Over-regulation is doubling the cost
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Nov 20, 2025 at 5:58 PM EST
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Wild - whoever did this should lose their job.
This company wants to put a bunch of stuff on the road going 70mph that could crash into you and kill you and is complaining about a measly $27 million of regulatory cost.
They are making up a bunch of scary numbers about the cost of the status quo and the tone of the article is basically holding us all hostage. Speed out special snowflake startup company through the regulatory process (written in blood) or else you’ll lose bajillions of dollars in suffering and pain from the “status quo.”
$27 million is basically a rounding error for automotive companies. Maybe do better at raising funds next time, bro.
I assume that out of 270 entire families that some are more popular than others? Why not pick the 20-30 most popular ones?
The tone of this article is that OP’s company has a savior complex. If they aren’t given expedient special treatment regulatory approval, the status quo is causing a bunch of fake make up dollar values of damage. It’s kind of a gross tone.
Where in this sentence is asbestos mentioned? As for the families, if they know their product works in 270 engine families why would they chose to only sell to 20-30?
Like a civil engineer preparing an existing conditions plan of a flat field...
In my view though the goal of the regulation isn't bad, but the cost of the process is prohibitive. Why is it so expensive to measure engine emissions?
Why's that? Because a guy who's apparently friends with the owner of the company that produces these things told you that it saves emissions? Doesn't it seem reasonable to verify these claims?
Every single regulatory process has them, so the fact that this very ranty article omits any mention of an attempt to use them is highly suspect.
I've worked with plenty of systems where for all sorts of reasons exemptions are granted for the express purpose of promoting innovation or recognizing a special circumstance.
Just as we should also verify claims that every regulation that has ever been written into law is by definition Good (tm) and can never be questioned.
It's possible for the friend of the company owner to astroturf an online form to get a good regulation eliminated, just because it didn't benefit him.
It's also possible for the such wealthy individuals to astrotruf in favour of bad regulations, just because it would benefit him.
How many types of truck engine do you reasonably need to test with? The number should fit on one hand. And really you should only need to do the full test with one model and limited verifications with others. That'll get it down from $27M to $200k, which would be a far more reasonable requirement.
The other alternative that I can think of is that experimental engines get an exception to be not certified for X miles of operation. Once the candidates are chosen for mass production, mandatory certifications can be introduced. Even if your new design doubles the emissions for some reason, over 100000 miles, that’s barely a drop in the bucket. For reference, double the emissions for 100000 miles is roughly equivalent to having an extra semi on the road for a year, which is nothing.
Is the regulation well intentioned poorly designed? Is it anti-competitive gatekeeping drafted by lobbyists? Is the author misrepresenting something? All of the above? Hard to say.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of what larger operators have in their fleets. It could be that a few certifications go a long ways. They are going to be at least somewhat inclined to avoid variation.
We know central planning doesn't work, yet we are inclined to do it anyway under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
No it isn't. Rent control is made to provide short term relief. Regulations tend to be long term requriements. Of course making a short term temporary solution long term does not work.
>we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes
For policy, I think it is important to be risk averse. Regulations are extremely risk averse. Slowing down reckless actions so that people don't die should be considered a good thing. Of course, that can be anathema to businesses who rush to be first to market.
I don't see regulations being a problem here, but the cost of the regulations. Instead of focusing on de-regulations we look into what that 100k certification is going to? Hopefully not yet another for-profit middleman with incentives to bog the process down.
Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the market value diverge further with each lease renewal. There are people in NY who have been in their apartments 50 years and pay 10% of the market rate.
They're right. Rent control is useful as a short term measure to keep rents from spiking, but it does long term damage to supplies and you need completely different methods to fix the supplies.
Of course after multiple generations you scare off housing investment. But not after 5. And that should be the goal of rent control. Short term relief while doing the long term plan of building more housing.
Politicians not doing it this way is like blaming your duct tape for falling apart after a few weeks of adhesive duty.That doesn't mean duct tape is bad. It means no one bothered to fix the underlying issue.
If so, I've not met this group of people, but I'd like to share your first point with them because I tend to agree.
I say that as someone who actually thinks a little central planning is good.
This kind of lazy ideological posturing is thought-terminating and incredibly tiring.
Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes. It would be truly baffling if of all conceivable points on the axis it was a global optimum.
The earliest regulations were about the purity of bread and beer, and I tend to think of them as a good thing. But concepts like gypsum doesn't go in bread are simple enough for a king to understand, so perhaps those early regulations were more suitable for central administration. This was before there were brand names or consumer organizations. I suppose a non-central form of regulation would have to be along those lines, adversarial but symbiotic with the specific industry. Restaurant rating stars. IDK. Some stuff isn't consumer-facing though.
When unmonitored, people aren't motivated to behave, and they make a mess. When monitored, the people comply, but the monitors aren't motivated to be wise or understanding, only to enforce. Sometimes you get situations where an entire culture of people are spontaneously careful and good, or where they are regulated by regulators who are wise and perceptive and flexible. This state of affairs comes about, so far as I can tell, at random, or by voodoo.
This doesn’t follow from your premise.
> We know central planning doesn't work
Europe conquered the world using central planning. Every society on earth with any measure of security, order, and cleanliness to speak of is dominated by a central bureaucracy. It works.
> under the false notion that it's better to do something rather than nothing.
Doing nothing is precisely why anarcho-capitalists failed to change anything. Everyone smart associated with that movement studied power dynamics and moved onto other projects.
If you leave things alone, you get the light bulb and the airplane, but also leaded gasoline and radioactive tonics. The notion that it’s always better to do nothing rather than something is as fallacious as the opposite.
Most corporations and dictatorships seem to be centrally planned. Communism didn't work out for the Soviets, but they also didn't have smartphones and ChatGPT.
This isn't quite right. There are some regulations that have such obviously enormous benefits that even if our estimates are imperfect, they'd have to be off by a thousand miles to not be the right thing. Examples like banning leaded gasoline or asbestos, or having antitrust laws that kick in if a market gets too consolidated for any reason.
The problem is then people start making a bunch of other rules that on paper would improve things by a couple of percent, but in practice because they're not accounting for overhead or their numbers aren't perfect they're actually making things slightly worse, and then multiply that by thousands of such individual rules and you've got a huge mess.
Any form of regulation is attacked by those who seek to profit by freely causing the harm that regulation prevents. These attacks aim at completely eliminating any and all regulation, but also aim at eroding it so that complying with the letter of the law is ineffective at actually complying with the spirit of the law.
Trying to make mountains out of molehills is one way to attack regulation.
Look at OP's example. In no way did OP offer any support for the $100k price tag for certification, or even mentioned what this hypothetical amount represents in the total investment in a product such as an engine. We're talking about investments that range well in the tens of million of dollars. It's an insignificant drop in the bucket. The design team's salaries alone eclipse that value. On top of that, a single engine alone sells for thousands. Is this hypothetical regulatory cost that high if it can be covered by selling a few dozen units?
The combinatorial explosion is also a far-fetched example of this desire to make mountains out of molehills. You do not need to recertify a whole engine if you do a minor change out of a whim such as changing the color of a knob.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that whoever wants to sell an engine isn't putting out subpar products that underperform and outpollute at clearly unacceptable levels. If proving that your product is not poorly designed and irredeemably broken is too much to ask, is regulation really the problem?
Luckily, the internet, software, and the digital world in general; were a bit too out of left field for regulators.
That's why we kept supremacy over them.
If we are lucky, AI may not be regulated to death
Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough". And then "if we come to an understanding, we might be able to look the other way".
Wonder what state that is? Anyone want to guess?
That they don't put the state on blast sort of points to the big cost not being entirely real (where they either think they can induce regulatory change or the number of tests that is needed to sell the systems is quite a lot less than the number of tests that would be needed to allow 100% of the market to use their system).
This is often fully formalized, i.e. you're not bribing a specific government official, instead you're paying a huge certification fee hundreds of times because it's a source of revenue generation for the government and whoever passed the bill gave zero fucks that it's a heavily regressive tax on new and small businesses.
Then it should be easy to answer that request? Where does the $27M price tag come from?
And it's not just this, every f-ing regulated industry is like this. I work with someone who specs out where the wires and fixtures for the lights are gonna go in commercial buildings. Ceiling lighting is full of crap like this for christ sake. The whole system is rotten.
state and federal bureaucrats do not lose jobs
Things going a little slow or costing a little more is very often preferable to the alternative where you begin operations recklessly and negatively impact neighbors, sometimes irreparably.
That may keep it out of sight but if it's still happening it might have been better to do it in a managed way at home.
Done, fixed the loophole.
But that's a tiny bit tangential from regulations.
When regulatory efforts depart from reality,and fail to find the correct middle ground, this happens:
The reality still exists, and will always find its expression in one of the following:
- people circumvent rules and go criminal
- undesired behaviours move elsewhere where the regulation doesn’t exist
- sections of an economy die
- issues remain unaddressed with the over regulated issues becoming too taboo to even discuss in a sane way.
Of course not, they want to be a normal weight. That's the discussion reasonable people hope to have about regulation. Your strawman isn't welcome here -- I've never seen anyone seriously argue that ALL regulations should be removed.
I've been seeing it in real time this entire year in my country.
And yes, on certain topics I see it here quite a bit. Maybe not "ALL" regulation, but some members of the community have an extremely libertarian take on conducting business.
I think you're continuing to mischaracterize the other position in order to feel like there's some daylight between you and the "anarcho-capitalists". If you stop erecting strawmen, you might find you agree on more than you think.
Shady as all hell.
I think the problem isn't regulation (which the current admin is aggressively destroying, e.g. with the EPA) so much as corruption - which manifests partly as critical government functions being deliberately starved of resources. Regulatory bodies should get more funding to study and approve new technologies, and there should be more subsidies available for smaller innovators to offset the R&D investments and application waiting periods. That wouldn't be in the interest of big polluters and their captive politicians though.
I’m open to being convinced that there are better ways of doing things, but despite what half a century of propaganda has been saying, regulations generally aren’t enacted for funsies. They’re there for a reason, specially the reason that in the absence of those regulations, commercial actors were privatizing profit at the expense of society as a whole, and democratic society made a decision to make rules to stop that from happening.
“Regulation obviously has a critical role in protecting people and the environment”
and then quantifies “a mindblowing $40m/year in healthcare costs” and a total of “about $400M” in societal cost from one delay, mostly borne by the public.
In that context, the line you are reacting to is just one item in a long list:
“We’ve also spent untold millions on regulatory affairs at all levels of government, not to mention the missed acceleration in sales”
He even says,
“What pains me most is the 5 years of lost carbon removal and pollutant reduction”
So the piece is not “regulations bad, profits good.” It is: regulations are essential, but the current process is generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole purpose is to reduce pollution.
Maybe he’s wrong on any given point, but he’s clearly trying to describe the utilitarian trade-offs in good faith
I hear this with a call to action of "we need to deregulate to help reduce pollution". And not the real call to action in that "these regulations need an overhaul". The title of "over-regulations" and the general tone seems to place the issue as an obstacle to be eliminated, not a system to be corrected.
That's my big problem with the article.
You cant just restore the river from a backup after you realise it was pretty dumb to dump toxic waste into it.
> “It is suggested that the increased costs of sociopolitical evolution frequently reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. This is to say that the benefit/investment ratio of sociopolitical complexity follows the marginal product curve… After a certain point, increased investments in complexity fail to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly, and yields decreasing marginal benefits.”
Government regulation and intervention are one such contributor to complexity, and as Michael Huemer demonstrates in his paper In Praise of Passivity we are akin to medieval doctors administering medical procedures on society that are more likely to cause harm than create benefits.
It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline, and it pains me to no end to see people push for more regulation and government intervention. "The patient is getting sicker, we need to let more blood! Fetch me more leaches!"
The good news is that collapse, as Tainter puts it, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a return to less complexity, and it often brings great benefits to large swathes of people. For example, the collapse of the Roman Empire was beneficial to serfs who would actually welcome raiding parties into their villages.
Because of deregulation, if anything.
> From 1970 to 1981, restrictions were added at an average rate of about 24,000 per year. From 1981 to 1985, that pace slowed to an average of 620 restrictions per year, before accelerating back to 18,000 restrictions per year from 1985 to 1995. A decrease of 27,000 restrictions occurred from 1995 to 1996—3.2 percent of the 1995 total—and in the 20 years since then, regulation has grown steadily by about 13,000 restrictions per year. These periods do not match up neatly with any president or party; rather, regulatory accumulation seems to be a bipartisan trend—or perhaps a bureaucratic trend independent of elected officials’ ideologies.
https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/regula...
Now sure, you may be the one "good corporation" out there, who will do things the right way and (edit: not) sell a cheap product or mislead anyone. But if the regulations aren't super stringent, others will undercut you by skimping on safety/emissions and selling a similar product for way less.
It becomes too tempting to cheat otherwise - see Dieselgate / VW, for example. Make it possible to easily profit by cheating (via relaxed regulations) and people will. Again, not you specifically (maybe), but people in general.
Since we can't tell what kind of person you are, REALLY - SBF also told people to trust him, for example - onerous regulations are required.
Plus, I love how on the main page advertising to companies, Revoy advertises 3x-to-5x better fuel efficiency - I'm guessing this one is the one they'll need to back up and officially achieve or companies will dump them / sue.
In the blog post, he claims 94% less fuel and 7 mpg to 120 mpg. I don't see how 7 mpg to 120 mpg is "only" 3x-5x better fuel efficiency - it seems like it's more 17x. Sounds to me like he's exaggerating the effect in the blog to try to get sympathy.
Yup. For example: this is why the US automakers have shoved all the Brodozers down everybody's throats; it let them duck efficiency requirements.
At best you can find a four door truck with a 6.5' bed and a tiny 2.7 V6 nowadays. If you want anything with enough power to actually haul something and have an 8' bed, they're 90k+ King Ranch Fords or whatever. Because people want short bed trucks with 4 doors to drive around the fucking suburbs so they can haul boards once a year for home improvement projects.
Rant over. Subsequently, I've been shopping for a new farm truck this week. It's not gone well.
The pretext is the blood. Something happens to create public approval for regulation. Then all the interested parties sink their teeth into it and get every pound of flesh they can, typically creating a compliance industry and government work out of thin air.
You don't get Dieselgsate without convoluted regulation and compliance industries. You can't game a complex text without a complex test to be gamed.
Have you ever actually done anything regulated that's bigger than a cookie cutter home improvement project? If anything the author is being too mild.
You don't get Dieselgsate without convoluted regulation and compliance industries. You can't game a complex text without a complex test to be gamed.
No you do not. You get smokes of diesel fumes without dieselgate.
Yes, some regulations are going too far and yes, it's hard to rewind it back, but that is mostly because any time something was under-regulated, companies abused it far harder.
I do think the regulations should get review period some time after enactment (whether the desired affect was met, the cost, whether it was worth it, could it be done other, easier way etc.) but it is still probably preferable than under-regulation.
And one rarely considered (by rule-makers) context is how much more they affect smaller players, making competing with established industry giants that much harder
Sure, but it's a balancing act, right?
My favorite example is that hairdryers sold in the US are required to have ground fault interrupters in the plug. This is touted as an important safety feature and it appears to prevent something like 2-4 deaths a year. Or at least, it used to when it first rolled out, because now you have GFCI outlets in the bathroom in any new or remodeled homes, so maybe it's redundant.
The hairdryers sold in the EU don't have that.
So yeah, it's a regulation written in blood, but it's a pretty good example of a gray area. Once you get into the business of preventing single-digit deaths, things get really weird. You probably should also ban pointy scissors (people trip), frankfurters (choking risk), only allow the sale of pre-peeled bananas, etc.
Maybe the UK is doing something weird here, but bathroom outlets are very much common in the EU.
Oh man this is the one that sets me off every time. Not that I condone VW's cheating, but have you ever looked at how many diesel passenger cars are sold in the USA? It's effectively zero, and has been for a long, long time. Americans don't like diesel cars. They could be totally uncontrolled from an emissions standpoint and it would not make any difference at all.
It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.
That doesn't follow. Americans don't like diesel cars because emissions-compliant diesel cars are a massive pain in the ass. Diesel emissions treatment systems are a maintenance pain, as indicated by how many people with diesel trucks perform illegal emissions "deletes". The "magic" of VW's cheating was that it minimized or eliminated this pain, so all the owner was left with was the increased MPG, and this was pretty popular. It wasn't more popular because (1) plenty of people who would have considered a diesel with this ease-of-use would not have considered a VW, and (2) none of the other automakers could compete, because, you know, the cheating.
The attitude that we can just throw it into the atmosphere and it won't hurt anything is exactly why we regulate emissions in the first place.
I'd be in favor of making diesel vehicles have to pass the exact same emissions requirements as gasoline vehicles.
Or maybe we can stop these silly attempts to bundle every regulation into a monolithic category?
The OP provided an opportunity to engage with a specific set of regulations. Instead you took it as an opportunity to make a political statement about abstract "regulations", divorced from every detail in the article.
>of course they shit on the floor, it’s a corporation, it’s what they do, the job of government is to be the rolled up newspaper applied to their nose when they do
Whether you’re a good company or a bad company, a large percentage of companies will always go up right to the limits that are set, and then another significant percentage will go past it until they are caught. That’s just how it works in capitalism. You’re constantly fighting a group of people’s ravenous desire for more money as well as the (often significant) resources they will bring to bear to defend their revenue stream.
You simply can’t expect them to do the right thing without adequate consequences for failing to do the right thing. We have literally centuries of evidence.
Excellent thought terminating cliche. There might be a reason (cause) but there's rarely an available justification.
Regulations dont exist on a spectrum between Hard (good) and Easy (COMPANIES ARE CHEATING NOW). Regulations compel specific actions and block specific actions. Its impossible to fit every regulation into your head to form an opinion on all of them. Taking a stand at "All regulations are good" or "all regulations are bad" is just signalling that you have never dealt with them.
Having worked with multiple companies in multiple legal jurisdictions I can tell you that I have a vast VAST preference for Canada. They talk a big game, but in my honest opinion they have a lower regulatory overhead in certain areas (the ones that affect me) than Australia or the USA.
Heres an excerpt from a canadian government website regarding building a telco tower.
"The Government of Canada is not involved in the specifics of tower installations, but we do set the law; it's called the Radiocommunication Act. Providing technical requirements are met, we only get involved when there is an impasse between the municipality and the company. In these rare cases, we look at the facts and provide a decision."
A Tower build that costs 5 - 10k in rural canada, can cost 100k+ in Australia.
So rural canadian internet providers build more, and service more people. Cause : Effect.
The last time I looked at a tower build for a customer in Australia, we lost interest trying to get a quote for the environmental impact statement required by the state it was to be built in.
Towers, are not 10x more destructive or dangerous in australia than canada. Actually with snow season knocking so many down, the reverse is true. But providers and local governments have the flexibility to make arrangements to service customers.
You need to drop this weird, reflexive defense of regulations, and consider that regulations prevent services, and regulations really do require justification. The Regulator owes you a justification. You are probably poorer for some regulations and those regulations may not be justified.
Another semi relevant example. Gold Coast cops have unlimited search and seizure powers. The "Cause" they display on posters everywhere. A child got stabbed, the parents pushed to change the law to invade everyones privacy on their deceased childs behalf. They tell you the blood cause of the law, but there's no justification for the invasion of privacy or ongoing justification in lives supposedly saved. Just police getting the ability to ruin more peoples lives.
There are thousands of pages of regulations, by volume they're written by rather than opposed to the incumbents, and only a small minority are actually safety-critical, but those are the ones everyone retreats into when it comes time to defend all of the ones that aren't. Most regulations are written in crayon.
> It becomes too tempting to cheat otherwise - see Dieselgate / VW, for example.
Dieselgate wasn't an instance of someone causing harm by satisfying a regulation that was too relaxed. They regulation was stringent and they were committing intentional fraud in order to violate it.
> Since we can't tell what kind of person you are, REALLY - SBF also told people to trust him, for example - onerous regulations are required.
So because liars lie, that justifies the government taking months or years to answer a question? Or requiring millions of dollars worth of certifications to test whether a device that customers only buy because it actually significantly improves fuel efficiency isn't reducing fuel efficiency?
That's exactly the thing you don't need the government to test ahead of time because the customer is going to notice immediately and have a false advertising claim if it doesn't actually work.
> Plus, I love how on the main page advertising to companies, Revoy advertises 3x-to-5x better fuel efficiency - I'm guessing this one is the one they'll need to back up and officially achieve or companies will dump them / sue.
> In the blog post, he claims 94% less fuel and 7 mpg to 120 mpg. I don't see how 7 mpg to 120 mpg is "only" 3x-5x better fuel efficiency - it seems like it's more 17x. Sounds to me like he's exaggerating the effect in the blog to try to get sympathy.
The post linked in the article explains that the first version of their product resulted in a 78% reduction in fuel consumption (this is the 3x-5x) and the newer version is 94%.
That the "onerous regulations" are demanded by people willing to condemn others when they themselves haven't done the reading is rather one of the issues.
Most regulations are written for reasons that have nothing to do with that:
1. Genuine public interest, but not safety related
2. To appease a loud interest group whose political influence greatly exceeds their numbers
3. As quid pro quo for support for a campaign contribution
4. To prevent unwanted competition to a politically powerful industry or union
5. Because it is in the interest of government employees who write the regulations, but not he general public
6. It is a particular pet issue of a powerful politician
7. As a flailing and arbitrary "we have to do something, and this is something" response to a moral panic
The weird thing is they want to test it against all the different trucks it can be towed behind, which doesn't make any sense. If it works it works, doesn't matter which specific truck it's behind so long as the already verified specifications of the truck engine and electric dolly align.
They should verify the electric dolly does what it says it does, compare that to the configurations of trucks they already have on file. Do the math. Does that cost $100,000 per configuration?
Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
For most people, they never directly interact with government regulations because somebody else does it. They work for a large corporation and then the corporation requires them to do wasteful or nonsensical things which they ascribe to management incompetence, but it's really because the corporation's lawyers made it a requirement.
Then there are the people who are actually doing the compliance paperwork, but they don't object because it's the thing that pays their salary. Moreover, it's their occupation so all the time required to figure out how to do it is now a sunk cost for them and the last thing they want is to get rid of it and make all that time they invested worthless.
The people who object are the people trying to start a new business, because nobody is paying them to do things that don't make sense and all they want is to get on with what they're actually trying to accomplish instead of paying one fee after another or waiting on unaccountable regulators who have no reason to say no to something but still take excruciatingly long to say yes.
This is an extremely disingenuous opinion, which causally omits the whole reason regulations are necessary and exist to start with.
The problem with your laissez-faire fundamentalism is that it ignores the fact that what these organizations claim to "actually trying to accomplish" is actually harmful and has considerable negative impact on society in general.
Regulation is absolutely necessary because these orgs either don't care or are oblivious to the harm they are causing, and either way have absolutely no motivation to right their wrongs.
Look at the way you chose to frame your fundamentalist opposition to regulation: "paying them to do things that don't make sense". Why do you think that preventing you from doing harm to society "don't make sense"? Is it too much of an inconvenience?
It's perfectly fine to expect regulators to streamline their processes. What is not ok is to frame regulations as whimsical rentism from bureaucrats. They are accountability mechanisms designed to proactively prevent bad actors from causing harm to society as a whole, and they work by requiring that organizations proactively demonstrate they aren't causing said harm.
Why is this all necessary? Because said organizations already have a long track record of causing that very harm to society. Why is this fact ignored?
I know a few local people who have only been impacted for the first time by regulations preventing the sale of vapes, and local regulations preventing the resale of used tyres to motorsport enthusiasts. Its the first spark for a lot of people.
Please point out what regulations you speak of, and why they are in place.
For example, vape pen regulation imposes requirements such as maximum nicotine concentration and minimum acceptable purity, and must be child-resistant. Regulation prevents you from trying to sell hazardous vape pens that can and will pose a health risk. What spark does this fire in you?
Or would you prefer to blindly resell things that harm the people around you without being bothered about consequences?
Now, we are told that this waste is actually going to benefit us, as its taking all of those nasty CO2 and PM2 emissions and locking them away. Great. but what's the chemical make up of those captured emissions? When you inject them into old wells, are they sealed against leakage?
I assume its capturing raw exhaust from things, and that has a non-negligible heavy metal content. Can you guarantee that those aren't going to leak into the ground water?
So yeah that kind of regulation probably is quite onerous, mainly because for the last ~60 years people have been taking the piss.
I would have said that it's something done to improve the health of the planet, but sure.
This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military arbitrage.
What I’ve come around to is the exact opposite of most de-regulation stans: bigger government. The tradeoff for regulations from the government is having said government shoulder the burden of helping new businesses successfully navigate said regulations quickly and efficiently. It shouldn’t be on the small business owner or startup founder to trawl through thousands of pages of texts and attempt to figure out where their business sits within them, the government should instead have an ombudsman or agent - paid with by tax dollars from successful businesses - work full-time with that business to figure things out.
Want to start a bar? Here’s the application for a liquor license, here’s the plain-language requirements for accessibility and hygiene, here’s a taxpayer-supported payroll system to ensure labor law compliance, and here’s the map of areas where you can setup shop without requiring a separate permit process.
Of course, the problem with said approach is that it requires funding, which requires more tax revenue, which means higher taxes. Under the current neoliberal, laissez-faire Capitalism system in the USA, that simply isn’t happening at present, if for no other reason than established players have captured regulatory agencies and government officials to deliberately hamstring new businesses.
Selling deregulation in business, especially “hardtech”, is exactly what those ghouls want. Don’t take the bait. Be better, even if it’s harder.
in all cases, Chesterton's Fence is a good reminder.
If labor laws can be automated by software why not just make them simpler?
If you can make a map to explain the permitting process why not just simplify the process?
If you made the regulations less complex and excessive you wouldn’t need to add another layer of bureaucracy to explain them.
Aside from laws being written the way they are (because the legal system is highly verbose and incredibly specific, which necessitates said language), I'm generally in agreement with you! Maps should be publicly available and kept up-to-date so citizens can quickly glance at them to identify potential business locations that have lower permitting requirements, and said permitting processes should be handled by the government rather than forcing new business owners to shell out for expensive attorneys and compliance officers right off the bat.
It's about balancing the needs of small business for flexibility and adaptability with limited resources, with the regulations needed to keep larger business interests from exploiting and monopolizing markets to the point of harming third-parties (consumers, small businesses, governments, the environment, etc). Striking that balance is hard, and maintaining it over time harder still, but it can be done without resorting to either extreme.
If the government is forced to provide at least one working payroll system for free or reasonable cost then private companies compete with specific verticals and ease of use. And when the government wants to change how payroll works for some third benefit... they just can.
Why would investors invest their money in things that have no chance of recouping that investment?
It doesn't mean everything is exactly right but it is a good reminder of what keeps happening when there are no rules there.
There are many regulations that are drafted, and paid for, by monopolies. There's also just outright stupidity put into place, because lawmakers get paid to make laws, so they make laws that sound good, without considering the consequences.
> the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is the deathbed of thousands of hardtech companies that could be drastically improving our lives. We must unleash them.
was "the unspoken reality is that our regulatory morass is also the deathbed of tens of thousands of hardtech companies who have no concern about destroying our communities in the interests of making a dollar", and that's what the regulations are there for.
I'm convinced that every SV founder or neolib politician who writes these hit/think-pieces is getting their enemy entirely mixed up. China is massively bureaucratic and regulation heavy, and just by the scale of these projects, it's simply impossible to think that if you just loosen some rules and fly by your seat pants, you can build a 11 platform train station in 3 years. Again, this station is mind bogglingly massive.
The real answer is that China's regulatory loop is extremely short and small, where the government works very closely and reacts very quickly. You can talk to your regulator, even if you're a small startup working on a small hardware problem. Because every single community district has a CPC office, with representatives that can escalate things all the way up to the top. There's a clear chain of command, and throw in some guanxi to keep the gears greased up, things (problems, questions, hurdles) get to where they need to go. In the US, politicians don't work for their constituents, and even in the rare cases where they do (or have good intentions), they are up against other politicians who have ulterior agendas and their own goals. The machine thrashes against itself, not in a single direction. This is exactly the image of "democracy" in the the minds of the Chinese general public.
The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.
China does a lot of stuff right, and your points may be entirely valid, but calling that system “democratic” nullifies everything else said. It’s a one party state.
Here's a good primer if you're interested in learning more: https://progressive.international/blueprint/cb7dbaf4-b106-41...
By this logic US is two-halves-party state. You are no less dictatorial than China, just better at hiding it at the cost of how performant it is. Democracy is an European thing that rarely ever got successfully exported.
There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when considering the best course of action.
EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves himself as a process oriented guy here.
Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering, activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the course of action that is politically favorable in the very short term but ultimately ill considered.
For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem with these guys is their entire business model revolves around making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
Are the potential harms in the very worst case scenario more significant than the harms of failing to sequester carbon and stop its production? It’s hard for me to imagine this being so. Mind that the process that created these holes have also created tremendously large biohazards very consistently, yet are normalized by society. We must accelerate the pace we’re on.
> What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
Makes a hell of a lot of sense to me? I absolutely think businesses which are working to save millions of lives should receive regulatory support, instead of the oil companies which are still to this day benefiting from price subsidies?
> A regulatory system that structurally insists on legalistic, ultra-extreme caution is bound to generate a massive negative return for society.
The OP mostly sees the downsides and disregards how hard earned any of those regulatory requirements are. Each requirement is usually the outcome of people being substantially impacted by industry before regulation. For instance the Thalidomide scandal with 10000 children born with deformities.
If OP doesn't grasp the origin and rationale behind regulations, it doesn't mean there aren't any.
> what kind of injection well is this? Should it be permitted as a Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal, or Class V experimental? This question on permitting path took four years to answer. Four years to decide which path to use, not even the actual permit! It took this long because regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in taking a formal position on something new.
Doesn't carbon get pulled out of the air through photosynthesis? That's why people plant trees to address global warming, no?
Your arguments seem very handwavey and not very well thought through. Do you really believe that EV business owners are the only ones who benefit from more widespread EV usage?
In any case, even if you're flagging real issues, there is no evidence that existing regulators identified those issues in the case of the OP? So it could still be the case that the existing regulatory scheme is useless overburden.
I don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we have a crisis something needs to give.
Instead we're so afraid that the other guys will be in power in the future that we make them hard for people in the future to alter.
Peter is brave because, descriptively, the regulatory state functions collectively as a cartel with a monopoly on the veto and can apply it essentially at will with no real accountability. If one of the thousands of officials Peter's companies work with takes a dim view of this post, they could quietly and anonymously kill the company by shadow banning progression of any of hundreds of strands of regulatory approvals needed to obtain permission to operate.
What are Peter's companies trying to do? Crush babies into gold? No, they're finding economic ways to fix air pollution. He's going to spend the better part of a decade of his life fighting some avatar of "the department of improving the environment" for the right to spend his own money improving the environment.
I too have heard, and experienced, insane horror stories.
The US is currently rapidly losing an energy production war with China. We have all the money and natural resources anyone could ever want, and China - a communist dictatorship - is deploying more electricity generation capacity in months than the US has deployed, ever, since the invention of electricity.
Why?
Solar photovoltaic power, which is approximately free and works best in uninhabitable deserts that are otherwise so economically useless that they remain federal land and are used for such things as atomic bomb testing, must go through the same environmental impact assessments, which take many years, as an oil refinery or explosives plant. Solar energy, which has a lower impact than practically any other land use and is by far the best per dollar spend for improving the environment. We should be granting 99 year solar leases on BLM land and inviting the top 10 deployers to an annual dinner at the White House!
This is not a market failure. This is a regulatory failure, and it is actively killing us. More Americans die every month than on 9/11 from the impacts of air pollution that would have been addressed a decade ago if builders were allowed to build. This is not some academic niche issue. Thousands of people are actively killed by our neglect of this problem.
Two years ago I wrote this: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/permitt...
The situation, expressed in real world time-to-deployment, has not materially improved. The regulatory state is a bizarre hydra where, somehow, painstaking reforms to speed up review often end up taking longer. Such is the case for California's fire hazard reduction burn process, which takes so long that the forests often burn up in the mean time. (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/01/17/the-los-angele...) Earlier this year, the fires took 10,000 houses and nearly 100 people with them, and now, nearly a year later, almost none have been rebuilt, while the city council's response to housing scarcity is ... rent control. Elon, I'm ready to go to Mars!
My radical view is that if McMaster-Carr can fit 500,000 SKUs into its 4000 page catalog, the federal government should be able to fit all its laws and regulations into the same space. The constitution can be on page 1. In 1875, the federal code was less than 2000 pages. Today it is over 12 million. At the current rate we are generating new law faster than anyone could ever read it.
The law of the land should be portable."
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