[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.