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.
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
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).
Posting a list of them as a justification for red tape that blocks industries does not make sense.
The difference is that successful businesses in California just do. They don't whine about problems caused by their own incompetence.
How CA can manufacture more when you add all the other SE states?
And your statement is like saying “sure the food has poison in it, but people just tough it out and don’t whine”
How about not poising food? Seems like a worthy goal.
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.
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.
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...
toxic because of chemicals and toxic because of the release of untreated sewage (bacteria) are sufficiently different that I thought I'd point out that you kind of mix them here. Also, toxic because of high concentrations (e.g. pH) that will dilute vs toxic cumulative forever chemicals are different orders of magnitude altogether.
This incident you describe seems like a one-off and fairly benign compared to long term patterns that lead to superfund sites. Till this company dumped that batch, they weren't dumping batches, i.e. the system was working.
I'm not up on the latest, not a civil engineer or public health authority, but it is generally recommended in many seaside places not to swim at the beach after rainstorms. the influx of large volumes of water into the sewage treatment systems means that they overflow and raw sewage is released. These systems are being improved all the time, but it's a known problem and civilization hasn't collapsed. Some natural creatures like sewage outflow. When Boston moved their outflow pipe from the inner harbor to deeper water in Cape Cod bay, the lobster population collapsed. Maybe we should have called it the lobster poopulation.
Waiting for civilizational collapse to justify regulation seems like an unhelpful standard TBH. In fact, I would argue that it's one of the main problems we are having right now: that we know our current trajectory will lead to civilizational collapse, but aren't willing to change course.
I wonder if chemical plants have something similar, a way to contain an uncontrolled outflow of toxic stuff if the normal flow of neutralization fails.
BTW this likely means quite a bit of land used up by such a reservoir which is ideally never needed, but must be present.
Wastewater plants have other ponds and tanks which are part of the process, and they're usually full, with liquid moving in and out, accompanied by stirring, air, and chemical injection. A big empty one is a backup system.
Real engineering.[1]
[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-09/documents/la...
It can range from overflow tanks to capture spills to concrete “pools” around the entire operation that capture any catastrophic leaks and direct it to underground holding tanks.
There are a ton of highly toxic industrial processes. Properly designed plants and safety infrastructure means it’s never an issue.
This is enough to earn chemical plants a spot on a future "BANNED in California 2" article, because it's "clearly" overregulation.
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).
Extraction of that oil via commercial wells greatly reduced the natural seepage, which is why there is so little crude oil floating in that ocean water today. Oil drilling actually made the water cleaner.
And 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?
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)
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.
Hawaii has other problems. When I lived there, I went through a lot of Neosporin because every scrape you get from a reef pushes in bacteria that got into the ocean from the leaking sewer pipes.
The regulations are to stop the pollution, if you can manufacture without polluting, then you'll comply and be able to manufacture.
The problem is that there are other regulatory environments where the people aren't protected from pollution.
What would fix that is enforcing the regulations nation wide, then applying tariffs on imported products that don't enforce the same regulations.
Net result, more expensive phones, better health and improved environment for the public. In the same way as car pollution was cleaned up.
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.
China's system is authoritarian state-capitalism. It is precisely the bureaucracy that steered it's industries toward this outcome.
that is literally nonsense .. lazy nonsense, ill-willed nonsense.. Ignorant nonsense.
literally four seconds to search " history of us environmental law"
Maybe by then we'll have returned to building products which last (although I'm not holding my breath).
We need to push these people out of California.
These banned industrial processes sum to making almost every physical object. The net effect is that it’s nearly illegal to make anything physical. Do you think that the state or country will do well in the long term if it’s basically illegal to actually make things?
Also funny that you Musk derangement people will never actually engage with the content of the quote’s message, preferring to dismiss it based on your political disagreement with the person who said it.
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.
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 you expect it to be impossible?
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
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.
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.
It’s an appeal to absurdity that falls flat because nuclear plants and oil refineries have been built near population centers in the US (including in California) without problem.
California had had more issues from under investment in industry (see it’s ancient electrical infra that lit the state on fire) than from collocation of industry and people.
Both of the largest ports are right in SoCal and that’s going pretty well. Building another one would never make it past the permitting stage in today’s California.
We should, it would replace significant amounts of natural gas usage for space heating. Not doing so is literally cooking the planet.
> Your smartphone contains materials processed through semiconductor fabrication, chemical etching, metal anodizing, glass tempering, and electroplating — none of which you could start a new facility for in California without years of litigation.
I agree that we should make it easier to do things, specifically by decreasing the amount of litigation involved in doing stuff. But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right? I get that it's trying to be attention-grabbing, but calling it a ban when it's not just sort of confuses the issue.
but why is this a problem?
There are other states without the regulations that these businesses apparently find offensive. Why can't the manufacturing be spun up in those states?
Serious question.
Funny enough, I've known some people over the years who have explicitly viewed litigation as a reasonable alternative to regulation. Their logic was that we should just let people and companies do whatever they want. Then, if it turns out a company is dumping mercury in the river or whatever, you litigate based on the damages. Better than regulation, they assured me.
/s
Things can appear banned even when they aren't merely because there is a new technology that's better and cheaper and it's a big investment so people go with the cheaper option.
Nobody is building new coal in the US because it's so expensive, not because there's an outright ban. Now, part of the reason it's more expensive than in the past is that using once-through water for cooling raises the cost of disposing of waste heat. And now, modern and much more efficient natural gas combined cycle plant is the obvious choice because not only is the fuel cheaper per kWh, but you also need to spend a lot less on waste heat disposal.
So is coal banned? No. Did some environmental regulations have an impact on just how bad of an idea coal is these days? Sure, but let's talk about the tradeoffs here, it's not a ban and framing it is a ban leads to bad solutions to real regulatory problems.
> Cell manufacturing uses NMP solvent for electrode coating, handles flammable electrolytes, and requires formation cycling that generates heat and gases. Tesla chose Reno for the Gigafactory specifically because of California's permitting environment.
EPA tried to heavily restrict these outright in 2024 [1] and California has air/environmental rules that made it nearly impossible to develop large battery factories in California, which is why Tesla chose Reno in 2014. An alternative didn't exist at the time and now a decade later Tesla recently filed a patent this year for Dry electrode processing [2]
So basically California lost a decade of possible lithium factories
[1] https://www.sgs.com/en-ca/news/2024/06/safeguards-9624-us-ep...
[2] https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/26/02/50290319/elon-mu...
Given the labor challenges in California due to high housing costs, which selectively pushes out those willing to work for lower wages, I am always surprised when manufacturers choose the state at all. Throwing additional challenges doesn't make it any easier.
*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.
Why mince words?
If there's a specific regulation on one aspect of a factory, as you describe, then "unbanning" the factory isn't going to help either, one must specifically unban that which was banned.
Mincing words would be saying "Factories doing X are banned" when in fact an existing Factory doing X with negative externality Y had negative externality Y priced or regulated.
That's exactly what we shouldn't be mincing, if we want to address the problems and make better decisions.
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?
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.
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.
- 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!".
The idea that people setting pollution rules secretly don't care is silly.
California can't fix the whole world's problems.
Also: I suggest rethinking your opening line. It's not very endearing.
They probably do if it's near their backyard
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.
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!)
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
If it was California wouldn’t be covered in superfund sites that originated from industrial activities that took place decades ago.
In your proposal you'd also cede the global market to China- because nobody in Angola cares about how those solar panels were made.
This is about as true as saying "But people don't care about child sexual abuse". Sure, those partying with Epstein don't.
Plenty of people do care and indeed are today making sacrifices that align with this. Including lowering living standards. If you don't then that's on you, but speak for yourself.
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.
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.
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?
It's mostly a question of when, not if.
Food is slightly different, judging by the rates of obesity people can afford more than they need.
Less stuff and less pollution everywhere.
Something to bear in mind when you are being told environmental damage is being caused by the poor or some foreign country.
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.
- 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...
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.
One thing is to regulate the industrial sector to be cleaner if waaaay more expensive and another is to just forbid stuff that can be reasonably be done cleanly (but again, waaaay more expensive than in asia, for example)
Then author just wanted to be over dramatic about how it’s not cost competitive to build in the Bay Area vs places like Reno where the land is cheaper and labor is less. Their scape goat or whipping boy is regulations but that’s highly myopic at best.
A hell lot of industries, including most the original author is mentioning, simply would not work in California. California is running out of drinking water for humans. You can de-regulate all that you want, even cancel all environmental laws, but that will not change the reality: You don't have water. Want to build a water-consuming factory? Great, but please go to somewhere where water is available.
Yes, bureaucracy can be annoying, and of course California has a hell lot of "let's not fix the actual problem, but make it mandatory to put up a sign about it" regulations that for someone from the outside (like me) look silly. If the state of California knows this substance REALLY is harmful, why... is it here?! Either it's not really harmful, but if it is... what? A sign is the solution?! ;)
So I understand people complaining about environmental regulations in California. We had the same in Europe for decades. Everybody was complaining and making fun about all the EU regulations. Then the UK left via Brexit. And learned a lesson. And today nobody is joking about EU regulations anymore.
Anyway: One may call it "banned", or "expensive" or whatever. But it really is "does it really make sense to put this here?".
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?
You are absolutely relying on some very outdated tropes, especially because I know China is in your mind. China remains a production powerhouse and has radically overhaul the country environmentally in the last 15 years. It's pulling away fast and hard in green energy. It's a country that had to go from mass poverty to modern era in 50 years compared to the hundreds of years. They aren't perfect yet, not California level of drinking water from sewers, but I fully believe they'll get there and still be a production power house by not having delusions and anti-engineering drive decisions.
I really meant what I wrote: Compare the environment. Pretty much everybody in Shenzhen hates Shenzhen. People live in tiny apartments. And not because they are poor: Even if you have money, you live in such a tiny box. Because everybody understands that Shenzhen is a Machine, and you are a part of that machine. Your goal is to one day be able to have made enough money to be able to exit that system, and unlike the USA, that actually really works.
Want to build electronics manufacturing and be able to compete with Shenzhen? Start by first building 50,000 box apartments of 200 square feet in size. Next step: Find 50,000 US Americans who want to work in that machine.
So yes, when it comes to electronics, it's not so much about getting poisoned by a poisoned nature, but by suffering in another way.
For clothes it's a different matter, for example. There you still have the oldschool stuff - want the US to be able to compete? Let's give the kids some cancer!
Let me try to re-phrase: Go to the place where stuff is successfully made that you want to in-source into the USA. Then make an informed decision if you really want the baggage that comes with it at home.
I am massively benefitting from something like Shenzhen existing on this planet. It is so effective and productive because it was designed for that from the ground up. Would I want anything like Shenzhen anywhere near me? Hell no!
Most US Americans asking for re-industrialization have neither worked in those industries nor even have a clue what it feels like working in those industries. The people who are asking for these industrial jobs to be re-created are those who do not have any intention to take one of those jobs.
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.
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.
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.
This statement makes me smile. Although I see where this comes from...
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.
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)
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?)
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.
Stop promoting overpopulation. The USA adds ~1.8 million of people every year. That's one more Phoenix city, every year.
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.
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.
"Semiconductor Fabrication (7nm/5nm)
The main processor requires ultra-clean rooms, toxic gases (arsine, phosphine), and chemical etching. No new fabs have been built in CA in over a decade. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all build elsewhere."
Phosphine is pretty nasty stuff. California was full of EPA Superfund sites when the government got stuck with cleaning up all the toxic waste. Politicians and voters went, "Eff that!" after manufacturers left the state, but left their barrels of shit behind.
It says, for example, that it's impossible to manufacture batteries in California and cites Tesla moving to Texas as the example. But Telsa still makes batteries in California in Fremont. They last did expansions on their battery manufacturing plants in 2023.
It cites all the dangerous chemicals used in manufacturing, but those aren't banned in California. CA has safety requirements for handling toxic materials. And we should be safely handling those materials, it's crazy to suggest we don't because of progress or whatever.
all sites: https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/EPA::epa-facility-registry-s...
npl sites: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
Also funnily enough, the first place I checked from this site's list of facilities that have been grandfathered in led to this finding
> Lehigh Hanson's Permanente cement plant in Cupertino, CA, is permanently closing following thousands of environmental violations and over 80 years of operation. The plant was a major source of air pollution and discharged toxic selenium into Permanente Creek.
Not being able to build a destroyer in California seems like a small price to pay for an ecosystem not poisoned
The Bay Area is peppered with Superfund sites that used to be fabs in the 80s. Maybe CA is saying it's done its part and now it's someone else's turn.
Example: cites automotive paint shop restrictions as the quintessential example of what you can't do in CA, and qualifies it with a specific Bay Area regulation.
So, the restrictions on incredibly stinky processes like spray painting cars that emit lots of VOCs and dust are somewhat reasonable?
Or to put it more crudely, isn't it a bit like putting up a big "NO FARTING" sign in a crowded room where the windows don't open, and then simply expecting people to understand that this is a place where they should not fart?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_ocean_dumps_off_Southern...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
The very first Google offices sat directly over one of these sites around 2004. It took decades to dissipate. People complained about noxious fumes and this was more than 20 years after the spills had occurred.
There are real tradeoffs to having heavy industry to human health and well being.
See also https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232 (Ashley M. Gjøvik , 2024)
But, locals don't love that because of the environmental concerns.
https://mashable.com/article/naacp-data-centers
I, for one, would not want to live within 100 miles of these data centers. But, people that live there already are not being given the choice.
And, I imagine not many of the people that live there are being offered one of those 3000 jobs.
For instance, NC milling is done in California. Printed circuit board manufacturing is done in California. Small-scale integrated circuit fabrication is done.
America did that. If it was just California then they could import iPhone parts from Alabama, but they don't do that do they?
Don't need to worry about those pesky people and their rights in other countries where people are in desperate need for, or are coerced into, working in these industries.
In addition to banning these manufacturing processes in California, we should ban the products manufactured with these processes from California. This would require products to "green up" in order to access California's vast market.
By allowing dirty products manufactured elsewhere, we've simply moved the problem and its harms out of our line of sight. And frequently to a place where the people are poor, non-white and under represented.
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...
One can hope that most Californians switch to BEVs from ICE vehicles before this becomes more of a constraint.
Gasoline usage externalities are poorly priced-in so the resulting increase in cost of gasoline here is probably overall a good thing. If we had appropriate carbon/sulphur/etc pricing on the outputs, I think it would be less justifiable since then the externalities would be priced in.
They are all using voc compliant paints these days, even outside California.
I have no idea how hard permitting is mind you, but the claimed thing here is that they can't be voc compliant and that's just totally wrong.
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.
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
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.
Everyone has an agenda. Is anything on this site false? Is it incorrect information?
Not sure what the point of the website is. To me it looks like a bad faith argument. The secular trend in the US has been to increase margins by moving manufacturing to other countries.
The tariffs are certainly not making it easier to manufacture domestically.
I think it's just informative. I found it interesting at least. I formed my own conclusions from it.
https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/EPA::epa-facility-registry-s...
I dislike how misleading and emotionally targeted this is and I understand the hate we get as tech people if this is the best we can do.
A separate but related topic is the warnings California requires of products. It's gotten a bit out of hand because every product you buy has the same warning, which completely dilutes what I hope was the intention. Even buying something as simple as an electric guitar comes with the "can cause cancer" warning because it can have nickel parts on it (usually for the bridge and tuners and frets).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
https://www.epa.gov/mo/town-flood-and-superfund-looking-back...
There was an EPA superfund site across the street (this all was adjacent to the beach).
The company also had a co-generator that they used to produce their own power (using natural gas) and sold excess power to the local electrical utility.
It's still in operation, though it changed owners ~4 times while he was there.
Edit: Now that I’m doing the research a partnership isn’t even needed, just a contract. Which makes sense, the feds cannot hire a private individual to do what would be illegal for them to do themselves… conversely, a company who is contracted to do federal business also enjoys supremacy by virtue of acting for the feds.
This website misses talking about all the Tesla Fremont paint shop violations (see https://www.baaqmd.gov/en/news-and-events/page-resources/202... ) and various OSHA violations:
- https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-02-11/tesla-fine... (2025)
- https://www.thedrive.com/news/26727/tesla-had-3-times-as-man... (2019)
Banned in California.. wait, I meant the Bay Area.
https://www.industryselect.com/blog/top-10-us-states-for-man...
There are only a handful of shipyards in the US that build ships for the Navy. What makes him think regulation has anything to do with only 1 being on the West Coast?
I doubt it is though, in these cases. Was probably just to make the measures more popular, as in not destroying existing investments / jobs.
It's not all of CA, it's just the Bay Area, and probably some other urbanized areas with a history of really bad air quality.
Surely the answer is not let's just allow to pillage, pollute and extort again to build a car, ship or phone.
I like clean air, and rivers. They are good for every being.
Why not invest in ways to make these processes more eco friendly?
How about the ban of asbestos and Chlorofluorocarbons?
> A modern auto paint shop emits volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during primer, base coat, and clear coat application. The Bay Area AQMD makes permitting a new paint shop nearly impossible. This is THE classic example of what you can't do in CA.
Ah yes, the Bay Area, famously "all of California". And on top of that, the restrictions are mostly in highly populated areas.
I can't speak to permitting but the coating and coating voc stuff I know quite well and what they state is simply bullshit.
I can also say I know of a bunch of auto paint places that opened in the mountain view surrounding area alone in the 10 years I lived there.
So I suspect it's all bullshit
1) They forgot to list Kid Rock (https://x.com/GovPressOffice/status/1969256868364095868)
2) Good, I'm glad this toxic shit is banned.
3) I wish people that constantly complained about California's regulations/taxes/politics would just quietly see their way out rather than obsessively whine about it. Enjoy Texas/Florida/wherever you go. We'll be ok without you.
Top of the list is "sulfuric acid baths". The correct disposal of sulfuric acid is "dilute with water", or if about metal dissolved in it, yeah treat as waste to be cleaned up or compacted and stored into eternity at a cost. So even after skimming, this seems agenda driven, not a fact sheet.
This seems like a "we cannot do it cost efficiently, so we claim it is impossible since China underbids us"
https://github.com/MidnightBSD/src/commit/7d956a27123f2d77a0...
People and businesses that are ok with being exploited and exploiting others, while externalizing the true cost of their products on to the environment and future generations by treating the air and land like an open sewer can do it elsewhere.
If this were real instead of dogshit lobbyist slop, you'd see the details, and there's be clear arguments and action plans.
But the action is that they're going to pay politicians off, and the politicians are going to give speeches that start "I went to a website the other day, and it was called Banned in California - you might like electric cars, think they're good, but because of bad regulation, we could never make them here." And that's going to provide cover as they vote for something horrible. And buy a boat with the money they made for doing it.
"compostable - except in CA"
It seems to me that there is a fundamental disconnect, between what society needs to function and what some societies are willing to tolerate. Almost everything we take for granted, like potable water, air conditioning, personal computers or long distance transportation, relies on industries generating some sort of externalities.
Regulating these industries is necessary. But we have reached the point, where the regulation makes many of them almost impossible. This has several effects.
First, the society is now dependent on delivery of these dirty products. This is obviously problematic if there is a major crisis that disrupts supply chains, or if those who manufacture them are no longer willing to deliver.
Second, working class collapses. Manufacturing jobs are one of the more stable available. They are generally unionized, or are conductive to unionization. This is unlike service sector jobs. White collar professions can mostly cope. But those who were already disadvantaged find themselves in an even worse position.
Third, the externalities move in locations with less oversight. This can, obviously, cause greater pollution and environmental degradation globally. Further, delivery of the manufactured goods across great distances adds to carbon footprint. This, again, leads to greater environmental toll.
Taken together, benefits of overregulating "polluting" industry to oblivion, are at best local and temporary.
I would also like to note, that the collapse of manufacturing jobs can be easily linked to increased political radicalization.
That being said, it's not all gloom and doom. I firmly believe, that as the impacts of this approach are felt more and more, there will be a push for sensible deregulation. Europe is already leading the way, weakening or delaying some of the more absurd regulation schemes.[1]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-10-04/chevron...
The guy who made this site is selling a $7k stove? Good luck with that, my dude.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/02/16/gasoline-starved-cali...
I appreciate some of the arguments here about pushing pollution outside the state, but this is madness.
What if you ... don't dump your waste in the river? Is it legal if you dispose of your waste properly?
That’s why so many solutions feel like de facto bans: not because the environmental goal isn’t valid, but because the cost of compliance in time, paperwork, and legal risk creates a barrier that only well-resourced actors can navigate. The real economic deadweight loss isn’t always in the policy text — it’s in the thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars spent just to prove you did the minimum.
There’s enormous opportunity right now with data tools and AI agents for qualitative assessment. We don’t have to keep defaulting to rigid checklists that presume every context is the same. With modern sensors, realtime monitoring, and AI that can synthesize qualitative evidence with quantitative data, we can finally shift toward performance-based permits that look at actual impacts rather than adherence to outdated procedural triggers.
Imagine a system where:
Sensors and connected data streams show real emissions or ecological outcomes,
AI agents help translate diverse evidence into risk profiles,
Permits adapt based on performance instead of fixed thresholds divorced from context.
That’s not just a tech fantasy — that’s a pathway to reducing administrative drag while improving environmental protection. The status quo isn’t sustainable environmentally or economically. If we cling to 20th-century process dogma, we’ll keep seeing well-intentioned policies backfire into de facto bans, regulatory bottlenecks, and inequitable access to compliance.
Just look at what they've done about rebuilding the Palisades, and the nonsense they've perpetrated, allowing people to live and build in places that are completely impossible to make safe to live because of incredibly stupid bureacratic policy conflicts. And then the staggering mismanagement of water resources, allowing huge tax breaks and claims on water rights to giant corporations, then completely taxing and running out farmers and landowners with legacy rights, making it impossible for them to live there.
At least if they drive everyone productive out of the state, the environment will be pristine.
It's like some insanely scaled up version of gentrification, but in the most aggressively, offensively stupid way possible. California is a tasteless joke.
Most of what you said has been going on for >100 years. That's sure driven people out!
