[acyou]

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]

> 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?

[oezi]

The key point contested is stated like this in the OP:

> 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.

[torginus]

It's not like before Thalidomide companies were just cool with putting baby-mutating pills on the market. There were existing regulations, and concerned voices, but those were ignored or silenced. Even after concrete proof of harm was obtained, the medication was continued to be sold in some places.

Diesel is another one of these stories - with dieselgate being Act 2 of the whole diesel scam - diesel was pushed as clean because it performed better on traditional tests of environmental impact gasoline was subjected to.

Any chemist with half a brain would've told you that's because it produces different combustion products, which are in turn, not measured.

Dieselgate was merely an attempt to continue the scam which shouldn't have been started in the first place.

And strict regulation more often than not, favors the established players who don't have to comply with it - example is housing, where construction of new housing is subject to rules old houses are not needed to comply with - artificially limiting the ability to solve the housing crisis while pushing up prices.

Various emissions and safety regulations in the auto industry were also basically straight up scams - they drove buyers towards more complex and less reliable, but more expensive to repair cars, and unfairly favored large vehicles which had an easier time complying with them.

The various driver assist safety systems were also found to not lower accident rates to justify their existence - and are universally hated by drivers everywhere.

Many people nowadays express the sentiment that they'd rather keep their old car around and drive it into the ground before purchasing a new one for these reasons.

[sophrosyne42]

It doesn't follow that the regulations are sensible reactions to those problems.

[terminalshort]

And now that we have these strict safety regulations after the Thalidomide fuck up, drugs are more expensive than ever due to the extreme cost of going through the approval process, but at least they're safer. Except, of course, that whole episode where people somehow forgot that opiates were addictive. What are we paying for again?

[j_w]

> 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.

What percentage risk of it being worse would you draw the "we need regulators to take a careful look at this at? A 20% chance that they destroy up a local ecosystem or something else catastrophic? 5%? 1%?

Now what if their operations were local to you? What does it become then?

[delusional]

Aren't the oil companies "working" on carbon capture?

[sfn42]

Carbon capture is a waste of time. You essentially have to suck the entire atmosphere through capture facilities.

It's completely infeasible in practice, the largest plant we have right now is called mammoth and in order to offset our current emissions we would need a million mammoths. A million of these large, expensive facilities that take years to build.

[rcxdude]

The oil companies are generally working on carbon capture that produces CO2 that can be sequestered with the equipment and know-how they already have (i.e. pumping pressurised CO2 back into underground reservoirs). Growing crops is one of their focuses (and it's not a very good form of carbon capture, anyhow).

[scotty79]

To be honest they should be forced to actually work on it. The rule should be, if you want to be allowed to sell X amount of carbon as fuel on a given market, you have to capture k*X amount of CO2.

[mnau]

Waiting 4 years until regulator even decides which regulation you fall under is "regulations that benefit me right now?" There is a lot of similar sentiment ITT. Speedy resolution by government is essential. They get too much slack from being slow, from regulators to court.

> 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.

[fragmede]

Oil companies routinely flared off natural gas that came up with oil because it wasn’t economically worthwhile build the infrastructure to capture it. It was expensive and it was just easier to flare it off and let it go to waste. North Dakota changed the calculus by implementing strict regulations that limited how much gas companies could flare in the state set a target that companies could only flare 10% of a natural gas production and if you exceeded that you would get a fine this regulatory pressure made previously un economical infrastructure investment suddenly worthwhile, and suddenly, they managed to build pipelines.

[mnau]

What does that have to do with fact that company in the article had to wait 4 years before they knew what regulation even to use?

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>deplete the soil

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.

[11101010001100]

Even to chemical engineers, life cycle analysis is not something that is general knowledge.