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.

He literally writes:

“Regulation obviously has a critical role in protecting people and the environment”

and then quantifies “a mindblowing $40m/year in healthcare costs” and a total of “about $400M” in societal cost from one delay, mostly borne by the public.

In that context, the line you are reacting to is just one item in a long list:

“We’ve also spent untold millions on regulatory affairs at all levels of government, not to mention the missed acceleration in sales”

He even says,

“What pains me most is the 5 years of lost carbon removal and pollutant reduction”

So the piece is not “regulations bad, profits good.” It is: regulations are essential, but the current process is generating huge public harms by slowing down tech whose whole purpose is to reduce pollution.

Maybe he’s wrong on any given point, but he’s clearly trying to describe the utilitarian trade-offs in good faith