Plating operations are a huge headache. They have corrosive plating baths. They have to do some chemical processing on site to neutralize the corrosive chemicals and get them down to a neutral pH.
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.
When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our ocean visits were to the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, and you would grab little alcohol wipes for when you got out of the ocean, to wipe the oil off.
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).
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rswail
This is whining from someone that doesn't want to be responsible for the externality of pollution that these manufacturing facilities generate.
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.
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daedrdev
Listen y’all, it’s not just that we aren't letting companies spew chemicals into the air. The permitting and regulatory process is so extremely hostile that even when you want to and are able to do so safely and without emissions, it’s impossible.
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.
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epistasis
There's an important distinction here, between "banned" and "has far cheaper alternatives".
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.
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burkaman
The Grandfatherd-in section is incredibly misleading. Look at the Semiconductor Fabrication section, for example. The implication is that these are the only fabs in the state, they wouldn't be able to get new permits today, and the red dots indicate that it would be "effectively impossible" to open any other ones. In fact (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...) there are at least 18 fabs in California, and these are just two random examples of particularly old ones. Obviously they couldn't reopen under the same permits they got in the 60s, why would anyone expect that to be the case?
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mint5
Oh I didn’t realize pineapple farms were banned in California and Alaska.
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
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blintz
They are playing a bit fast and loose with the word "banned".
> 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.
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Fischgericht
There is a reason these kind of things are no longer possible in much of the western world and especially Europe-like US states like California:
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?
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barelysapient
Should California be treated differently than the rest of the world?
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.
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dragonwriter
These explanations have no citations, and even the explanations frequently conflict with the category labels. It seems much more like an elaborate propaganda infographic than a useful source of information.
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cogman10
The article is just factually incorrect.
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.
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beachtaxidriver
As a resident who likes to breathe clean air and drink clean water, none of that seems all that bad.
I guess there should be an ability to do this farther from the population centers though.
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forthwall
Everyone wants heavy industry outcomes, no one wants heavy industry side-effects;
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?
On the website, it claims you cannot manufacture lithium battery cells in California unless you are grandfathered in. A relatively minimal search found statevolt.com. They are building a factory in the Imperial Valley. While I did see the project is on hold. It seems implausible that they bought the site, not having researched whether you could actually build lithium battery cells in California. Considering the banned website claims it's impossible, I can't trust anything on that website without citations.
triceratops
> No new fabs have been built in CA in over a decade. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all build elsewhere.
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.
ted_dunning
Some points on this page are simply incorrect.
For instance, NC milling is done in California. Printed circuit board manufacturing is done in California. Small-scale integrated circuit fabrication is done.
LarsDu88
I live in Santa Clara where the first chip fans in the world existed. In places like Santa Clara (home to Intel, AMD, Nvidia), and neighboring Sunnyvale and Mountain View there are maps of chemical leakage of industrial solvents which had contaminated the groundwater.
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.
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onlypassingthru
You can thank the fine people who figured it was cheaper/easier/faster to just dump the toxic waste out back (or offshore [0]) for many of these processes being outlawed. If I'm not mistaken, CA has the 2nd most Superfund sites in the US.[1]
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.
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kazinator
This is deeply hypocritical, since Californians consume products built with these forbidden processes. They just have them made elsewhere so they can feel like they are ambassadors of environmental protection.
culi
Now compared that to this map of superfund sites and the pollutants they've left in our soils and groundwater. Statistically speaking, an average American lives within 10 miles of one of these sites
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
edgarvaldes
Let's be honest: People have no problem polluting elsewhere as long as they can consume the final product without suffering the consequences. TFA isn't important to the people of California.
kylecazar
It's interesting, but is there some conflation of regional restrictions with the state of California?
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.
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object-a
It would be nice if the site cited the regulations and costs that make the different facilites impossible — are they outright banned? Are there environmental regulations that don’t exist elsewhere? Is it a long process for permitting with tons of inspections?
ortusdux
They lost me at "vacuum deposition - impossible" without justification. As far as processes go it's one of the safest (everything happens in a sealed vacuum chamber). Maybe the solvents used to clean prior to coating?
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analog31
I work in manufacturing. I don't think regulations are the only barrier. The other one is attracting investment. Manufacturing is simply second class compared to IT, the finance industry, healthcare, etc.
wiskinator
The site would be better if it linked to the actual regulation that prohibits each type of business instead of just making the claim “0 new factories of this type have been built”.
wewtyflakes
So no new car paint shops or oil refineries? I'm okay with that.
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cdrnsf
My dad spent 40+ years working at a unionized industrial facility in California that recycled paper and cardboard waste into the paper layer used to make the corrugated interior of cardboard boxes. There were some local regulations on waste water runoff that I'm aware of, but he never mentioned much else.
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.
mparkms
The creator of the website is the CEO of a battery-powered induction cooktop company. (https://x.com/sdamico)
I wonder if there's a law+econ analysis of comparing the current framework (regulations and upfront permitting) vs having the regulations but then enforcement via combination of randomized gov't inspections and private lawsuits. The motivation would be to allow things to move faster while also requiring the same degree of compliance, but without the massive red tape upfront with administrators having no real incentive to approve projects or move fast. One obvious downside is that it effectively creates an economic incentive to try and skirt the law and/or find loopholes, but that arguably exists to the same degree in the existing system.
rising-sky
Probably helpful to add why, otherwise this is just seems intended to trigger biases
docmars
Make sure not to list the things that are easy to build or permit because California will find a way to make it impossible.
njarboe
I would like to read this website but the font and colors are so poorly selected (read and grey for most of the text) that I'm not willing to struggle to do so. I guess my eyes are just old.
827a
While I do tend to feel it is important that superpower-level countries be capable of producing within their political borders most/all of what they consume, for reasonable prices; I do not tend to feel that everything we produce needs to be produced everywhere within those political borders. California is the most beautiful and hospitable land on the entire planet. There's nothing wrong with putting the toxic chemical factories in a desert or tundra somewhere.
tzs
> 1 West Coast shipyard that can build destroyers
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?
seltzered_
" Building an EV requires metal forging, battery manufacturing, painting, and chip fabrication — all processes that drove Tesla to build in Nevada and Texas.
Tesla's Fremont factory was the former NUMMI plant (GM/Toyota, operating since 1962). It was grandfathered in."
Are other states building all this manufacturing/semiconductor capacity? I think it's an overall USA thing, we just don't do manufacturing anymore because it's cheaper to do it in another country.
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.
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ixtli
This kinda makes me wanna move to CA. someone should take these list items and make a map of those fabs in the US so we can avoid moving near them.
lokar
The line about auto paint shops is out of place / misleading.
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.
yellow_lead
> 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.
Banned in California.. wait, I meant the Bay Area.
Meneth
Poorly written site. Javascript-only, no references, no sources.
breakyerself
Fuck oil refineries though. That's what you want to lead with?
phyzix5761
"Grandfathered in"? Isn't that how you create monopolies?
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ta9000
I guess Tesla’s paint shop in Fremont is virtual.
paxys
Half the states in the country are actively deregulating all of this stuff. Why not take your factories there? California is anyways too expensive.
taeric
I confess I don't know what to make of this. Without seeing the reasons why these are banned, what is the point? Would be like lamenting how you can't use asbestos. Sure, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
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ctime
Great! Considering you can’t swing a dead cat around Silicon Valley without hitting a superfund site, this seems ok.
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.
a3w
I claim BS: labs can operate with these and more dangerous chemicals.
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"
Hizonner
Lot of unsupported "impossibles" in there.
bigyabai
> California has outsourced its industrial base while still consuming the products.
America did that. If it was just California then they could import iPhone parts from Alabama, but they don't do that do they?
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reboot81
Page seems to be blocked from EU.
seb1204
Is this a lobbying initiative?
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.
daneel_w
At least the New Republic is clean and healthy... on paper...
jameson
I don't want to make a mess in my yard but I don't care if your yard is a mess and I'll buy it
Why not invest in ways to make these processes more eco friendly?
tonymet
i hear that's why Tesla paint is so soft, and why it's so popular for Tesla buyers to apply expensive protective film to their paint. I didn't believe anyone when they told me, and now i have more scratches after 1 year than my mazda did after 5+ years
clarionbell
You could make similar site about much of Europe to be honest.
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]
My favorite banned in CA is the "off roster" handguns that the police can buy and sell to the people of CA at a markup.
givemeethekeys
How do the new manufacturing startups in the Bay Area and El Segundo deal with these limitations?
parl_match
A lot of these are stretches or remove nuance. I get the point they are trying to make, but it's a lot weaker than they think and undermined by their own "hero" example: painting cars in California
> 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.
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jimt1234
I grew up in the 80s, not far from Times Beach, Missouri, so I'm a huge supporter of environmental protection. Hooray for California.
Lot of things could be added to this list. Good luck getting permission to start a hospital, or permission to mine/refine anything with a slightly messy process (e.g. rare earth metals). You can't build a new port. The California Coastal Commission won't let you open a new hotel anywhere on the water. You can't even keep a bar open late in San Francisco.
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croes
Without the list of environmental side effects those things have it’s not a neutral list.
How about the ban of asbestos and Chlorofluorocarbons?
crest
There is a difference between banned and you can't just pump it into the next water stream.
mark242
I love that "The Grandfathered In" section. Here's just one sample of a place that presumably this stupid website wants to keep up and running:
I appreciate some of the arguments here about pushing pollution outside the state, but this is madness.
bitwize
Got a new one. In California—the only place that matters in tech—all operating systems must implement age verification by Jan 1, 2027. Which means this is coming to a computer near you, worldwide.
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CodinM
The author equates "you need a permit, which you obtain by making proof you follow the law and best practices re: handling dangerous substances" with "BANNED!!!!!!".
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.
201984
But don't you get it? We're moving up the value chain to things only WE can do.
OkayPhysicist
The claim that aluminum anodizing is "banned in California" because of the sulfuric acid waste it produces is patently absurd. There are no shortage of labs, factories, and more in California that use sulfuric acid, and they all figure out how to dispose of their waste without going "fuck it, YOLO it into the river".
inigyou
So most of these are just saying "you can't do this because they won't let you dump your waste in the river" and some are just "nobody's doing this in California yet"
What if you ... don't dump your waste in the river? Is it legal if you dispose of your waste properly?
thereisnospork
A lot of people on this site clearly have never tried doing anything in California that involves more infrastructure than a laptop. Can easily be 18 months or more to get a permit to 'do things the right way'. If they'll even deign to give you one.
goodluckchuck
California can do a lot to private companies, but the supremacy clause allows the federal government to do what it wants. If a business wants to engage in these illegal-in-California practices, they could partner with the federal government.
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.
themafia
The newest thing I've seen:
"compostable - except in CA"
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ranger_danger
Guess we can add free (from age verification) operating systems to that list now as well.
pessimizer
This website has no content at all. It doesn't mention a single regulation or law. It's just something for politicians to cite from the floor or in reports when they're demanding deregulation or subsidy, and a url that sounds like a slogan.
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.
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.
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.
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patwater10
Reading through this discussion and speaking from professional experience I have to say that the real challenge isn’t just specific bans, it’s the administrative cost and the inertia of a permitting paradigm designed in the 1960s and 70s. We’re still managing complexity with relics of a regulatory architecture built for a different era — one with paper files, siloed agencies, and a bias toward “check-the-box” compliance rather than real world outcomes.
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.
Plating operations are a huge headache. They have corrosive plating baths. They have to do some chemical processing on site to neutralize the corrosive chemicals and get them down to a neutral pH.
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...
When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our ocean visits were to the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, and you would grab little alcohol wipes for when you got out of the ocean, to wipe the oil off.
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).
This is whining from someone that doesn't want to be responsible for the externality of pollution that these manufacturing facilities generate.
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.
Listen y’all, it’s not just that we aren't letting companies spew chemicals into the air. The permitting and regulatory process is so extremely hostile that even when you want to and are able to do so safely and without emissions, it’s impossible.
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.
There's an important distinction here, between "banned" and "has far cheaper alternatives".
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.
The Grandfatherd-in section is incredibly misleading. Look at the Semiconductor Fabrication section, for example. The implication is that these are the only fabs in the state, they wouldn't be able to get new permits today, and the red dots indicate that it would be "effectively impossible" to open any other ones. In fact (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...) there are at least 18 fabs in California, and these are just two random examples of particularly old ones. Obviously they couldn't reopen under the same permits they got in the 60s, why would anyone expect that to be the case?
Oh I didn’t realize pineapple farms were banned in California and Alaska.
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
They are playing a bit fast and loose with the word "banned".
> 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.
There is a reason these kind of things are no longer possible in much of the western world and especially Europe-like US states like California:
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?
Should California be treated differently than the rest of the world?
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.
These explanations have no citations, and even the explanations frequently conflict with the category labels. It seems much more like an elaborate propaganda infographic than a useful source of information.
The article is just factually incorrect.
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.
As a resident who likes to breathe clean air and drink clean water, none of that seems all that bad.
I guess there should be an ability to do this farther from the population centers though.
Everyone wants heavy industry outcomes, no one wants heavy industry side-effects;
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...
On the website, it claims you cannot manufacture lithium battery cells in California unless you are grandfathered in. A relatively minimal search found statevolt.com. They are building a factory in the Imperial Valley. While I did see the project is on hold. It seems implausible that they bought the site, not having researched whether you could actually build lithium battery cells in California. Considering the banned website claims it's impossible, I can't trust anything on that website without citations.
> No new fabs have been built in CA in over a decade. Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all build elsewhere.
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.
Some points on this page are simply incorrect.
For instance, NC milling is done in California. Printed circuit board manufacturing is done in California. Small-scale integrated circuit fabrication is done.
I live in Santa Clara where the first chip fans in the world existed. In places like Santa Clara (home to Intel, AMD, Nvidia), and neighboring Sunnyvale and Mountain View there are maps of chemical leakage of industrial solvents which had contaminated the groundwater.
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.
You can thank the fine people who figured it was cheaper/easier/faster to just dump the toxic waste out back (or offshore [0]) for many of these processes being outlawed. If I'm not mistaken, CA has the 2nd most Superfund sites in the US.[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_ocean_dumps_off_Southern...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
Interesting website.
"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.
This is deeply hypocritical, since Californians consume products built with these forbidden processes. They just have them made elsewhere so they can feel like they are ambassadors of environmental protection.
Now compared that to this map of superfund sites and the pollutants they've left in our soils and groundwater. Statistically speaking, an average American lives within 10 miles of one of these sites
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
Let's be honest: People have no problem polluting elsewhere as long as they can consume the final product without suffering the consequences. TFA isn't important to the people of California.
It's interesting, but is there some conflation of regional restrictions with the state of California?
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.
It would be nice if the site cited the regulations and costs that make the different facilites impossible — are they outright banned? Are there environmental regulations that don’t exist elsewhere? Is it a long process for permitting with tons of inspections?
They lost me at "vacuum deposition - impossible" without justification. As far as processes go it's one of the safest (everything happens in a sealed vacuum chamber). Maybe the solvents used to clean prior to coating?
I work in manufacturing. I don't think regulations are the only barrier. The other one is attracting investment. Manufacturing is simply second class compared to IT, the finance industry, healthcare, etc.
The site would be better if it linked to the actual regulation that prohibits each type of business instead of just making the claim “0 new factories of this type have been built”.
So no new car paint shops or oil refineries? I'm okay with that.
My dad spent 40+ years working at a unionized industrial facility in California that recycled paper and cardboard waste into the paper layer used to make the corrugated interior of cardboard boxes. There were some local regulations on waste water runoff that I'm aware of, but he never mentioned much else.
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.
The creator of the website is the CEO of a battery-powered induction cooktop company. (https://x.com/sdamico)
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
I wonder if there's a law+econ analysis of comparing the current framework (regulations and upfront permitting) vs having the regulations but then enforcement via combination of randomized gov't inspections and private lawsuits. The motivation would be to allow things to move faster while also requiring the same degree of compliance, but without the massive red tape upfront with administrators having no real incentive to approve projects or move fast. One obvious downside is that it effectively creates an economic incentive to try and skirt the law and/or find loopholes, but that arguably exists to the same degree in the existing system.
Probably helpful to add why, otherwise this is just seems intended to trigger biases
Make sure not to list the things that are easy to build or permit because California will find a way to make it impossible.
I would like to read this website but the font and colors are so poorly selected (read and grey for most of the text) that I'm not willing to struggle to do so. I guess my eyes are just old.
While I do tend to feel it is important that superpower-level countries be capable of producing within their political borders most/all of what they consume, for reasonable prices; I do not tend to feel that everything we produce needs to be produced everywhere within those political borders. California is the most beautiful and hospitable land on the entire planet. There's nothing wrong with putting the toxic chemical factories in a desert or tundra somewhere.
> 1 West Coast shipyard that can build destroyers
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?
" Building an EV requires metal forging, battery manufacturing, painting, and chip fabrication — all processes that drove Tesla to build in Nevada and Texas. Tesla's Fremont factory was the former NUMMI plant (GM/Toyota, operating since 1962). It was grandfathered in."
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)
yet oddly California is the #1 manufacturing state by a wide margin.
https://www.industryselect.com/blog/top-10-us-states-for-man...
Are other states building all this manufacturing/semiconductor capacity? I think it's an overall USA thing, we just don't do manufacturing anymore because it's cheaper to do it in another country.
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.
This kinda makes me wanna move to CA. someone should take these list items and make a map of those fabs in the US so we can avoid moving near them.
The line about auto paint shops is out of place / misleading.
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.
> 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.
Banned in California.. wait, I meant the Bay Area.
Poorly written site. Javascript-only, no references, no sources.
Fuck oil refineries though. That's what you want to lead with?
"Grandfathered in"? Isn't that how you create monopolies?
I guess Tesla’s paint shop in Fremont is virtual.
Half the states in the country are actively deregulating all of this stuff. Why not take your factories there? California is anyways too expensive.
I confess I don't know what to make of this. Without seeing the reasons why these are banned, what is the point? Would be like lamenting how you can't use asbestos. Sure, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
Great! Considering you can’t swing a dead cat around Silicon Valley without hitting a superfund site, this seems ok.
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.
I claim BS: labs can operate with these and more dangerous chemicals.
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"
Lot of unsupported "impossibles" in there.
> California has outsourced its industrial base while still consuming the products.
America did that. If it was just California then they could import iPhone parts from Alabama, but they don't do that do they?
Page seems to be blocked from EU.
Is this a lobbying initiative?
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.
At least the New Republic is clean and healthy... on paper...
I don't want to make a mess in my yard but I don't care if your yard is a mess and I'll buy it
Why not invest in ways to make these processes more eco friendly?
i hear that's why Tesla paint is so soft, and why it's so popular for Tesla buyers to apply expensive protective film to their paint. I didn't believe anyone when they told me, and now i have more scratches after 1 year than my mazda did after 5+ years
You could make similar site about much of Europe to be honest.
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...
My favorite banned in CA is the "off roster" handguns that the police can buy and sell to the people of CA at a markup.
How do the new manufacturing startups in the Bay Area and El Segundo deal with these limitations?
A lot of these are stretches or remove nuance. I get the point they are trying to make, but it's a lot weaker than they think and undermined by their own "hero" example: painting cars in California
> 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 grew up in the 80s, not far from Times Beach, Missouri, so I'm a huge supporter of environmental protection. Hooray for California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
https://www.epa.gov/mo/town-flood-and-superfund-looking-back...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ElM_xAtbAY
Lot of things could be added to this list. Good luck getting permission to start a hospital, or permission to mine/refine anything with a slightly messy process (e.g. rare earth metals). You can't build a new port. The California Coastal Commission won't let you open a new hotel anywhere on the water. You can't even keep a bar open late in San Francisco.
Without the list of environmental side effects those things have it’s not a neutral list.
How about the ban of asbestos and Chlorofluorocarbons?
There is a difference between banned and you can't just pump it into the next water stream.
I love that "The Grandfathered In" section. Here's just one sample of a place that presumably this stupid website wants to keep up and running:
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.
CA is currently importing gas from Bermuda via the Panama Canal:
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.
Got a new one. In California—the only place that matters in tech—all operating systems must implement age verification by Jan 1, 2027. Which means this is coming to a computer near you, worldwide.
The author equates "you need a permit, which you obtain by making proof you follow the law and best practices re: handling dangerous substances" with "BANNED!!!!!!".
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.
But don't you get it? We're moving up the value chain to things only WE can do.
The claim that aluminum anodizing is "banned in California" because of the sulfuric acid waste it produces is patently absurd. There are no shortage of labs, factories, and more in California that use sulfuric acid, and they all figure out how to dispose of their waste without going "fuck it, YOLO it into the river".
So most of these are just saying "you can't do this because they won't let you dump your waste in the river" and some are just "nobody's doing this in California yet"
What if you ... don't dump your waste in the river? Is it legal if you dispose of your waste properly?
A lot of people on this site clearly have never tried doing anything in California that involves more infrastructure than a laptop. Can easily be 18 months or more to get a permit to 'do things the right way'. If they'll even deign to give you one.
California can do a lot to private companies, but the supremacy clause allows the federal government to do what it wants. If a business wants to engage in these illegal-in-California practices, they could partner with the federal government.
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.
The newest thing I've seen:
"compostable - except in CA"
Guess we can add free (from age verification) operating systems to that list now as well.
This website has no content at all. It doesn't mention a single regulation or law. It's just something for politicians to cite from the floor or in reports when they're demanding deregulation or subsidy, and a url that sounds like a slogan.
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.
honestly, you couldn't even build your own house.
As a Californian:
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.
Is hosting a website in California banned? /s
https://check-host.net/ip-info?host=bannedincalifornia.org
They just really, really want to be European.
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.
Reading through this discussion and speaking from professional experience I have to say that the real challenge isn’t just specific bans, it’s the administrative cost and the inertia of a permitting paradigm designed in the 1960s and 70s. We’re still managing complexity with relics of a regulatory architecture built for a different era — one with paper files, siloed agencies, and a bias toward “check-the-box” compliance rather than real world outcomes.
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.