[amarant]

The comment that spurred this conversation did claim that the problem was overly complicated legislation to a simple problem. "Don't dump chemicals" is about as good a solution as "don't do bad things". You can't oversimplify a complex issue like that and expect to get anywhere.

I'm being plenty charitable in assuming you're arguing in good faith, at first glance your comment comes off as anti-intellectual value signalling, which will never ever solve anything. Ever.

But this is HN, so I'm going to assume you've simply misunderstood the concern, as anti intellectualism has no place here.