Despite the danger of spinning wildly off topic, I will throw out the facts that doing things the easy or cheap way is not equivalent to doing them the best possible way, and that business is not typically motivating by doing things the best possible way and more typically by the cheapest way. The concept of running businesses out of an area through environmental legislation is hardly unique to California, there are an endless number of businesses which have encountered similar obstacles everywhere. To name a universal one, you will find pretty much no businesses that mass produce circuit boards in the United States because the fallout from that type of production is absolutely terrible, and it's a lot cheaper to make them in, say, China which doesn't give a flying &^% about its environment than, say, Illinois where they once were. There are huge swaths of this country that have been completely wrecked to the point of becoming uninhabitable by companies operating cheaply rather than correctly from mining to fuel production to things as innocuous as cheese production. Individual states and especially the Federal government have put restrictions on these types of industries which sometimes results in them relocating or shutting down entirely. California being more specific about some things is a response to unique conditions. You will see similar things happening in New Yro, for example, which shares a lot of California's details.
On that note, California has challenges that most other states don't as a result of a large amount of diverse land, an enormous economy, and substantial income disparity. California is closer in composition to a country than virtually every state and that creates problems. But, despite gross mismanagement of government budgets and running businesses out of the state and horrifically oppressive environmental law we might have, we also happen to have a positively enormous economy and host some of the largest businesses in the world. We may not be doing it right, but it can hardly be argued that the approach is totally flawed.
And, finally, and with the intent of bringing this back around to on topic, not doing the best you can because someone else is wimping out is not exactly a great way to live a live. People get murdered all the time, it doesn't make murder right. Lightning starts fires all the time, it doesn't make it right to intentionally start a fire. Sometimes people pass gas in a restaurant, it doesn't make it right to fart on someone while they are eating dinner. Justifying negligence of a shared resource like the environment because someone else or something else is being negligent is, well, bad. Tornadoes knock down houses all the time, doesn't make it right to run your F350 into one. Volcanoes make a lot of greenhouse gasses. Doesn't make it okay for you to add to the problem.
I can't even begin to comprehend the variables in play in a thing as complex as our world, but I can say with absolute certainty that minimizing your footprint is better than maximizing it. Not littering is better than littering, even if you just throw out one Big Gulp. Not running your F350 into a house is better than doing it. Running a cat is better than not running a cat. I think that's a pretty simple truth, but if a person doesn't see the logic and the truth of it, well, I don't know how to address that.
[This message has been edited by thesameguy (edited 06-07-2015).]
