Uh, it's not the tree huggers to blame for the US's industrial problems. The Europeans have even more stringent regulations than we do. The blame for the decline of American industry lies almost entirely with the labor unions that have made American labor completely unaffordable and companies using it completely uncompetitive.

Something like this is in fact part of the proposal currently under discussion: a seconds flag ("validated" or something) in addition to "not vandalized". The ability to set this flag would be reserved to a special group of experts. For core articles about science, etc, I think this can work. I'm not sure though how much of Wikipedia can be covered this way.