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.

It's really easy to sit and demand evidence before regulating something. But consider that if we waited for hard evidence to accumulate before banning lead in gasoline, we likely never would have banned it because the hard evidence wouldn't exist.

I also don't agree on the principle that regulations are "harmful" or "helpful." Rather, you have to define who the regulation harms, and who it helps. For example antitrust enforcement harms shareholders and some employees of very large firms, but it helps many employees and arguably improves the landscape for competition between many smaller firms. So whether a regulation is preferable comes down to values.

In the case of leaded gas, it harms basically everybody, but it helps fuel companies, so it was an easy thing to change.

Note that the current administration closed its research and science office.

https://www.science.org/content/article/blow-environment-epa...

Basically everybody agrees with what you're saying which is what makes this an insidious comment.

In general the pressure against regulation comes from narrow winners (oil industry for instance) whereas the pressure for regulations generally comes from people focused on the greater good (even if they are misled by other narrow winners, for instance compliance firms).

Lead is a textbook example of a good regulation. It’s something where the industry was doing something very harmful-aerosolizing lead and pumping it into the air—which had quite small economic benefits and was relatively easily replaced.

Some regulation achieves this kind of improvement, and we’re probably under regulated in those areas. Particulate matter, for example, is extremely harmful. But many regulations do not have such clear cut costs and benefits.

It should be uncontroversial that introducing shit into an environment where it doesn't belong is a bad idea, yet many people remain unconvinced that dumping tons of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere or tons of fertilizer by-products into the oceans is a bad idea.

Who is proposing for environment regulation without proper scientific evidence? You both sided the argument without giving any claims about environment regulation that turned out to be not helpful.

Aren't you just waving a flag for less regulation by rushing to align yourself with this inarguable example of regulatory success? Rather than discussing the issue of what impact lead had, or how we might apply this longitudinal method to other other problems (making hair archives into a general environmental data resource), or develop longitudinal methods in general, You've chosen to issue a clarion calla gainst 'bad regulation'.

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.

....nobody was arguing this. It's a classic straw man fallacy. Further, you're leveraging a lot of emotional terms while providing zero examples, inviting potential sympathetic readers to just project their feelings onto any regulations they happen to dislike rather than establish any sort of objective criteria or lay out any map/model of regulatory credibility that could be subject to challenge or criticism.

That's why the people that would rather policy be based on their personal interests work so hard to discredit all data and the scientific method so that you can't even have that conversation.

> while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.

Prove it.

Your tone suggests you think they are generally not based on science and given cost benefit analysis. Probably a reflection of your media intake.

In 1981 Reagan made cost benefit analysis a requirement for EPA.

For example in 1984: the EPA " estimates that the benefits of reducing lead in gasoline would exceed the costs by more than 300 percent.... These benefits include improved health of children and others"

Trump has just scrapped the requirement to cost in human health.

I wonder if removing lead would meet the new standard.

> while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.

Which "other" regulations are harmful and what harm are they doing?

> 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

You're right. Off the top of my head, the stupidest environmental regulation I can think of right now is the banning of plastic straws. It's such a minuscule amount of plastic used compared to the mountains of bags and packaging used in general commerce and industry.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting our environment. I just believe in evidence-based policy and setting priorities correctly. After all, money, labor, and attention are finite resources.

give me an example of EPA regulation that needs to be eliminated

> 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.

This would be a reasonable centrist opinion, if there existed environmental regulations that do more harm than good!

Actually, I do know of one, in California, that does both harm and good and the harmful parts need to be reigned in. CEQA in California was expanded by courts after it was passed to cover all sorts of things that weren't intended by the authors. CEQA is not so much an "environmental" law as it is a "perform some massive studies law" as it doesn't really regulate anything in particular.

Mostly it serves as a route to use the courts to delay projects, largely housing in already-built-out areas. By delaying a project's approval with a court lawsuit for 2-3 years, the preliminary financing runs out, the cost of owning land without doing anything with it runs out, so projects can be scuttled without the validity of the lawsuit every being evaluated by courts.

Instead of this sort of legal courtroom process that takes long and indeterminate amounts of time, CEQA should be replaced with strict and very clear definitions of harm, or at least move the more subjective parts into a science-based regulatory body that provides answers an a short timeline that can not be dragged on indefinitely.

> Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights.

This is a very weird turn of the phrase "corporations aren't people," because there actually are highly influential politicians that made the case that corporations are people. Nobody is saying that regulations are people. That's silly.

The regulations we need to get rid of are not "environmental" regulations, they are "rent seeking" regulations that allow entrenched interests to prevent disruption by smaller interests. CEQA is not a problem because its an environmental regulation, it's a problem because it's a tool NIMBYs use to get results that are worse for the environment.

> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped

Here is a strawman for you: studies for regulation A show that it is successfull in improving habitat for endangered species. Studies also show that the regulation increases tax burden and decreases competitiveness of national agriculture.

Should the regulation be chopped?

Put more broadly, we should, you know, enact good laws and repeal bad ones. No major political party has a monopoly on good, or bad, legislation.

> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped.

This sounds good as a general default, but there are differences of approach. The US, for example, tends to be more permissive with new chemicals while the EU tends to take a more precautionary approach. Which is better on the whole, weighing the various competing goods, I don't know. I generally favor health over economic prowess, however.

> a manipulative political maneuver

Yes, under the pretext of concern for the environment. There are well-known cases where the political opposition will commission a bogus ecological studies to stifle construction projects they either don't agree with or as a petty way to simply make the ruling party appear less successful. And naturally, the ecological study will find something, as virtually no major construction project will leave the environment unaltered, which is not to say seriously or irretrievable damaged.

This sounds nice, but in the context of actual politics it's completely meaningless.

It's like saying that some people are dangerous criminals who need to be locked up, and other people are upstanding citizens who should be free to live their lives. Everybody would agree with this. The disagreement is in how you sort people. What category encompasses someone who belongs to the opposing political party? That sort of thing.

Regulation should definitely be justified by scientific data. Who gets to determine what's enough? Who gets to determine what counts? Leaded gasoline is a great example. It was pretty well understood when it was introduced that lead was hazardous and dumping a bunch of it into the atmosphere was unwise. But this was evaded, denied, and suppressed for decades.

Even today, it's not settled. Lead is still used in aviation gasoline in the US. It's being phased out, but it's been in the process of phasing out for a couple of decades and there seems to be no urgency in it.

You'll find plenty of people disagreeing with pretty clearly beneficial environmental regulations because in their view those regulations are not supported by the data. They would completely agree with your statement, while saying that pollution from coal power plants is no big deal, climate change is a myth, etc.

>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.

I'm aware of political parties and politicians who make statements similar to "We have too many regulations" or "stop big government" I'm not aware of opposite.

> some environmental regulations work [...] while other [..] do more harm than good

You are (deliberately?) overlooking the elephant in the room: lobbies with money can distort the discussion.

Big tobacco knew for decades that smoking was bad but still managed to block restrictions in smoking. Oil companies knew lead was poisoning. Purdue knew Oxycontin was addicting. Facebook knows their product is toxic.