> 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.
> 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".
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh man this is the one that sets me off every time. Not that I condone VW's cheating, but have you ever looked at how many diesel passenger cars are sold in the USA? It's effectively zero, and has been for a long, long time. Americans don't like diesel cars. They could be totally uncontrolled from an emissions standpoint and it would not make any difference at all.
It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.
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!"
>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.
THe problem is that the main argument for this assertion is: "we are trying to dispose of large amount of industrial waste, the regulator is slowing us down"
Now, we are told that this waste is actually going to benefit us, as its taking all of those nasty CO2 and PM2 emissions and locking them away. Great. but what's the chemical make up of those captured emissions? When you inject them into old wells, are they sealed against leakage?
I assume its capturing raw exhaust from things, and that has a non-negligible heavy metal content. Can you guarantee that those aren't going to leak into the ground water?
So yeah that kind of regulation probably is quite onerous, mainly because for the last ~60 years people have been taking the piss.
On the other hand, there are thousands of invisible interaction points in your day that are the result of regulation, and your life is better for it. You only get to see the bad in current regulation, not in the bad that could have been caused without it.
>On the other hand, there are thousands of invisible interaction points in your day that are the result of regulation, and your life is better for it. You only get to see the bad in current regulation, not in the bad that could have been caused without it.
Right but thats no reason to try and protect all regulation from criticism.
The problem is that most people assume it is all good, but if you ever get a bunch of people together from a specific industry you will get a sense on how bad regulation of that industry is. Often in places laughably bad. But no one generally cares enough outside of that group to change it. You need to expose people to bad regulation enough that they develop some empathy, to the extent that they can turn a critical eye to the rest of it. Thats the only way to develop an informed voting base these days.
To put it in context, I love to joke with people in wireless about how bad different regulatory frameworks are. I have never once in my entire life heard anyone complain about working at heights/ rope and rescue requirements in any jurisdiction. They are smart requirements and directly save lives. If a tower climber ever tells me "No I am not climbing that", that's basically gospel for me.
We don't disagree at all. I was disagreeing with the notion that regulation as an idea is bad. I completely agree that people and experts should have a democratic voice in the regulation that governs them
>Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
The problem is that such people often have no (original) thoughts. As the old saying going about bring the horse to the water etc.
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.
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.
I’m glad that I’m not the only one who saw the profound irony in this. I don’t think anybody of their own free will would pay someone to inject processed agricultural waste into the ground. And honestly, I’m not that upset that bureaucratic inertia has obstructed a process where working people get tax farmed for 50% of their earnings to give people like this his next “multibillion-dollar exit“. Especially when the benefits require so much confidence in extremely simple models of an extremely complex system that they are essentially articles of faith.
Now the cynic in me reads this article is an appeal to his creditors. Maybe they thought that because he made money in software, he must just smarter than everyone else and would clearly be a virtuoso in any market, kind of like a Buckaroo Bonzai. However, now their millions have vanished with nothing to show for it, and he needs to convince his creditors that it’s not he who is wrong, but the world who is wrong.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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-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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 82.5 ms ] threadWild - whoever did this should lose their job.
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?
state and federal bureaucrats do not lose jobs
Then it should be easy to answer that request? Where does the $27M price tag come from?
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.
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.
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.
You cant just restore the river from a backup after you realise it was pretty dumb to dump toxic waste into it.
> “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.
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.
Oh man this is the one that sets me off every time. Not that I condone VW's cheating, but have you ever looked at how many diesel passenger cars are sold in the USA? It's effectively zero, and has been for a long, long time. Americans don't like diesel cars. They could be totally uncontrolled from an emissions standpoint and it would not make any difference at all.
It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.
Every regulation loving person who is exposed to a tiny fragment of how actually terrible most regulatory frameworks are immediately have this thought.
Now, we are told that this waste is actually going to benefit us, as its taking all of those nasty CO2 and PM2 emissions and locking them away. Great. but what's the chemical make up of those captured emissions? When you inject them into old wells, are they sealed against leakage?
I assume its capturing raw exhaust from things, and that has a non-negligible heavy metal content. Can you guarantee that those aren't going to leak into the ground water?
So yeah that kind of regulation probably is quite onerous, mainly because for the last ~60 years people have been taking the piss.
Right but thats no reason to try and protect all regulation from criticism.
The problem is that most people assume it is all good, but if you ever get a bunch of people together from a specific industry you will get a sense on how bad regulation of that industry is. Often in places laughably bad. But no one generally cares enough outside of that group to change it. You need to expose people to bad regulation enough that they develop some empathy, to the extent that they can turn a critical eye to the rest of it. Thats the only way to develop an informed voting base these days.
To put it in context, I love to joke with people in wireless about how bad different regulatory frameworks are. I have never once in my entire life heard anyone complain about working at heights/ rope and rescue requirements in any jurisdiction. They are smart requirements and directly save lives. If a tower climber ever tells me "No I am not climbing that", that's basically gospel for me.
The problem is that such people often have no (original) thoughts. As the old saying going about bring the horse to the water etc.
This isn't arbitrage any more than selling warships is military arbitrage.
I would have said that it's something done to improve the health of the planet, but sure.
Now the cynic in me reads this article is an appeal to his creditors. Maybe they thought that because he made money in software, he must just smarter than everyone else and would clearly be a virtuoso in any market, kind of like a Buckaroo Bonzai. However, now their millions have vanished with nothing to show for it, and he needs to convince his creditors that it’s not he who is wrong, but the world who is wrong.
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.
If labor laws can be automated by software why not just make them simpler?
If you can make a map to explain the permitting process why not just simplify the process?
If you made the regulations less complex and excessive you wouldn’t need to add another layer of bureaucracy to explain them.
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.
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/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-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...
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.
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.
I don't think all building regulations should be put aside but we have a crisis something needs to give.
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.
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.
They weren't created for that reason, but it end up being used precisely for that.
That is the conundrum we all face - how much power do we give the gvt.
We still need to ask what is being protected (and if was what we intended), and if the cost is worth it.
This is my big takeway from this article and others like it that I've read.