23 ms·

Over-regulation is doubling the cost

• itsdrewmiller 11mo ago
  > As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device—whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations—is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It’s a complete waste of money for everyone. Wild - whoever did this should lose their job.
  • dangus 11mo ago
    Seems somewhat reasonable. I don’t know why the company is supporting all 270 engine families. 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.
    • some_random 11mo ago
      Why wouldn't they try to support a large number of engines, the testing was about emissions not safety, and they're not a huge automotive company.
      • dangus 11mo ago
        Emissions = safety. 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.
        • some_random 11mo ago
          >As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. 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?
          • amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
            Because they can't afford the required testing for all of them?
            • cm2012 11mo ago
              The testing that is clearly theater and a waste of money for all involved?
              • potato3732842 11mo ago
                It's not wasting the money of the testing people who's job it is to get paid to do work. Like a civil engineer preparing an existing conditions plan of a flat field...
              • amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
                I don't know enough about it to know whether it's a waste or not. It's certainly not surprising that the company that has to pay for it thinks it's a waste.
    • cm2012 11mo ago
      Spoken like someone who has no idea how hard it is to actually get anything done in real life vs your armchair.
      • dangus 11mo ago
        Nope. I own a business. Complying with regulations is a sometimes-difficult but necessary part of my existence. Small business owners like myself are the ones who comply while the biggest corporations use their armies of lawyers and bean counters to see how many pennies they can save by skirting those regulations. Just like OP.
    • terminalshort 11mo ago
      If you want to argue that adding an electric engine to existing trucks is going to make them go out of control and kill people in some completely common sense defying manner, then the burden of proof is on you and not on the company to prove a negative.
      • wredcoll 11mo ago
        I don't think this is even what they're testing, but come on, it takes very little going wrong for a multiton truck going 80+ to kill someone.
  • cool_dude85 11mo ago
    >Wild - whoever did this should lose their job. 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?
    • some_random 11mo ago
      No that doesn't seem reasonable at all if it's been proven to work _really well_ in several configurations and there's no particular reason to expect that the results would be drastically different in other very similar configurations.
      • cool_dude85 11mo ago
        Who proved it works really well in several configurations?
      • squigz 11mo ago
        And how do you codify the threshold for what "very similar" configurations don't need to be tested and those that do?
        • XorNot 11mo ago
          That's what regulatory exemption procedures exist for, and it would be the logical next step if you had convincing hard data. 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.
    • shortrounddev2 11mo ago
      Some kind of testing should be required but 27mil seems egregious
      • 11mo ago
  • darth_avocado 11mo ago
    The problem isn’t that regulations exist. The problem is that they are defined in a way that reasonable work arounds or alternative pathways do not exist for situations like this. 270 engine families for 9 engine suggests that the designs may be small variations that would not significantly change the emissions between them. The bureaucrats should waive off some requirements here. 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.
    • nerdponx 11mo ago
      We need more information. How does this work for internal combustion truck engines? 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.
      • maxerickson 11mo ago
        I imagine that the variation is in the internal combustion engines the system is being paired with. In that scenario, it can be that the regulator is treating the combined units as a new drivetrain and requiring certification of each combination as if it were a new engine. 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.
    • samdoesnothing 11mo ago
      You cannot separate the idea of regulation from their harm because they are inherent to the concept. A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects. Rent control is a fantastic if trivial example of such. 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.
  • Workaccount2 11mo ago
    Having dealt with regulatory bodies before - they probably did lose their job, maybe multiple times, before becoming an engineer that doesn't have to engineer anything, just come up with rules.
  • IG_Semmelweiss 11mo ago
    This is China's secret weapon. 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
    • wredcoll 11mo ago
      This is such a bizarre myth but I guess it matches your priors.
  • cm2012 11mo ago
    Its not usually one person, but many well meaning committees.
  • potato3732842 11mo ago
    The magic of the system is that we all did it, comrade. There's multiple people, laws define what those people can do, processes, comment periods. It's all spiderman pointing at spiderman. You can't find any one party so clearly culpable that they can in good conscience suffer real consequence. 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.
    • cindyllm 11mo ago
      [dead]
  • rdtsc 11mo ago
    > one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks and that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. 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?
    • AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      > Depending where that is one could read it as "fuck you, you haven't bribed us enough". 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.
    • ecocentrik 11mo ago
      Mississippi? I bet it's a flyover state with a tiny sliver of road that sees massive trucking volume.
      • maxerickson 11mo ago
        It's gonna be California (but I'm guessing, not sure). Other states just defer to federal regulation. 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).
      • greenie_beans 11mo ago
        mississippi doesn't make people do certifications lol. unless you drive a hybrid, then you pay the hybrid tax.
  • bpodgursky 11mo ago
    lol state and federal bureaucrats do not lose jobs
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  • jimnotgym 11mo ago
    It's not like anyone ever added a device to an engine to deliberately defeat these tests.
  • _ink_ 11mo ago
    > whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations Then it should be easy to answer that request? Where does the $27M price tag come from?
• dangus 11mo ago
  I was just reading an NYT article about lead battery recyclers in Africa and how their operations are basically unregulated and are poisoning entire towns. 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.
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  • nemomarx 11mo ago
    I think part of the story here is that as we regulate things at home we also out source activity that wouldn't fly here to those African regions? 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.
    • dangus 11mo ago
      “All outsourced, vendor, and subcontractor companies down the entire production/waste chain to the raw material must meet US environmental regulations.” Done, fixed the loophole.
      • some_random 11mo ago
        Oh of course, just identify your entire supply chain in both directions and make sure they're compliant. What an obviously easy thing to do.
        • samdoesnothing 11mo ago
          The world is so simple when you can just assert that your intervention will have positive effects eh.
• k1musab1 11mo ago
  Edison Motors, a manufacturer of hybrid and electric semi and other trucks in Canada, is currently battling regulation. They have a series of videos on their Youtube channel going over what's been taking place.
  • ehnto 11mo ago
    That was pretty surprising when I saw it unfold. Especially because they utilised state grants specifically to achieve the goal they are now being blocked by regulation on.
  • theoldgreybeard 11mo ago
    Wasn’t there a scandal about the consultants that write the grant applications also were contracted by the government to administer it? Shady as all hell.
• faidit 11mo ago
  Meanwhile the established players with connections can break all the laws they want, and pay zero taxes to boot. 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.
  • bryanlarsen 11mo ago
    No they can't. Dieselgate cost VW over $33 billion.
    • faidit 11mo ago
      That was 10 years ago, when we still had a mostly functioning government. The EPA has since had its teeth removed by the Trump administration.
      • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
        Sounds like regulations work, then. We just need to get a functioning government back to enforce it.
• nocoiner 11mo ago
  He described “the missed acceleration in sales” of pumping Liquid Smoke down old oil wells as “a direct hard cost” of the regulatory regime. That tells me all I need to know about our narrator’s intellectual honesty. 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.
  • orzig 11mo ago
    He literally writes: “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
    • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      > regulations are essential, but the current process is generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole purpose is to reduce pollution. 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.
  • blitzar 11mo ago
    The meeting of softwares 'move fast and break things' with hardwares 'move fast and break things'. You cant just restore the river from a backup after you realise it was pretty dumb to dump toxic waste into it.
• samdoesnothing 11mo ago
  Everyone should read or at least be familiar with Joseph Tainter and his research on societal collapse. > “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.
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  • burnt-resistor 11mo ago
    No. Such laissez-faire economic gaslighting and accelerationist mob terrorism-condoning sophistry. Read Chalmers Johnson and Edward Gibbon instead.
  • whoknowsidont 11mo ago
    >It's fairly clear to me that our civilization is in decline Because of deregulation, if anything.
    • samdoesnothing 11mo ago
      What data do you have to suggest that our societies are becoming less regulated? Because what I can tell, regulation is increasing throughout the western world and has been for at least the past five decades. In the US for example: > 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/regulatory-accumulation-1970 https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/regula...
• hn_acc1 11mo ago
  There's a reason for most regulations - most of them are written in blood. 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.
  • bsder 11mo ago
    > 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. Yup. For example: this is why the US automakers have shoved all the Brodozers down everybody's throats; it let them duck efficiency requirements.
    • Loughla 11mo ago
      As a former full-time farmer, and current part-time farmer I wish people would go back to driving cars instead of trucks. 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.
      • 11mo ago
• XorNot 11mo ago
  Good lord the tone of this article is insufferable. "We're saving the world! It's so unreasonable anyone ask us to verify these claims because we're saving the world!"
  • AirMax98 11mo ago
    So true — this thing is designed to go on our streets; I expect an attitude of maximum compliance. This shit can literally kill you if something goes wrong?
    • ehnto 11mo ago
      The testing is solely about emissions, it's an electric powertrain dolly and they want it to be proven it doesn't increase emissions rather than decrease them. It has nothing to do with safety as far as on road safety is concerned. 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?
  • pxtail 11mo ago
    Especially when combined with the fact that the company is deeply involved in carbon credits "business"
• protocolture 11mo ago
  >I’ve been shocked to find that the single biggest barrier—by far—is over-regulation from the massive depth of bureaucracy. Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
  • strictnein 11mo ago
    I bet it's still like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, where they think that the regulations they're encountering are bad, but clearly all the other ones are good.
    • AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      Almost but not quite. 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.
      • locknitpicker 11mo ago
        > 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?
• Animats 11mo ago
  This company's business is regulatory arbitrage. Of course they have to deal with regulators. Capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is not a commercial enterprise. It's something done to get some sort of regulatory credit.
  • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    > company's business is regulatory arbitrage This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military arbitrage.
    • stocksinsmocks 11mo ago
      It’s not pork because I like it?
  • xendipity 11mo ago
    The problem is that dealing with regulators takes years and millions of dollars, reducing competition and societal benefit. He's quoting $200m in additional health costs borne mostly by Medicare/Medicaid. Regulations aren't a useful part of the system if they're gunked up.
    • wredcoll 11mo ago
      The thing is, we really don't need people competing at selling carbon credits because it's an industry that literally only exists due to badly written regulations so it's hard to come up with a ton of sympathy.
      • mnau 11mo ago
        Saying it exists only due to badly written regulations is rather bold assertion. It exists, because companies damage what isn't theirs. It is a regulation to protect property rights. Companies are polluting shared resources. Classic tradegy of commons. Credits is one of things we have come up that does work. Sure, we could just ban it outright and say goodbye to industrial civilization. Most people don't agree with that.
• stego-tech 11mo ago
  While I am firmly in the “de-regulation is bad, because every single one of those is written in blood” camp, I also sympathize with startups and businesses desperately trying to innovate in a regulated market and being stymied by said bureaucracy. 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.
  • some_random 11mo ago
    The reality is that many, many regulations are not in fact written in blood.
    • deleted 11mo ago
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    • t-writescode 11mo ago
      And many, many of them are written in Lawful Good/Neutral/Evil people trying to enact their will in the system; however, in all cases, Chesterton's Fence is a good reminder.
  • 11mo ago
• __MatrixMan__ 11mo ago
  I think the trouble is that regulators have done a bad job at setting themselves up to learn from their mistakes. Regulations should expire more quickly so their next incarnation can be better sooner. 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.
• MangoToupe 11mo ago
  It ain't regulation holding back america, it's profit. Our investors have failed us in every way imaginable, and our inability to consider any other manner of funding means we're dead in the water.
  • strictnein 11mo ago
    Huh? The US has the largest private investment pool in the world. Why would investors invest their money in things that have no chance of recouping that investment?
    • TylerE 11mo ago
      Nd they’re all concerned with next quarters results, not the next hundred years.
      • strictnein 11mo ago
        Are your investments in places where you're interested in the next 100 years and won't see the benefits until after your dead?
        • MangoToupe 11mo ago
          That belies why relying on individual investors to guide society is never going to work. You might as well cede the globe over to whichever society had the balls to centralize the economy
    • MangoToupe 11mo ago
      Exactly! It's an absolutely foolish thing to build a society around, and the benefits are largely squandered on the private lives of private investors.
      • strictnein 11mo ago
        "Absolutely foolish" - the tech sector doesn't exist without this "foolishness", but other than that, great idea.
• ETH_start 11mo ago
  "Incredibly brave post from Peter about the insane regulatory friction our society must endure and which is directly responsible for the premature deaths of the startups attempting to build wealth for our future, as well as millions of people whose emancipation from (inter alia) air pollution is delayed for decades by the same regulations that were intended to drive improvement of the environment. 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/permitting-reform-or-death/ 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-angeles-wildfires-are-self-inflicted/ 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." https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1991589814865654084?s=20 https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1991589814865654084?s=20
• JohnnyLarue 11mo ago
  It takes a brave businessman to speak out about how government regulations are killing their business. Thank you for your service.
• inetknght 11mo ago
  Your "over-regulation" is my "safety first".
  • collingreen 11mo ago
    > every regulation is written in blood It doesn't mean everything is exactly right but it is a good reminder of what keeps happening when there are no rules there.
    • nomel 11mo ago
      That's for safety regulations, and is somewhat true. That's not really what's being discussed here. 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.
      • collingreen 11mo ago
        Regulatory capture and corruption are certainly horrible.
      • wredcoll 11mo ago
        Sure and if this article actually brought up specific regulations and made a case against them... it probably wouldn't have made the front page and be full of flamewars.
  • degamad 11mo ago
    Yep. My reaction to this line: > 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.
    • 11mo ago
• dluan 11mo ago
  I was just in Hangzhou two days ago, and went through the Hangzhouxi train station. Needless to say it's utterly massive, straight out of a Star Trek scene, extremely efficient and clean. Construction was started in 2019, and finished in 2022. It cost $2.25bn. Hangzhou has 5 of these train stations, let alone one. 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.
  • piker 11mo ago
    > 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.
    • dluan 11mo ago
      This is incorrect. There are 9 parties. You are likely saying "well it's functionally a singe party system" yet you can't even read Chinese to understand what the policy positions of the different factions within the committees are. Here's a good primer if you're interested in learning more: https://progressive.international/blueprint/cb7dbaf4-b106-4105-8bde-fdab4bfc2fe8-building-whole-process-peoples-democracy-in-china/en https://progressive.international/blueprint/cb7dbaf4-b106-41...
• whoaoweird 11mo ago
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• acyou 11mo ago
  You can tell when someone is a process or chemical engineer, by how they carefully consider each of the system boundaries and the inputs, outputs and processes inside and outside each of these boundaries. 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.
  • internetter 11mo ago
    > 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? 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?
• mmsimanga 11mo ago
  In my country in Africa there is a huge shortage of homes in cities where building is regulated. Not enough homes are being built and many people live in shacks. Building in the villages has literally no regulations and amazing houses are being built at an amazing pace in the villages because you don't need any regulatory approval. I don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we have a crisis something needs to give.
  • anovikov 11mo ago
    It's regulated everywhere it's just that corruption networks are so dense in the countryside, no one gives a damn about things being done legally.
    • mmsimanga 11mo ago
      In my village there is no regulation for building residential property. You don't have title deeds either. You get allocated a piece of land by the local chief or headman/woman and you decide where and what you can build. The only regulation is you must have a toilet. Which tends to be a no brainer and one of the first things most people build. A simple Blair toilet.
      • anovikov 11mo ago
        This is same that i meant myself. Local gang so established, it is seen as a government itself, runs the place and national laws do not apply, resulting properties being from perspective of law, illegal - can't be officially sold or mortgaged, have no title deeds, and would have been razed if government had access there, except if a city official with a bulldozer appears, the local gang will meet them with machetes and pitchforks, and sending in tanks and helicopters is not worth it. It's not "deregulation", it's "lawlessness".
  • TylerE 11mo ago
    Which just leads to things like this https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthquake-turkey-corruption-buildings-collapse https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/15/earthq...
• anovikov 11mo ago
  Logical approach i think here, is to develop and first deploy tech in a less regulated country, just pick based on where regulation is the weakest and/or corruption works better in overcoming it. Use VC dollars to buy the officials to fast-track everything. Then if it works and brings benefit, it will be the nations' problems themselves on who will be ahead of others to adapt their regulations for faster deployment.
  • blitzar 11mo ago
    This was the lesson on the software side of things, seems that it has not been learnt.
• m0llusk 11mo ago
  > We need a ... Here's were he loses me. The problem statement is detailed, but proposed solutions need more work. There must be ways to improve the system without abandoning the original intent. There may be way to account for costs, simplify reviews, and so on. Often changing regulations to have specific goals and sunset provisions changes enforcement for the better. Sometimes basic changes like the amount of time allowed for any given step can make a huge difference. Solving regulatory problems is as real as the engineering and marketing that make products in the first place.
• komali2 11mo ago
  People often say this kind of argument is in opposition to regulation and in favor to deregulation, but lemme play devil's advocate and say, why is it not an argument in favor of stronger, centralized, simplified regulation, aka what they got going on over in the PRC? Sure it's nice having the ability for a blue city in a red state in a blue federal government all keeping each other from getting anything done, but on the other hand, seems there's something to be said for a government that can say "there should be a train here. We will cut a hole through your building now to make that happen."
• goku12 11mo ago
  I can see two problems causing the pain described here, which I will discuss shortly. But the article seems to stretch that experience too much into the 'regulation is bad' territory. Regulations exist for a reason. They aren't created for the power trip of government officials. This is the same US where companies dump PFAS into drinking water sources with impunity, has some of the highest fees for the worst quality interest access, where insulin is unaffordable and corporate house renting is a thing. There are many such areas where regulation and oversight is woefully inadequate, much less any 'overregulation'. Regulations are practically the only thing standing between the rich and the powerful and their incessant attempt to drive even more wealth into their own pockets at the expense ordinary people's health, wealth, future, welfare, housing, etc. Now let's look at the specific problems here with a much narrower scope than 'regulations'. The first problem is the type of regulations. Some regulations are too arcane and don't reflect the current state of technology. Others affect the unprivileged people disproportionately. The solution for that is to amend these regulations fast enough - not deregulation. It's also important to assess the negative impacts of loosening these regulations - something I don't see discussed in this article. The other important requirement is to increase the staffing of the regulatory agencies so that their individual workload doesn't become a bottleneck in the entire process. There is a scientific method to assess the staffing requirements of public service institutions. According to that, a significant number of government departments all over the world are understaffed. Regulatory agencies and police departments top that list. Increased workload on their officials lead to poor experience for the citizens availing their services (this is very evident in policing). Yet those same experiences are misconstrued and misrepresented to call for deregulation and defunding of these institutions - the opposite of what's actually needed. (PDs need more staff and more training in empathy. Not defunding, nor militarization.) This is exactly what I see in this article. An attempt to target regulations as a whole using a sob anecdote.
  • energy123 11mo ago
    > Regulations exist for a reason. Regulations exist for different reasons, not one reason. Some of those reasons are good reasons, like regulations against dumping or against contract killers or for food safety. Some of those are bad reasons, like regulations of parking minimums implemented to appease the property owning class. Some of those are for bad reasons pretending to be for good reasons, like the regulations that block renewable energy which are allegedly for the environment, but the true motives are more about aesthetic displeasure or ideological hostility.
• Seattle3503 11mo ago
  > regulators are structurally faced with no upside, only downside legal risk in taking a formal position on something new. This is my big takeway from this article and others like it that I've read.
• jimnotgym 11mo ago
  I wonder what adding a second hinge in a truck does to it's performance in an accident? When the trailer jack knifes, for instance? I guess someone who wants to put them on our roads should answer some questions on that. Especially as they are clearly given to absurd claims like, 'it goes from 7 to 120 mpg', as if that happened without any other input.
  • bradley13 11mo ago
    Indeed. The idea is interesting, but the claim is obviously exaggerated: sure, you're burning less gas, but you're tanking electrons. Whatever the final mpg equivalent is, it isn't 120mpg. His other company is yet another green washing idea. Taking what could and should be valuable natural fertilizer and sequestering it. Also, for most of these ideas, the energy costs of transport and processing outweigh any supposed benefits.
  • terminalshort 11mo ago
    Did you even bother reading the article? The problem is that the government is making them prove the same thing 270 times. And the only thing absurd here is your statement. It's an electric motor. Of course there is "other input."
    • jimnotgym 11mo ago
      My bike can do over a million mpg. It is at best a stupid statement
• loglog 11mo ago
  I estimate the fraction of carbon removal cost wasted to regulation at 100% rather than 50%. Regulation must be truly insane if producing synthetic oil and pumping it underground is somehow more appealing than not extracting the equivalent amount of fossil oil in the first place.
• jimnotgym 11mo ago
  Is part of the problem the federal system itself? Did I read that you have different regulations in different states?
• pkrein 11mo ago
  Hi HN, author here. I wanted to address the most common theme in the comments: safety. The regulatory burdens I've encountered and described were not related to safety requirements. They are procedural questions with no bearing on safety. Whether an injection well is Class I disposal, Class II oilfield disposal or Class V experimental has no bearing on the (strong and reasonable) safety requirements to protect underground sources of drinking water... the problem is the delay that comes from deciding which class is most appropriate (turns out, Class V experimental). And ditto, whether a Revoy is a tractor, a trailer, or a converter dolly for the purposes of DMV registration paperwork has no bearing or relation to the (again strong and reasonable) NHTSA FMVSS safety requirements... the problem is the delay on the procedural paperwork. I think we can all agree that these procedural issues are not "written in blood", but are in fact regulatory bikeshedding that we'd all be better off without.
  • temp123789246 11mo ago
    Indeed. Thank you for writing this and speaking up in public. Many of the comments here that essentially reply to your article by saying “regulation is good, stop criticizing it”, are deeply depressing. That is a regulatory mind virus that must be destroyed before it kills us.
  • _ink_ 11mo ago
    The issue I see is that companies have limited liability. If they mess up, they can just go bankrupt and sometimes pass the cleanup costs on to society. Therefore, I think it’s fair that society wants to have a say in what gets done and what doesn’t. Maybe a way around this would be companies operating without limited liability. Would you be willing to put your entire fortune on the line in exchange for a fast track through regulations? Edit: to clarify: I’m not arguing that all companies should lose limited liability. I’m suggesting the introduction of a new type of company structure.
    • fransje26 11mo ago
      > If they mess up, they can just go bankrupt and sometimes pass the cleanup costs on to society. Or as Dupont, Dow, the Ethyl Corporation et al have shown, don't even go bankrupt and still pass on the cleanup costs on to society.
• avhception 11mo ago
  Maybe that guy needs a trip to Germany to feel a little better about the processes in the USA. The stuff I've seen over the years is completely insane. And I'm not even working for industries that do any novel stuff, just boring old stuff. Getting permits for building something as trivial as a small storage facility for literal nuts and bolts will make you feel like you've entered Kafkas "Der Prozess". And if you, somehow, through some miracle, after decades, get said permit and build something (to absurdly high costs), you're under constant threat of being shut down for arbitrary reasons. Again, the nuts and bolts storage is a literal nuts and bolts storage. Just some maybe 200 metal crates with metal nuts and bolts in there, with a roof on top. It was shut down after we built it. "Fire hazard". And we're not talking hot stuff just off the production line or something, no. Just ambient-temperature nuts and bolts in metal crates with a metal roof on top. The stories that I've heard or sometimes even was somehow involved in would take many hours to write down and have the reader shake their head in disbelief. And, again, I'm not even anywhere near any new innovation. Just regular boring stuff.
  • avhception 11mo ago
    We also had a facility for sorting nuts and bots shut down because the original building permit was for a CNC shop or something, "metal works" or whatever the technical term is in English. You see, sorting nuts and bolts is not "metal work" because you're not altering the metal. So the permit was revoked, they wouldn't issue a new one, and we had to move shop. That alone almost cost that little sorting spin-off it's live.
  • _ink_ 11mo ago
    Sounds like the show extra3 might be interested in your story :)
  • mnau 11mo ago
    There is always something worse. We should focus on making things better, not on "at we are not North Korea." I have no doubt that Germany is insane, but that doesn't retract from fact that current environment is bad. We want it to be "good".
    • 11mo ago
• ljouhet 11mo ago
  TLDR: "I drive an ambulance and I could save more people if I could drive faster, so speed limits are bad!"
• maccard 11mo ago
  It’s not over regulation, it’s bad regulation. Not all regulation is bad, and some of it is wildly effective at not just achieving the letter of the law but actually solving the problem it was defined for. Good regulation IMO looks bad because you never hear of anyone being punished for breaking it because it is complied with. The EU banned roaming charges in 2017. Most networks by then had already abolished them, but only because this change was coming. The UK then decided it was going to leave the EU, and pretty much overnight the major mobile providers reintroduced the roaming charges. EU flight compensation rules are another great example - they don’t pay out often because what’s happened is the airlines don’t get delayed to that point as often as they used to. Scotland has a “right to roam”, which can be summarised as “don’t be a dick and you can go anywhere you want outdoors”. So you can walk, camp etc pretty much anywhere (it’s a bit more complex). In theory this means I can just open a gate to a farm, and walk across their fields. In practice, this means that most popular walking paths have access routes maintained by landowners that people use. On the flip side, the cookie banners are a perfect example of bad regulation. They’re super easy to (allegedly) comply with and the result is just an annoyance for some 300 million people and absolutely no change to company behaviour whatsoever.
  • NedF 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • croon 11mo ago
    Frankly, the cookie banners are an example of bad enforcement. Most of the annoying ones are actually non-compliant with the regulation. I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well.
    • throwaway48476 11mo ago
      A good point. Regulation is worth nothing if not enforced. There are new right to repair laws but nothing has been enforced.
    • maccard 11mo ago
      I disagree - I think they’re a bad law. Ideally it wouldn’t need to be enforced at all, because companies would comply with it. The last website I worked on we had 0 telemetry in cookies but we used a cookie for non telemetry uses. When we were putting together a privacy policy, one of legal’s questions was “are there any cookies”, to which we said yes. We explained, but as far as they were concerned cookies means cookie bar. > I'd say that regulation is mostly fine as well. Personally I’ve never looked at a cookie bar and said “wow I’m glad I now know how many people they’re selling my data too” and then changed my behaviour. And the companies have just slapped non compliant (and unenforced/able) banners to justify what they were already doing. That’s a bad regulation.
• Jean-Papoulos 11mo ago
  >at the end of the day, it leaves us all worse off I don't know, I like having meds that are radioactive be clearly labeled, for example. It's hard to draw the line as to what is overregulation and what is really needed, but it'd reather have too much than not enough.
• throwaway48476 11mo ago
  More regulations need phase in clauses. If you build <100 vehicles a year almost no regulation should apply. Give people room to demonstrate the case for change.
  • _ink_ 11mo ago
    Same for if you fill < 100 old oil wells with toxic waste? (not implying that anyone is doing that). How to prevent that if you want to build 200 vehicles, you just found a new company? Or 50.
    • throwaway48476 11mo ago
      No, the harm needs to be considered. Usually courts dont take kindly to people obviously skirting the rules. It's not really a different company if it uses the same design and factory/tooling. The goal is to create more competition and not entrench existing players through burdensome regulation that treats kit cars the same as GM.
    • Paracompact 11mo ago
      Sequestering CO2 is not toxic waste dumping. And as I understand, creating dummy companies to skirt regulations or taxes is already a known tactic with known antidotes.
• someothherguyy 11mo ago
  everyone wants to live in a dog eat dog world until they are being consumed themselves
• ZeroGravitas 11mo ago
  I'm highly suspicious of anyone who can't clearly state that fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change. When they then claim, against all obvious facts, that there is a clear political consensus on fixing climate change in the USA, that becomes active distrust of their message. This appears to be another subset of the so-called "Abundance" movement where people avoid the elephant in the room (political power of fossil fuels) and get all screechy about those damn environmentalists and regulators who are the real villains holding us back from solving climate change with the free market. Meanwhile solar and wind farms are being illegally shut down by the government. But sure, it's abstract regulation at fault, not the politicians paid off by oil who regularly state that the problem his company is solving isn't even a problem.
  • Dumblydorr 11mo ago
    Regulation is a nebulous term, dozens of posts about it in here and no one defined regulation, nevermind agreed on a definition of regulation. On one side, It’s a useful buzz word for libertarians to attack, saying these prevent companies doing anything they want constantly, which Libs believe would help the world. Meanwhile it seems less ideological comments see shades of effectiveness in good vs bad regulations. There’s also shades of law vs regulation, enforcement laxity, hidden purposes behind regs supposed reasons, etc. It’s a tangled web and HN loves debating regulations more than almost anything!
    • fff123qwerty 11mo ago
      One regulation definition is the international building code. Due to this regulation houses cost more than twice as much to build. Thus we get more homeless people, which creates more bureaucracy trying to solve the homeless problem created by the housing bureaucracy.
  • NicuCalcea 11mo ago
    It's a company doing carbon removal, the environmental equivalent of snake oil. They claim to have removed 11,234 tonnes of CO2e, which might sound like a lot, but for context, a single seat on a return flight from New York to London produces 1.7 tonnes. There is only one solution, stop burning fossil fuels. No amount of stuffing agricultural waste down abandoned oil wells will make a dent in the climate crisis. PS: One of the investors in Charm Industrial also owns half a company that produces equipment for the oil and gas industry. https://charmindustrial.com/blog/accelerating-carbon-removal-with-our-100m-series-b#:~:text=Exor%20Ventures https://charmindustrial.com/blog/accelerating-carbon-removal... https://www.exor.com/pages/companies-investments/companies/welltec https://www.exor.com/pages/companies-investments/companies/w...
• reop2whiskey 11mo ago
  Over-regulation is without a doubt one of the top, if not the top, reasons for many of our woes. Propagandists will continue to say they are necessary for our safety or environment, but the negative repercussions are obvious and abundant. The only true beneficiaries will always be a handful of potential victims and the monopolists.
• choffee 11mo ago
  So the argument is, we have manufactured something to create a noxious goop that we would like to inject into the ground at high pressure. Why are people so scared that this is going to have a long term impact our company has a short term profit to deliver to shareholders.
• yard2010 11mo ago
  There is no such thing as over regulation, just regulation done wrong. And the solution for a bad regulation might be a better regulation rather than no regulation at all.
• temp123789246 11mo ago
  In the same way that people struggle to comprehend exponential growth, they seem to also struggle to comprehend the cost of inaction, compounded over time. Imagine if the steam engine had not been allowed by regulators during the time of the Industrial Revolution. If that happened and we were all still working on farms today, I bet half the people would be telling us how much safer the government was making us with all its regulations. In blissful ignorance.
• imiric 11mo ago
  > If we had a regulatory system that could move fast to experiment with creative new technologies, we’d live in a world where our environment gets cleaned up faster, where awesome new hardware was constantly improving our lives by making things better and cheaper, and where large-scale hardtech innovation happened here at home in the USA, not in China. This is such a shortsighted, self-serving, and hypocritical mindset. "Move fast and break things" has been the motto of Big Tech for decades, even though they're slowly distancing themselves from the "break things" part. We know what this approach brings, and it's not something that inherently benefits the general population. It benefits corporations first and foremost, who when faced with little to no regulation as is the case with Big Tech, will take every opportunity they get to lie, cheat, and exploit their way into making themselves and their shareholders rich. The idea that removing the regulatory burden on companies will make "our world" better is a fantasy sold primarily by corporations themselves. It's no wonder the author is a CEO. I'm sure regulations are a major pain in the ass for companies. I experience similar frustrations as a citizen, and I can only imagine what large companies whose main product is innovative technology have to go through. I'm also sure that the regulatory system can be made more efficient, as most government systems can. But the answer isn't to allow companies to "move fast". Moving slow is precisely the correct approach for introducing new technology, regardless of how benevolent their CEO makes it sound to be. Governments need time to understand the impact of the technology, and plan accordingly. Companies need time to address any potential issues. Society needs time to adapt to it. All of these are good things. The only reason we would need to "move fast" is so that executives can get richer quicker. There are very few cases when moving faster is paramount, such as when there's a pandemic and people's lives are in immediate risk, but in all other situations it is the wrong approach. The claimed political tech race where nations must ensure that innovation happens within their borders is also a red herring. Companies have been offloading manufacturing to China for decades so that they can sell us cheaply made garbage while they skim off the margins, and now when the politics are shifting, they're all about keeping innovation home? Give me a break.
• cassepipe 11mo ago
  > CO₂ captured in farm & forestry plant residues, convert it into a carbon-rich, BBQ sauce-like liquid How much carbon do forestry residues (dead branches, leaves and wood chips ?) take to release their carbon back to the atmosphere through rotting ? How much of that carbon woudl have stayed in the ground (unless there's wildfire) ?
• torginus 11mo ago
  But European companies need over-regulation - they are not competitive by themselves, so they need to raise artificial barriers to external market entrants. Since Europe is hopelessly behind by its own decision to pursue protectionism instead of competition, the choice remains between keeping overregulation which will continue the managed decline, or deregulation, in which companies would find their services are not competitive on cost, experience and would be wiped out in a freely competitive landscape. Of course the reality is not that black and white, it's clear that deregulation would hurt powerful and wealthy interests, so it will not happen at once - it'll happen to those most behind and least able to garner favorable political treatment. Overall I think the future of Europe still lies in managed decline, with its innovative capacities only able to be manifested in crafting new regulations and making the efforts to comply with them - it's future companies and startups will be funded and supported by governmental grants and/or powerful old money investors who also have vested interests in other companies.
• aallaall 11mo ago
  Some regulation should double the costs, to prevent evil people from doing bad things. Also, under-regulation might triple the costs for society.
• tajd 11mo ago
  There has got to be opportunities here for abstracting over regulation to make it easier to comply with and prove compliance so that risk owners/govt can enact change faster. Now to figure out who would pay for that.
• GuB-42 11mo ago
  I get the idea but it is a very one-sided argument. It sounds like "but can't they just trust us?". And no, they can't, that's the reason why regulation exists. They said they have done all sorts of research to make sure their tech is safe, but would they have done it if there wasn't any regulation? Many companies wouldn't have, because it is not profitable, even accounting for the risk and especially for startups that don't have a lot to lose. They also claim that by not letting they do their things, regulation caused the emission of plenty of CO2, NO, etc... Yeah, right, we can say the same for drug testing too, drug testing may have killed millions by delaying the adoption of life saving drugs, so should we stop testing drugs? It is debatable really, but I am sure that experts studied to question seriously and that the answer is no. Regulation is costly and inefficient, obviously, that's the point, if it wasn't you wouldn't need regulation because that's what companies would do naturally. It is also not perfect and you can always find bad regulation. But overall, they are important.
  • j_w 11mo ago
    > They said they have done all sorts of research to make sure their tech is safe... We've heard this one before. This really is a regulation bad because "trust me bro our product/service is so good for you/the environment/the world/etc and it's just regulations that are holding us back." This isn't to say that it's not a fine product/service, but we are talking about a service that alters how companies may comply with current/future emissions regulations. By apparently pumping it back into the ground. We might want the regulators to really make sure that is a good idea and not just take their word for it.
    • sophrosyne42 11mo ago
      It is a quagmire created out of the environmental regulatory regime. Until that is removed and replaced, innovations will be hampered, and the countries part of that regime will suffer or even stagnate.
  • BellLabradors 11mo ago
    Do you think your points are applicable to the specific examples he gives? e.g.: >As one example, one state agency has asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn’t increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the 9 engines that our initial partners use. That’s $27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device—whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by >90%, and which has demonstrably done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing and operations—is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It’s a complete waste of money for everyone. And that $27M dollar cost doesn’t include the cost to society. This over-regulation will delay deployment of EV trucks by years, increasing NOₓ and PM 2.5 air pollution exposure for many of society’s least well-off who live near freeways
• jyounker 11mo ago
  Peter Reinhardt is specifically talking about pumping massive amounts of a synthetic liquid into the ground. The history of the 20th century is full of people insisting that some industrial product is perfectly safe to dump into the environment in massive amounts, and then it turns out years later that it's not safe at all. I can't imagine the process for injecting some new synthetic into the ground taking less than four years in any situation. It's going to take more time than that just to do basic studies. The specific kinds of regulations he's arguing about have been written in blood and tumors, and they exist for good reasons.
• jyounker 11mo ago
  It's nobody on here is talking about Rheinhardt's #2 point: The US is not spending enough on regulation. He specifically points out that regulators are underfunded and understaffed. In the US, this is often an active strategy by conservative politicians to undermine regulations, and portray the story that the regulations are bad, when in fact, the regulatory agencies are being intentionally preventing doing their jobs efficiently.
  • superxpro12 11mo ago
    The current administration is defunding anything they dont agree with. How many departments have folded within the past year? It's zero surprise that they wont fund any regulations. I'm honestly still surprised the NHTSB is still around at the rate they're going.
    • tantalor 11mo ago
      They are trying to kill the Chemical Safety Hazard and Investigation Board (CSB) https://cen.acs.org/safety/industrial-safety/White-House-moves-kill-chemical/103/web/2025/07 https://cen.acs.org/safety/industrial-safety/White-House-mov... Same group that makes these amazing post-portems on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcMnf86n8_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcMnf86n8_U
  • lukeschlather 11mo ago
    If he believes the US is not spending enough on regulation, he shouldn't describe the situation as "over-regulation."
• user____name 11mo ago
  I wonder how much existing regulation is a result of ass-covering related to insurance premiums.
• FrustratedMonky 11mo ago
  Everyone is against regulation, until their tap water is catching on fire.
• ckemere 11mo ago
  Potential counterpoint. Is it possible that one challenge is the lack of expertise in government? I think it’s clear that most novel permitting situations involve one expert party (who want the permit but are potentially motivated to not report downsides) but the other party (the regulator) has to either develop their own expertise or say “no”/“wait”. I was unimpressed by the situation described. It seems that existing injection wells often have all sorts of negative consequences that are avoided by bankruptcy. I suspect more “no”/“waits” in the past might have been reasonable
• sebastianconcpt 11mo ago
  Just on bad rule could more than double the cost. Or even put your project completely out of any feasibility region
• H1BCurryChef 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• sharts 11mo ago
  > After building a software company to a multi-billion dollar exit… sigh
• sfink 11mo ago
  This is a great point, and I'm sympathetic to the problems raised, but it's not a great post. It's pushing the view that the relevant question is how much regulation there should be. That's just mechanism. Better questions are: how good are the regulations? What is the incentive structure to improve them? What are the mechanisms to improve them, by whittling away the problematic parts, modifying things that missed their target, and adding ones that would have better outcomes? Even here, I wouldn't want injecting CO2 into old oil wells to get a free pass. I think we'd agree that injecting CO2 into deep lakes would be a bad idea -- or rather, it would be a great idea, up until the lake turns over and suffocates thousands of people and most of the life in the area. Do I know that that can't happen if the injection is underground? I do not. What's actually needed here is research, and regulation is the blunt instrument that you have to use when the research is not yet available or suspiciously funded by those who will benefit and/or there's no mechanism for paying for it (who should be paying, anyway?) [Note that this is speculative; perhaps this research does exist and is of good quality. But this dynamic will still come up when anyone tries doing anything new and potentially dangerous.] I agree that over-regulation is a major impediment. I just don't think the argument "over-regulation bad, let's throw away all of our seat belts" is productive.
• m101 11mo ago
  Couple comments having read gist of comments here: 1) It's not about bad regulation either: it may be impossible to design good regulation "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." - Friedrich Hayek 2) Everyone agrees that controlling bad externalities is good. The point is at what cost? 3) Regulation isn't the only answer to things. Perhaps the issue is private property isn't properly enforced? Perhaps things could be solved through insurance schemes? There are many complex systems that have been solved without the use of government mandated regulation
• thesnide 11mo ago
  it is usually the result of https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/04/brains-prefer-adding-sustainability/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/04/brains-prefer-adding...
• vannevar 11mo ago
  I'm sure there are bad regulations. But the reason that there is reliance on simple one-size-fits-all rules is that we are unwilling to pay the cost of investigating each special case and having someone make an expert judgment. Taking the trucking case as an example, it's certainly reasonable to require proof that the proposed technology solution doesn't actually make the problem worse in practice. While most people are honest, there are dishonest businesses that would claim environmental benefits for their product that simply don't exist (see the case of VW and their "clean diesel" fraud). So the regulation is a good one. The author's complaint is that it took too long and cost too much to provide the proof. Maybe he's right, but maybe he's not. Maybe he was satisfied by less evidence than the government, because he had a financial interest in believing in the technology. Just saying it was all unnecessary doesn't make it so.
• ForOldHack 11mo ago
  "This slashes emissions that negatively impact both air quality and climate..." So... Your entire supply is carbon free? I think not, as well as the permitting for an additional axle group and the extra weight. If you recharge from the standard energy mix you are still burning fossil fuel. But let's just gloss over that. Now again with the weight, how easy is it to corner and stop? There is probably a minimum of 12,000 lbs of extra weight... And you need a charging network at the truck stops... There is so much just glossed over ... Nice sales job.