Comment by wewtyflakes
1 day ago
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.
My point wasn't about fairness towards oil refinery companies, it was that supporting a ban on refineries in your local area while still benefiting from the downstream outputs of oil refineries is hypocritical nimbyism.
If oil refineries are bad in California, they're bad everywhere, and if they're bad everywhere, we ought to stop using them altogether, which will make for some unwelcome lifestyle changes.
Would it be hypocritical nimbyism if I wanted to use semiconductors containing arsenic, but didn't want my living room to be an arsenic warehouse? Or how far away does the arsenic warehouse have to be before it starts being hypocritical nimbyism for me to not like it there?
IMO it would be hypocritical nimbyism if the arsenic warehouse would need to be in someone's living room for those semiconductors to get manufactured.
> If oil refineries are bad in California, they're bad everywhere
That doesn't follow. It only follows that they are bad everywhere with circumstances similar to California. A place differing in distribution of population, distribution of agricultural land, weather patterns, and/or water flows might be able to have refineries without causing the harms that makes them difficult to place in California.
I agree with your reasoning in principle, but I think it doesn't hold up for California specifically. According to Gemini, 90% of California's population lives in 5% of its land area, and 45-50% of the land is government-owned, much of it being unpopulated wild areas including large parts of the Mojave and Colorado deserts.
The state is large, diverse and already contains vast chunks of unpopulated land. Almost everywhere that isn't near the poles is similar to some part of California.
I'm fine if other states want to ban them too. I'm also fine if ultimately running oil refineries is uneconomical. I do not care if this is nimbyism; other communities are free to set their own rules.
Much of the pharmaceutical industry depends on petroleum byproducts.
So you're okay with no refineries after all.
So, no combustion-based private or public transportation, no detergents, no aspirin, paracetamol or ibuprofen.
It would still be possible to drive an EV, though. You could keep it lubricated with whale oil.
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