of your citizens without even basic affordable healthcare?
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US healthcare is excellent – if you can afford it.
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What is the 'INSERTNAME' law that explains how all conversations on HN, which is ostensibly focused on tech, devolve (evolve) into the realm of the humanities?
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UK isn't EU, especially when it comes to health system. I lived in the US for quite some time (from Fr), the healthcare is great... if you can afford an expensive health insurance AND pay some extra money when required. The avg US people can not pay and when you can not pay the experience is just far worth than terrible.
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It’s in progress. Most of Europe slept on that - thats true.
But pretty sure we’ll figure it out over the next decade.
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One of the big reasons we have no universal healthcare is because we socialized defense for other countries like your country. You guys are years if not decades away from being able to defense yourselves.
That’s not really true, as an American.
We spend a ton on healthcare anyway, just inefficiently and in a way that causes stress and struggles for patients.
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Defend against who? You?
I am in Canada, and the USA recently threatened to invade us, basically.
So we need to buy weapons from the USA in order to defend ourselves from the USA?
Sounds like mafia protection schemes.
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Do you think that if europe had tripled its defence spending over the last century the US would have spent more or less?
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They just really, really want to be European.
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.
> At least if they drive everyone productive out of the state, the environment will be pristine.
Most of what you said has been going on for >100 years. That's sure driven people out!
I don’t know, 39.5m with net growth might disagree with you. Are you living in California at present? If not, do any of the deregulation in laws where you are trouble you. If so, when do you plan on leaving and where to?
California is one of the only states in the union seeing a population decline year over year (while surrounding states are seeing population growth).
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.
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Reading through this discussion and speaking from professional experience I have to say that the real challenge isn’t just specific bans, it’s the administrative cost and the inertia of a permitting paradigm designed in the 1960s and 70s. We’re still managing complexity with relics of a regulatory architecture built for a different era — one with paper files, siloed agencies, and a bias toward “check-the-box” compliance rather than real world outcomes.
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.