Biden Admin to Exempt Semiconductor Companies From Environmental Laws

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/biden-admin-to-exempt-semiconductor-companies-from-environmental-laws

4 Comments

  1. GrandpaTurtle on

    Breaking News! Oil Companies to restructure with new branding; All products, and byproducts, to be classified as semiconductors!

  2. Only for Environmental Reviews required for new factory construction, and only specific projects not financed through taxpayer grants. Intel isn’t allowed to violate the Clean Water Act or RCRA. I know that personally because I ship their waste. At the very most this applies to chip fab *construction*, not the manufacturing process itself. I doubt people want a bunch of acid in their drinking water. Either way, it’s too late lol. You can’t undo decades of divestment and lost institutional knowledge by just removing laws. Experience doesn’t work that way. The electrical engineers, manufacturing engineers, machinists, technicians et cetera who make factories work all died without any effort at retaining, storing or preserving their experience. Those people died in obscurity, their works piled into dumpsters by their windows, and put into landfills. I knew many and my garage is piled with old tooling for it.

    America lost the chip war. We will continue losing so long as China makes all of our stuff. China makes the better chip, the better chip machines, can make them in bigger quantities, *and we pay them to do it*. We need to get China out of our supply chain first. There is no soft transition possible anymore.

  3. Wuhoh. Chip fabs can be pretty nasty. And environmental disasters with them have already happened on US Soil too: Another part of general Commodore management being just awful, MOS Technology (the chip fab they owned) was basically let rot (somewhat insanely – they freaking made the 6502! Management too busy funnelling money to their personal bahamas bank accounts) and eventually became a [“superfund site”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund), still [causing issues](
    https://web.archive.org/web/20200521044458/https://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/2218465.pdf) decades on.