It's all a matter of what the regulations actually are. Most of them get sold as "consumer protection" but in practice are written by the industries the consumers are supposedly being protected from, in order to create barriers to entry and destroy competition.
> The US is sold products that force you to buy more “juice” and make messes.
Is there something forcing you to buy those ones? Can't you just order the EU one and have it shipped to you in the US? (And if the thing preventing that is regulations, well, "we need more regulations" is probably the wrong fix.)
Requiring 3rd party certification that your food/vape juice/whatever won't harm me should definitely be a barrier to entry. If that means there's less competition and higher prices, so be it. Consumer safety should come before the need for more competition and lower prices.
So then don't buy anything without third party certification. But why shouldn't you be able to choose the EU's certification rather than the US, or a private one, if you want to?
You can't tell how compliant with food safety standards a manufacturer is when you're standing in front of a supermarket shelf. It's better to just know that every juice on the shelf met some minimum food safety standard.
How can you tell any better how compliant they are with local law? The penalty can be the same for misusing the seal of the standards organization, it just gives you the choice of whose standards you're willing to accept.
> It's better to just know that every juice on the shelf met some minimum food safety standard.
But that isn't what happens. It immediately goes from requiring that the food is not rat poison to prohibiting donut holes and restricting hamburgers on Sundays and requiring apple pie to be served with cheese.
With regards to diesel vs. gasoline: Where I live, gasoline is 5 times more expensive than it is in the US, so diesel have been favored solely for its efficiency. We consider anything below ~25km/l (or ~60MPG) to be inefficient, and anything below ~20km/l (or ~50MPG) to be terrible, and that has been our standard for close to 20 years. NOX vs. CO2 is always a discussion, but we do our best to burn as little as possible of anything.
We also try to disincentivize owning old cars that are legal by older standards by having taxes on emission technology (e.g. no modern DPF), as well as fuel efficiency.
(Not that I'm fossil-fuel apologetic—I'm going to get an EV as soon as its affordable. Cars are pricey here.)