This is too strong of a statement. There are perfectly sensible reasons to NIMBY certain activities. For instance, burning wood is probably ok in general, but a horrible idea in heavily populated cities.

Obviously, California is not composed exclusively of heavily populated cities. But it does contain a lot of them! So it is not completely insane that the regulation is skewed in favour of this.

Of course, for things that are equally polluting no matter where you do them (like burning fossil fuels), moving production outside of the location but still buying produced materials is simply passing the buck. But it's not totally clear to me that's what's happening here.

Fossil are not equally polluting. There's a difference between living next to a generator with exhaust at ground level, a properly designed smoke stack, and just being further away so the reactive emissions can dilute and degrade.

CO2 might be a long term problem, but it isn't the core health concern of living near combustion facilities - moving those away from residential areas isn't passing the buck, it's just good sense.