I don’t doubt that environmental protection has become a scam now. It is beyond over the top.
Environmental regulation should be almost exclusively the domain of the states themselves. Even then they can’t really be trusted to rip off the taxpayers.
After the Embridge pipeline spill here in Michigan there was lots of screeching about Embridge not inspecting their pipeline. There wasn’t much mention of the fact that the state had been paying for a non existent pipeline inspector for the past decade.
Granted the company should have been inspecting their own pipeline but there was no urgency because they knew the state wasn’t doing it either.