SV is unique in the USA in that it's a major industrial area that evolved into a huge urban center, not a small rural town. So the impact of each bit of pollution is much larger.
I went to school in Pittsburgh, PA where they are building condos and bars on slag piles from 19th century blast furnaces. I don't think industry in cities is unique. For a few more examples: Philadelphia has an oil refinery practically downtown. Even without leaving the Bay Area Oakland and Richmond have heavy industry in close proximity to people's homes inside the cities.
> SV is unique in the USA in that it's a major industrial area that evolved into a huge urban center
Not unique at all. That's how most large urban areas in America got started. They became urbanized because people lived close to their jobs in the days before highways.
Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and pretty much any east coast city became urban because of heavy industry. Factories located there because of the ports which brought in raw materials. Those ports then spawned more heavy industries (railroads, shipyards, etc...)
Eco-friendlyness and general kharma in the public eyes is usually dependant on how many vendor-layers you are away from the horrifyng layers of reality.
Chicken-Stable-Cleaner - horrifying.
Egg-Delivery-Truck-Driver - acceptable.
Hotel-Breakfast-Cook - never met a nicer person.
If the horror is additional well distributed, and humanity is secretly addicted to your product and wont imagine live without it- you get a free ride on the kharma slide.
>>Coltan from african warlords mined by enslaved children in every cellphone! Will humanity give up cellphones to save the innocent? Click here - to find out.<<
It would be a interesting project to find out the actual kharma-cost of a product though. Imagine the inheritance, if the industry relies on a lot of kharmatic lower services- or propells other low-kharma activitys onwards.
Though it could end up, showing that the it- is actually a net-positiv to humanitys kharma, after all i drastically reduces what humanity would have usually done with its spare time.
> It would be a interesting project to find out the actual kharma-cost of a product though
I'm having trouble finding it and would love if someone else found it, but a couple years ago someone did an academic paper doing just that for the iphone, tallying up all externalities (abuse of workers and the environment for example) involved in manufacturing the product and coming up with a "real" cost of making it. I recall they concluded an iphone would cost $1000 to $2000 if the true costs were included.
I seem to remember the phrase "dark value" but it hasn't been helpful in googling for the paper.
Not super unique I think. Rochester NY got rich with optics manufacturing (Bausch&Lomb, Eastman Kodak), and is now a world leader in optics research. Less manufacturing than there used to be but the talent never really left.