The only reason there is progress is because of regulation. We just see things entirely differently.
Did you ever get in an elevator in Europe in the 1990s? No bumpers. Just big metal chompers for doors? Likewise US bumpers and bumper design improved in the US first, but not Europe except as they copied our cars to make cars economically all the same. The reality was the same on many ares of commerce, people used to buy cakes or pies from the local restaurant and find things like rusty nails in them. But you could not sue the pie company because you bought it from a third-party, your local grocery or restaurant. And they were not liable because they did nothing wrong. The laws of liability changed, and then insurance companies and the end result was you got bumpers in elevators to prevent them from chomping people in half, you got bumpers on cars that protected people in accidents, and you got rules that made companies that put goods into commerce, from pies to cars, liable for defects.
All of those things made America BETTER. Laws do the same thing. There was a time when workers had all kinds of risks from taking jobs, and if your salary was a little higher than the next guy, regardless of whether you were killed or maimed for life, the court said, you were already compensated because you got a few pennies more than the next guy and you "assumed the risk". This kind of thinking that "government is in the way" is really very old thinking and was driven by people who'd rather have you lifting bails of hay or coal on their farm or in their mine than typing on a keyboard comfortably today, with health insurance and a 40 hour work week. People repeat this nonsense mindlessly until they think it makes sense.
We have a good balance of rules and laws and protections that were gotten by people who in their day were "radicals", and these things are what created the American way of life that everyone in the world wanted to copy. Let's not forget that.
So yeah, energy creates externalities that humanity pays for with lives and with our environment becoming unlivable. The people that create those externalities actually get subsidies from the government, and it's very difficult to take those away because they've convinced people that the politicians who keep those subsidies in place are against government intervention, which is not really true.
And when a group of people incorporate to create a huge problem, for some people, in order to make a lot of money for themselves and create conveniences for a lot of other people, they use GOVERNMENT to keep them from being personally liable for the problems they cause. People claim they don't like government, but the very same people hide behind the law to protect them from being responsible for the things that they do that harm other people, which they claim is not them at all but "that company over there", which has no resources because they've already legally taken it all out. Can't have it both ways.
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