All you need is a lot of money, a lot of time, a problem that is fixable, legislators willing to work together, and/or a judiciary operating outside political ideologies.

We'll be fine, everyone. Nothing to see here.

Regulators don’t make laws and local governments have spent years limiting corporate liability, so I don’t think your opinion on this is based in reality, unfortunately.

Regulators do not make laws, they make regulations based on authority granted to them in law.

And that's better how??

“The chicken will be fine, the structure is still there”, says the fox guarding the henhouse.

Depends on what rights the corporations enjoy and the states where the corporation is sued.

Actual laws are up to congress etc which frankly don’t understand the intricacies because it’s not their job. So it’s common for agencies to be given authority to oversee something without a law explicitly defining specific level of salt in drinking water etc. Regulators therefore don’t make laws only clarifying where boundaries exist (safe levels > X ppm).

Deference for unintentional ambiguity seems unrelated, but in the real world people want to know where the lines are so they can respond accordingly. Not knowing where the limits are gets expensive for anyone not trying to push boundaries.

Lawsuits meanwhile are horrifically inefficient in terms of time. What exactly are people supposed to do while waiting for a lawsuit to finish? For some things sticking with existing guidelines works but nobody wants to make major investments when the underlying rules are about to change. Clarity is far more valuable than generally perceived and that’s what’s being destroyed here because the courts even decades to make the meanings of laws clear.

This decision is therefore directly and significantly harmful to the US economy.

Damn yeah lawsuits are really a quick and useful remedy to these problems, as long as you are willing to wait a decade or more for the resolution.

The word "can" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.

In theory, I entirely agree - regulation should not be decided by agencies, but by lawmakers. In practice, this is so painfully far from reality. Do you really think congress has the ability to pass meaningful legislation on complex issues? Do you think that lifelong politicians can do a better job than civil servants who have spent their entire lives studying this particular issue?

Of course, we regularly have big, major bipartisan bills getting passed in the Congress, don't we?

/s

And Congress is fantastic at passing laws and amending small details after the fact with follow-up laws \s