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.

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otherme123 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Shitty-kitty an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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ecshafer 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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wahern an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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Shitty-kitty 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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danaris an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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wahern 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

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 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.