[z0r]

Is the suggestion here to remove environmental regulations that make outsourcing to countries without regulations appealing? I'm not sure what problem that solves. Of course without discussing specific regulations it is hard to argue about anything - maybe there are useless environmental regulations that make lead battery recycling impossible in first world countries? Or maybe your line of reasoning just doesn't make sense, at least in this case. I don't think I'd want to live near a polluting lead battery recycling operation.

[nemomarx]

A lead battery plant that we can oversee and regulate is better than a polluting one in another country, where we basically export the suffering and damage to them. So policy goals should try to keep it possible and economically viable (with subsidies, bureaucrats who are responsive to community needs, whatever you like) to do recycling in the first world in some way.

Whether any particular regulation is necessary or onerous needs more detailed examinations, and it's easy to say "just have the regulations be as simple as necessary to protect us", but I'm arguing we've gone a little far with zoning regs and studies so that we can't build things as well as we used to. You could also argue that bodies are using these environmental regulations for their own purposes, like keeping property values high or protecting their other investments instead of actual environmental impacts?

(We can also try and spread regulations down the outsourcing chain, but I think that's difficult for other reasons.)