re: #54 ArchangelMichael

One thing we need to work on, first and foremost is a way of streamlining the approval process for building just about anything. Once something gets the green light from whatever committee or bureaucrat, that should be the end of it. No decades worth of NIMBY or Sierra club lawsuits. They get one chance to complain, at the beginning. If the thing gets approved, tough shitski to them. If all the correct steps were taken, and then it goes to a judge, it should be SOP for judges to dismiss them as frivilous lawsuits.

I see this in Southern California a lot. A company wants to build something and they bend over backwards to get it approved, then every NIMBY and BANANA pops out of the woodwork with a lawsuit.

California doesn’t produce nearly enough electricity to meet it’s own needs, since getting any sort of power plant built is nearly impossible. The situation has resulted in a building boom for power plants in neighboring states, which happily sell their excess electricity to California, while California gets to pretend they aren’t generating pollution.

It’s a lot like the Kyoto Protocol and the upcoming Copenhagen Conference - you don’t eliminate pollution, you just shift it somewhere else.