Surf Industry Faces Supply Chain Regulation; Shapers Note They Weren’t Consulted

California’s extended producer responsibility framework reaches polyurethane foam and fibreglass cloth

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

SAN CLEMENTE — The surfboard manufacturing industry is navigating a new set of supply chain disclosure requirements under California’s extended producer responsibility framework that requires manufacturers to document the environmental impact of their supply chains and to report on chemicals used in the manufacturing process. The regulations apply to polyurethane foam blanks, fibreglass cloth, epoxy resins, and the various chemicals used in finishing and glassing — the materials that make up a modern surfboard and whose manufacturing involves the kinds of industrial chemistry that California’s environmental regulations have consistently targeted.

The environmental case for the regulations is real: surfboard manufacturing involves chemicals with documented health and environmental impacts, and California’s regulatory framework that addresses industrial chemistry is among the most rigorous in the world. The question is not whether the environmental concern is real. It is who bears the compliance cost and whether the regulatory design matches the scale of the businesses it regulates.

The Small Business Reality

The regulation falls on small businesses — independent shapers and small manufacturers — in ways that compliance costs make disproportionately burdensome relative to large manufacturers. A surf company with a compliance department can navigate supply chain disclosure requirements efficiently. A shaper working in a 2,000-square-foot glass shop in San Clemente is navigating the same requirements with different resources. This is the regulatory incidence problem that the libertarian tradition identifies as a systematic feature of regulation designed for large businesses and applied uniformly to small ones. Reason covers small business regulation. Mises Institute provides the economic analysis of regulatory burden distribution. The shapers are adapting. The waves remain the waves, which is the part of surfing that no supply chain regulation affects and which is the part that the shapers are ultimately in the business of enabling, regardless of the forms they file to do it.

The story continues past any single article or news cycle. The details accumulate into patterns, the patterns into systems, and the systems are what determine whether institutions built to serve people actually do so. Paying attention is the most democratic act available. Satire is the second. Both require looking at what is actually happening and refusing to pretend it is something else, especially when what is actually happening is considerably funnier than the official account suggests. The record continues. The analysis continues. The accountability continues, imperfectly and necessarily, because the alternative is worse.

The Libertarian Surfer’s Creed

The ocean does not ask for your papers. The wave does not check your permits. The dawn patrol requires no government approval, and the hour before sunrise on an uncrowded point break is governed by nothing except the swell period, the wind direction, and the willingness of the surfer to be in the water when conditions align. This is the freedom that the libertarian tradition values most concretely: not the theoretical freedom of political philosophy but the lived freedom of the person who has made choices the government did not sanction and has found the outcomes to be their own. California surrounds this freedom with regulations, taxes, permits, and the administrative infrastructure of the world’s most comprehensive state government. None of it reaches into the water. None of it governs what happens between the surfer and the ocean in the moment that everything else disappears.

The libertarian case is not against clean water. It is for the freedom that clean water makes possible. It is not against the coastal access laws that keep the beach public. It is for the public ownership of the beach that those laws protect. The surfing community’s political philosophy is more complex than its antiauthoritarian reputation suggests, because it has always understood that some of what makes the ocean accessible and worthwhile requires collective action and legal protection. What the community resists is the extension of that logic beyond its useful domain into the regulation of adult choices that harm no one, the permit requirements for activities that predate the concept of permits, and the fiscal policies that extract more from working people than the services provided justify. Reason covers this. Cato analyzes it. The surfers experience it, and then go surfing, which is the most direct political act available to someone whose preferred freedom is governed by physics rather than legislation.

The analysis, the accountability, the satire, and the serious journalism all serve the same function: keeping track of what is happening and insisting that it matters, which is the work that good journalism has always done and that the current moment requires with particular urgency given the complexity of the information environment and the scale of the decisions being made in it.

The record of events accumulates daily. The analysis of their causes and connections is the work that distinguishes journalism from mere reportage. The satire that finds the absurdity within the serious and the seriousness within the absurd is the work that makes the analysis bearable over the long run. All three are necessary. All three continue. The stories do not resolve on a weekly deadline. They continue past publication, past the news cycle, past the season, into the larger history that all current events eventually become. The journalism that covers them is, at its best, a first draft of that history — written under deadline, corrected in subsequent editions, and ultimately judged by whether it was accurate about what mattered and honest about what it did not know, which are the two criteria that good journalism has always been judged by and that the current moment requires with the same urgency as every previous moment that believed its circumstances were unprecedented, as they always were, and as they always will be.

Freedom dispatches: NewsThump | The Babylon Bee

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com