> Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue.

That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.

It’s not an easy problem to solve.

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potato3732842 2 days ago | parent [-]

Were they really reasonable and well intentioned if they were written with these faults and people supported them as such?

	▲	BobaFloutist 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		California's notorious CEQA was originally intended only to apply to public projects, but the State Supreme Court bizarrely decided to interpret it to as written cover pretty much any construction, public or private, presumably plugging their ears and singing when the legislature attempted to clarify that that was never the intent of the law. Course have subsequently expanded it's purview beyond parody, such that a law that was written with the goal of preventing contaminated rivers from catching fire now requires a housing developer to study the potential "environmental impact" college students getting a bit too noisy would have on the surrounding neighborhood.
	▲	amanaplanacanal 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Likely they were side effects that nobody thought of until people started using them after the regulations were created.