Comment by colechristensen

>Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated.

Ok, strong example here: the long term efforts to stop forest fires caused build up of fuel that should have burned up in small fires which then instead burned up ecosystems which evolved for small forest fires and instead were destroyed in large ones.

That's a well intentioned environmental policy that had terrible effects.

Fuel efficiency programs with the goal of reducing emissions with exceptions for work vehicles killed small trucks and meant a ton of people who do approximately 0 work drive around enormous vehicles that were designed big to match the exception criteria.

That's another one.

Ethanol to replace gasoline is also an enormous negative consequence waste that started as an environmental program.

Things don't just work because you want them to and programs aren't automatically right because of what they intend to do.

Far too many people argue for things they don't understand at all because of the surface intention of them and treat discussion about them blasphemy. (I chose uncontroversial negative examples because I don't want to get sidetracked into arguments about my examples with zealots)