The regulatory bureaucracy is a real hurdle. Even if you want to comply with the regulations, navigating the regulatory bureaucracy is a killer. Super slow, super expensive, quite opaque, somewhat arbitrary, and highly punitive.
Even if the bureaucracy didn't exist and everyone voluntarily followed the regulations, you could not run a globally cost competitive business without some sort of subsidy when competing with places where rampant pollution is allowed.
It's a real problem without an obvious long term solution that I am aware of.
Yeah I think there are two problems
First: we may have gone too far toward anti-pollution. China has more naval vessels than the US. Everything changes when peace isn't a foregone conclusion, as it has been for the past 30? 50? years.
Second: it's not the regulations per se, but the difficulty of dealing with the bureaucracy, particularly (a) long delays and (b) uncertainty.
I run an electrical contractor, so this is not the least bit theoretical to me. The hassle of dealing with local government and PG&E for what should be routine things adds tremendous cost to doing business. Recent concrete example: it cost over $1,000 and two months to process a minor change to an electrical permit set, in Alameda (City). The actual change was moving some panels outside, a small revision to a plan that had already been checked and permitted. This required $1,400 in engineering fees, plus a ~$200 application fee to the City, and then the actual plan check and review charge of $650-700. It was probably one hour of actual work. The worst part was that Alameda outsources its plan check to a third party and I'm pretty sure the plans sat for two weeks on someone's desk at the City, before I asked for status, and then, an hour later, by "complete coincidence", it was sent to the outsourced plan checker.
If we could put a precise price on pollution, it would be a different story. It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.
> It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.
I keep hearing this, but it never happens. Despite attempts to get jurisdictions to race to the bottom, businesses simply follow the money/markets: I can bet you a hefty sum that Alameda will never go without electrical contractors.
> I can bet you a hefty sum that Alameda will never go without electrical contractors.
You *really* don't understand the issue then because no one is saying that there will be 0 electrical contractors.
Electrical contractors will continue to exist because demand will continue to exist, but the wait time to get the work done will increase due to not enough electrical contractors.
Or the work will be left undone because the owner doesn't have enough money to pay the few electrical contractors that remain.
Or the work will occur but will avoid all regulations because the cost of complying relative to the odds of being caught don't justify paying it.
That's a lot of words to say business won't be driven away by regulations.
It's like saying that a ball-and-chain thing is not going to entirely prevent you from walking, so you're not denied the ability to walk. While technically correct, this conclusion misses a few important related consequences.
You can't see if there is 1000+ dollars of fees for any small electrical change then there will be less actual work done in an area.
I understand why businesses would want to maximize work done in an area - I hope you're self-aware enough to realize this.
The tension you may be blind to, is that society wants to maximize safety in an area - and any work done should be in service to that goal, and not an end unto itself. We shouldn't blindly maximize for work done in an area, we have to make sure the result is safe: this introduces rules and regulations, and the time and monetary costs tag along.
No two people will agree where the balance is, but generally there's regional culture. Hell, Texas allows home-owners to do their own electrical work - does that "drive business away" since some people won't pay for small DIY fixes in TX? I can't say I've ever heard that argued, but I hear it deployed a lot in response to regulations.
Everyone just says F the permits and becomes a youtube academy engineer. Then you start seeing all the issues that the permit system was designed to fix.
Half my house was built less-than-safely by the previous owner because getting the permits for the structures would be too expensive, time-consuming, and maybe not even possible.
The increased costs (time and money) of permits really changes the risk-reward.
> China has more naval vessels than the US
... what?
Yeah, everyone wants faster bureaucracy until they see the cost estimate for proper staffing, then just pretending there wasn't any harm to regulate in the first place becomes the preferred option.
Every bureaucracy I've ever experienced is constantly complaining about being under-staffed, but when they get more funding, the service level rarely improves. It seems like complaining about 'over-work' is just an easy excuse for doing a bad job, which makes sense given how many friends I have in government who are constantly complaining about their lazy and inept colleagues.
Agreed that staffing the bureaucracy with good people costs a lot.
There is a large opportunity to simplify and rationalize the regulations. This would dramatically reduce the cost of both bureaucracy and compliance. In addition to massively reduced cost, it would enable people in CA to do more cool stuff faster!
But simplification, rationalization, and acceleration is not in the interest of the bureaucracy or the incumbents... so we are very unlikely to see change until there is an existential crisis.
I think that one solution might be making it much easier to sue companies for their externalities and then loosen the regulation. IMHO, all that regulation is necessary primarily because methods of controlling the corpos and the rich have broken down.