Don't these types of fabs lead to things like all the EPA superfund sites around Silicon Valley? I personally hope we don't do that anywhere in this country again. Visit Guangzhou sometime to see what a city / country looks like with lax environmental regulations and a bustling manufacturing industry. You can still see the skyline from most parts of the city most days when the "fog" isn't so bad. Sure you and everyone you care about will die of cancer, but at least it would be better than damn socialism, right? And with all that money (just look at how rich they all are), surely everyone can afford hospital-grade whole-home air filtration systems like the rich there have.

Edit: s/fans/fabs

Damn socialism was pretty horrible for the environment back when we had it around here, pre-1989. Our capital was blanketed by the exhaust of a huge steelworks plant several sizes too big for our economy, and our friendly neighbors across the river (brothers in socialism of course) regularly gassed one of our cities with chlorine.

You don't say which country this is/was. Since I can't think of any country ever existing that was truly built around socialist principles, I'd guess you were living in a totalitarian regime parading itself as socialist via propaganda.

Regardless, it's not as if capitalism can't produce environmentally disastrous results. Google "Chevron brazil oil spill".

I don't know enough about the industry to know if superfund sites are a necessary thing for chip fabs.

That said, these chips have to be made somewhere. Is your solution to this to create superfund sites in other countries? To me, that isn't a solution. I would rather we make superfund sites here, so we have reasons to fix the problem, rather than create them elsewhere.

Are they still using TCE[1] to manufacture semiconductors? That stuff is the major pollutant in silicon valley left over from all the early semiconductor manufacturing. There are a lot of really expensive homes and offices in Palo Alto that are built over sites where this stuff has leaked.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene

[2] http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/05/palo-alto-stanford-can...

Or you could pay a surtax on imports that aren't built with the environmental standards of the native country, as we are seeing with attempts for a carbon tax.

I can't find a list of local Superfund sites that shows degree of pollution or costs of cleanup, but the Lorentz Barrel & Drum fiasco got a lot of press.

That site is now a parking lot for (apparently) auto dealership storage. It's at 10th and Alma, across the street from both Spartan Stadium and the Ice Center.

mean while the guy ignores the magnitudes more jobs in the solar industry to favor the antiquate coal jobs.

Hopefully he'll get on board with it soon - if things keep going the way they have been, soon it economically won't be feasible not to.

Solar employment is highly distributed throughout the country. That's not going to win any districts for your party.

true.

but I laugh at those coal workers thinking trump will somehow change market dynamics to make coal economical again.

In the video, the Intel CEO claimed that it will generate 10,000 additional jobs in the area.