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1. cfigge+7B1[view] [source] 2026-02-03 14:31:10
>>geox+(OP)
In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.

Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.

Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. Clearly, banning leaded gasoline has that kind of justification, and therefore I'm strongly in favor of maintaining that ban and extending it wherever it isn't in place yet. The same reasonable standard should be applied to other regulations across the board.

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2. breaky+qS1[view] [source] 2026-02-03 15:48:39
>>cfigge+7B1
Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated.

The worst environmental crisis in human history is going largely unchecked. I find it hard to take seriously any argument that environmental regulation has gone too far as opposed to not nearly far enough.

If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good I'm cool with revisiting anything, but the common sense wisdom around environmental regulation has been corrupted by corporate public relations campaigns.

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3. LorenP+HS9[view] [source] 2026-02-05 18:46:40
>>breaky+qS1
You are acting as if they are somehow equal. Unfortunately, environmental regulations have three huge problems:

1) They become political. Rules are made (or not made) to appeal to voting blocks rather than by evaluating the science.

2) There is a strong tendency not to destroy that which exists. By any reasonable standard coal filed powerplants should not exist.

3) (Could be considered part of #2) There is a strong tendency to look at risks in isolation rather than in the marketplace. We should not be aiming to make industries as safe as practical, we should be aiming to make the outcome as safe as possible. These are very different things! The extreme example of this is electricity. Coal is ~10x as dangerous as oil which is ~10x as dangerous as natural gas which is ~10x as dangerous as nuclear. The risk to society is measured in deaths (or other harm) per terawatt-hour, not by whether any given generator is as safe as it reasonably can be.

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