[ecshafer]

Government needs to get out of the way. Micron announced a memory fab in Syracuse in 2023. It took 3 years, 20,000 pages of "environmental review", deals with the government on amount of union contracts during building, etc. for them to break ground in 2026 for a 2030 opening date. In any reasonable world, a 2023 announcement should have broke ground in 2023.

[otherme123]

OTOH, a celulose factory near me, built in the 1950's, got their permits fast and with little regard to environment. FF three decades, and their entire surroundings are destoyed for everyone else. Trials go nowhere, because they have all authorizations needed (and a lot of political leverage because they are the main employer in the region). Careful fast-tracking business that have zero incentives to avoid externalization of costs.

[zouhair]

Oh, yeah, we are in this calamity because of government interference, not unbridled capitalism. Sure.

[CamperBob2]

'Unbridled capitalism' is why the RAM exists in the first place, along with the computer or phone you typed that on.

[Shitty-kitty]

Buddy they ain't building an ice-cream parlor. 200 miles of the Hudson river is a Superfund site. The biggest polluters, PCB's, lead and mercury.

[ecshafer]

The main blocker was that there were bats there so they needed to buy separate land to preserve. 20k pages of environmental review is just make work to spend money and create an unnecessary paper trail. If polluting with x is illegal then its illegal. The review doesnt stop that.

[wahern]

And? The primary goal should be to catch and stop pollution, not make manufacturers spend years promising not to do something they're not allowed to do. If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.

Using red tape as some kind of prophylactic is ridiculous. If the state doesn't have the monitoring in place, you have to just trust the company, which is naive if not negligent. If you do have the monitoring, why require the extremely expensive song & dance? To protect corporations from negligently wasting money?

Answer: because the song & dance is primarily about extracting concessions, like union labor or even cash (e.g. promises to pay to fix someone else's pollution, or contributions to various interest groups). The friction and expense involved in today's development review processes are many times more costly to all involved than the social benefit.

[Shitty-kitty]

The process is there because Industry has proven that it can't be trusted. The only way to stop it is to verify that it won't happen in the first place by making sure their building plans are up to par. The song-and-dance, well even with the review, they try their damn hardest to cut corners and hood-wig wherever they can.

[danaris]

> If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.

That's hopelessly naïve.

If you let them build the facility that can pollute, they're going to pollute.

And if you point to the pollution coming out and tell them "you have to stop," they're going to say "make us."

And if you point to the pollution already in the environment and tell them "you have to clean that up, because you put it there," they're going to say "prove it."

And they're going to tie the government up in court for years or decades, and then oh, whoops, somehow the entity that actually did all the polluting has no more money and can't do anything about it :-( Good thing they were only a subsidiary that all the profit and assets can be moved out of!

And the people who actually live there are suffering from preventable diseases and dying of cancer at rates 5x the national average.

How do I know all this? Because this has been industry's playbook for over a century.

[wahern]

First of all I disagree that it's difficult to get injunctions to stop an activity that was illegal from the start. In fact, sometimes environmental reviews can backfire because they typically require affirmation by the government, which can create a defense to doing something that would otherwise be judged illegal. That type of loophole is why people are so cynical.

But even so, how does the song & dance prevent any of that? It's not like, e.g., a battery manufacturer submits a plan admitting that they're gonna dump stuff.

[Shitty-kitty]

The plan details how those chemical storage tanks are designed and constructed. The monitoring, in place, the contingency plans.

It raises the stakes, Obviously they can still cheat but now it's a matter of criminal negligence not civil law.

[wahern]

Sure, but in terms of expenditure and especially time (and time is a huge expense because of the cost of raising and securing financing) that work doesn't make up the bulk of the cost. There's nothing wrong with impact statements themselves. You need independent assessments of hazards beyond the well known ones like chemical storage, where in most cases existing codes and regulations are more than adequate. It's that in many places, California especially, there's no fixed goal post. The review process has effectively become a vehicle for local and even national politics to play out. And a method for detractors to spread FUD (again especially in California where anyone, not just officials or local residents, can challenge and drag out review of an impact statement itself, let alone proposed mitigations). Just look at what has happened with CaHSR (they're still not completely done getting write-off on all the necessary impact statements for the planned route) or the politics involved with approving offshore wind farms, where Trump and, to a lesser extent, the Biden administration showed how much pure politics plays into things and drives costs up. (And federal EIP review process is, at least historically, much simpler and less subject to political games compared to some state analogs.)

The maxim, "a nation of laws, not of men", is applicable here. If you don't have fixed goal posts or rules, governance becomes chaotic, not to mention unjust, inefficient, and ultimately corrupt (so many people like Trump because he promises to substitute his own judgement in place of democratic processes).

It would be nice if we could comprehensively hypothesis and address every possible manner in which things could wrong, but we can't. Most of the time you need to rely on broad rules, at least as a catchall, like don't harm someone or don't pollute, and ensure fast, consistent, and efficient accountability when injuries occur. The current state of development approval has become grossly degenerate in many places. In others it could definitely use some firming up. But let's not pretend that a project in California would get away with most of the stuff they can in Louisiana just because we reformed the review process. For one thing, California is much better about enforcing existing hazard codes at both the planning approval and operational stages.