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Yeah. It's especially relevant for the author's focus on shipbuilding. The old shipyard at Hunter's Point in San Francisco is horribly polluted, and they've been working to decontaminate it for more than three decades in order to reclaim the land for other uses (in particular, housing). Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island also have a lot of pollution from the former naval base there. There is a cost to overregulation, and there is a cost to underregulation.

And OK, sure, there's a lot of industry that ought to happen somewhere. Someone has to build ships and electronics and whatever, and if California's code is too strict then it just becomes NIMBYism. But if some company moves their gigafactory to Reno for easier permitting, I don't whether (or more likely by how much) CA is too strict, or NV is too lax. And I know that CA has NIMBYish and overregulatory tendencies, but given the clear bullshit on this website, I'm not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt either.

I'm especially doubtful when it says "THE classic example of what you can't do in CA" is auto paint shops ("Impossible"!) ... but then the detail it gives is that they're "effectively impossible" to permit in the Bay Area AQMD, that being only one of the state's 35 AQMDs (albeit one of the larger ones).

[hedora]

Hunter’s Point was where they cleaned the boats that were used for open air nuclear weapons testing.

It’s not a great example. I’d be more convinced if you picked a decommissioned shipyard with more conventional problems, like marinship.

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I picked Hunter's Point because I used to live near it. The problems from decommissioning radioactive ships are bad, but they're far from the only pollution that was there. Lots of VOCs, solvents, oils, radiation from other stuff (eg, glow-in-the-dark equipment made with radium), heavy metals, pesticides, PCBs, and what have you.

But sure, there are other shipyards they cleaned up in less than three decades.