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Comment by Tallasatree | Hacker News Reader

Stopping a mid-rise building during SEPA review because of migratory bird flight paths is one thing, but macro scale environmental impacts that could occur during the constructions of freeways etc - yea we should review thoroughly.

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We should first examine environmental laws for their impact on communities, people and the economy. Far too often the environment is just a veil for NIMBY.

I agree that environmental protection is a top priority, but I think it will be overall better for the environment if we accept the reality of having a little visible infrastructure/manufacturing in our collective faces. If anything, visibility should drive us to develop cleaner alternatives instead of the current reality where things like the Foxconn iPhone factory suicide netting is a funny joke to many of us. I believe the move away from domestic manufacturing created an even bigger climate problem from the thousands and thousands of ships and planes carrying materials across the planet for assembly, carrying them back for sale, and spewing unchecked amounts of pollution the entire way.

The offshoring of US manufacturing jobs also disproportionately hurt Black Americans and others who were once able to use those jobs as an accessible path to a middle-class life: https://equitablegrowth.org/african-american-workers-are-hur...

I'm trying to unpack what you're saying here because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You think we should roll back environmental protections so that the negative effects of manufacturing are more in peoples faces so that they care more with an end goal of... putting those same protections back I assume?

Pretty close, yeah! More like with an end goal of developing cleaner manufacturing processes that we can stand to be around. I think the environmental laws we have just take the same old dirty tech we've always had and move it far enough away that we don't see local negatives. The statistics I've seen about the environmental impact of the shipping industry are pretty alarming, and I suspect the actual impact is way worse than that since the entire area is so poorly explored.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping... (Paywall: http://archive.is/Pf7Bw )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...

I don't understand why fixing issues with shipping requires us to dismantle environmental protections elsewhere. This just seems like whataboutism to me.

Could an executive order be made to make the approval process more effective and efficient? We did the fist part of the work by identifying the bottle necks (at least broadly), the Acts where approved by Congress, so now let’s optimize.

It seems like a lot of these executive order get thrown out which if true seems like a big waste of time and resources.

I would be down for that, yeah. That's why I don't like the way Trump approaches things as mandates instead of conversations. I think it just ratchets up the divisiveness to the point that people start downvoting you on here if you like one thing Trump does because you think it's good to build houses and give people jobs to buy them with :p

You can't ignore the fact that labor costs were also a large part of the reason manufacturing moved offshore. Those jobs aren't coming back, regardless of environmental regulations.

The path forward is to continue to innovate, not roll back environmental protections.

>Those jobs aren't coming back, regardless of environmental regulations.

And many of those jobs no longer exist... they were automated away long ago. So even if you brought the factories back, it wouldn't put many people to work.

I don't believe an iPhone made in America would have to cost much—if anything—more than my iPhone from Foxconn. There's surely some spare change in Apple's hundred-billion-dollar cash pile that we could use to pay those more-expensive American workers a living wage: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/cash-on...

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