EPA To Buy Small Town In Kansas 260
Ponca City, We love you writes "The Wichita Eagle reports that Congress has approved funds to relocate the population of the southeast Kansas town of Treece, which is plagued with lead, zinc and other chemical contamination left by a century of mining. Estimates say it will cost about $3 million to $3.5 million to buy out the town, which is surrounded by huge piles of mining waste called 'chat' and dotted with uncapped shafts and cave-ins filled with brackish, polluted water. 'It's been a long, dusty, chat-covered road, but for the citizens of Treece, finally, help will be on the way,' said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas who has been pushing for a buyout of Treece for two years. The population of Treece has dwindled to about 100 people, almost all of whom want to move but say they can't because the pollution and an ongoing EPA cleanup project makes it impossible to sell a house. The EPA has already bought out the neighboring town of Picher, Oklahoma, stripping Treece of quick access to jobs, shopping, recreation and services, including fire protection and cable TV. Both cities were once prosperous mining communities but the ore ran out and the mines were abandoned by the early 1970s. Of 16 children tested for lead levels in Treece, two had levels between 5 and 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood and one had a level of more than 10 times the threshold for lead poisoning."
EPA plans to relocate town to New Jersey (Score:5, Funny)
Where it will become a nature reserve.
FHA is doing the financing.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Well, a whistle owned by a crack whore down on 53rd.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
At least they... (Score:4, Funny)
...didn't put a DOME around it, barring everyone in the town from the rest of the world!
Re:At least they... (Score:5, Funny)
A shame, I was looking forward to the commercials...
Tom Hanks: [voiceover in TV ad] Are you tired of the same old Grand Canyon?
TV Dad: [bored] Here we are kids. The Grand Canyon.
TV Daughter: Oh, it's so old and boring! I want a new one, *now!*
Tom Hanks: [appears from behind bush] Hello. I'm Tom Hanks. The US Government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine.
TV Son: Tussle my hair, Mr. Hanks!
Tom Hanks: Sure thing, son.
[laughs as he does so. Stars come out of the boy's hair. He then smiles in wonder]
Tom Hanks: Now, I'm pleased to tell you about the new Grand Canyon.
[shot changes to that of a smouldering crater]
Tom Hanks: Coming this weekend! It's east of Shelbyville and south of Capital City.
Marge Simpson: [watching ad] That's where Springfield is!
Tom Hanks: It's nowhere near where anything is or ever was. This is Tom Hanks saying, if you're gonna pick a government to trust, why not this one?
Funny how this always happens (Score:5, Interesting)
In the end it's the tax payers and not the rich owners that end up paying for the clean ups. It's my main opposition to nuclear power not the reactors it's the clean up from both the mines and processing sites. It's true of most mineral based resources that they cut corners on extracting and processing and the people living around the places and tax payers generally suffer. It's long overdue that we end the corporate veil for this kind of abuse and bleed the ones that profited dry to pay for the mess. There's a whole town full of houses we can let them have cheap to live in.
That's easier said than done. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:That's easier said than done. (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget that the majority of the mining was done to supply that war (WWII) effort. The US military used munitions in the *billions* of rounds, not to mention supplying the allies.
Just Google "treece, kansasa war effort"
Re:That's easier said than done. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the government required they poison the locals?
Was that to show those damn japs we meant business?
The reality is these folks chose to do it that way so they could sell more product at lower prices thereby increasing their profit. We cannot go after them for breaking rules that did not exist, but we could require companies going out of business to restore land to salable levels. If they fail to do that, pierce the veil and take the owners money to do it.
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"These folks" made no such decisions. The decisions were made by people above their pay grade (both in business and government.)
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The old Nuremberg defense, how cute.
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We cannot go after them for breaking rules that did not exist, but we could require companies going out of business to restore land to salable levels.
http://www.autosafety.org/gm-gets-dump-its-polluted-sites [autosafety.org]
If the government isn't forcing a company they have control over to live up to its responsibilities,
what makes you think they'll chase after private corporations
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They won't. The simple fact is we have legalized bribery and until that ends this will continue.
When someone donates to both parties it is very clear what is going on, same when someone who could not vote in a race donates to a participant.
Silver? (Score:2, Interesting)
Silver is usually a useful byproduct of lead and zinc mining, It was an important side-product of the Cornish tin industry. The tailings of lead mines can contain significant silver.
Nevertheless. there are regions which do no have the traces of the silver you might expect. The price of silver is not that great: it can dip below three times that of copper. If no-one is offering to rake through their tailings then either (a) they are waiting for a better price or (b) there is nothing there to be had. A si
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I would say that it is the government's responsibility to regulate the industry and ensure this doesn't happen. Problem is when the rich guys that own the mining company basically buy the rich guys the run the government, well you can see what the eventual result is. It really is criminal.
Problem is the rich owner, and the rich politician are long gone now. If they could be held responsible for their past actions, then something may happen. However I believe that is called accountability and that is indeed
Re:That's easier said than done. (Score:5, Informative)
During the 80s and 90s, a small consortium of businessmen, built cyanide leach ponds in the Nevada dessert. The purpose of these man-made lakes of poison, was to dump lowgrade gold ore into them, to leach out the gold.
The minute they used up the pits, and extracted as much gold as they were able to, they pumped the money out of the companies, declared bankruptcy, abandoned to toxic disasters they created. In fact, looking at the many millions of dollars it will cost to remove the poison waste, clean up the landscape, and remediate the poisoned water table, it will cost tax payers many times what the mining company was able to extract from their business.
From my point view, this was nothing more than an elaborate scam to convert our tax dollars into their personal assets (and a grossly inefficient method at that.) Add to that, the horrific environmental damage, and gross lack of conscience of those involved, and our current mining laws (virtually unchanged from the 1800s) are the perfect vehicle for destroying vast tracts of Federal Land (that should read as public lands, all our land.)
Though most mining does produce resources vital to our society, we need to include the cost of safe and sane mining practices, and proper land reclamation in the bottom line of that business. Not to do so, is to invite more environmental disasters, and growing human cost.
Just as an aside, recent analysis shows that the largest source of fresh water in the southwest (the Colorado River), is becoming increasingly polluted by toxic heavy metals from abandoned mines in the Rockies. The impact of this pollution will impact tens of millions of people, and could cost the U.S. and Mexico hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity, heath cost, and cleanup.
Re:That's easier said than done. (Score:5, Insightful)
From my point view, this was nothing more than an elaborate scam to convert our tax dollars into their personal assets (and a grossly inefficient method at that.)
Not to worry: nowadays we have much more efficient methods to convert tax dollars into personal assets: no-bid military contracts, bank bailouts, tax breaks nestled into unrelated bills, and bridges to nowhere, to name a few.
Re:That's easier said than done. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once mining companies (and property/land developers) realize that their is a risk that they might be sued in the future, they will create subsidiary companies that are legally responsible for the project. Once the project has been completed, the subsidiary company is liquidated along with any legal responsibilities. Either way, the owners will be absolved from any blame.
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Once the mining companies go belly-up, it's hard to say where the money's gone and who is responsible
A lot of jurisdictions have laws now that cover this. Mine, in Nova Scotia, Canada, requires a large bond to be placed by the mining company before the ground is even broken. The bond is sufficient to cover the costs of reclamation once mining is done. Thus, the public is guaranteed that reclamation will happen for any new mine, even if the company goes under. NB that reclamation and modern mining regulation
Re:That's easier said than done. (Score:5, Insightful)
it's US law that you can't go after the stockholders
and back in those days most people didn't care about pollution
Re:That's easier said than done. (Score:5, Informative)
No, it is perfectly legal to go after stockholders once a certain level of illegal activity occurs. This is referred to as "piercing the corporate veil".
This is just another example of what all the banks having been doing recently, socializing the losses and privatizing the profit. This unholy merger utilizing the worst of all possible economic systems is called corporatism.
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No, it is perfectly legal to go after stockholders once a certain level of illegal activity occurs. This is referred to as "piercing the corporate veil".
No, "piercing the corporate veil" means going after the people in a corporation who made the decisions. Not stockholders.
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In fact it can mean both, if the stockholders were aware of the crimes being committed.
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Yep, it was more of a people just didn't care about the environment and didn't realize the implications on humans/animals by dumping these chemicals.
Same thing happened in my town for the Saturn V rockets while at the development facilities in Huntington Beach, CA and Seal Beach, CA they had huge bins of DDT and Boric Acid that they would continuously overfill all the time. Well the spillover of the acid would just splash out the top and onto the exposed dirt ground, this was all done with residents fairly
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The rich owners have been dead and gone for over 50 years. The mining that caused all this lead rich waste was done just after the turn of the century. There is a ton of wasteful spending in our gov't, but what lies around the cities of Picher and Treece is an environmental catastrophe of the worst kind that needs to be cleaned up. If you want to see for yourself, look it up on Google Earth. These cities are dwarfed by dunes of this mining waste (chat). Similar Superfund work in smaller projects are being
Re:Funny how this always happens (Score:4, Informative)
The clean up from Nuclear Reactors is actually the easy part. Typical amount of radioactive waste per year would fit in the back of a pickup truck. Almost all of it is being stored on site of the various power plants. Where to put that waste where it will be safe for 10,000 years of so is the difficult problem. In the end a coal plant puts out as much radioactive waste as a nuclear plant. It just dilutes it and spews it into the air. Nuclear is by far the least of all evils.
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"Where to put that waste where it will be safe for 10,000 years of so is the difficult problem."
No, it's a political problem. The 10,000 year number is a red herring; if we were to reprocess and use the waste we wouldn't NEED to search for a way to keep the Eloi fat, dumb, and tasty.
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With lithium batteries cars will be cleaner, heck copper mining for wire which is used in all cars is just about the worst. If we would just require a certain level environmental protection for all goods sold we could prevent most of this mess. No hybrid car nor solar panel required the use of these methods, someone decided to use them so he could pocket the profit.
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They should be paying that much, as they are earning that much. Look at the facts, [wikipedia.org] wages for all but the top 20% have stagnated for fifty years. Almost all of the increases in GDP have gone to that top 20%. Of course they should pay more in taxes, they own everything worth taxing.
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Please. Sixty percent of the top 80% rotate in and out? You just made that up. Seriously, most of the wealth in the 80th percentile is actually concentrated in the top 10%, and most of that is concentrated in the top 1%.
Most of the top 1% is old money.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Those sources do not support your assertions. They seem to be a list of the world's richest men. They do not show that 60% of the top 20% cycle in and out of that percentile.
The list also seems inaccurate. Bill Gates, for instance, comes from old money yet they list his wealth as 'self-made.' He never would have gotten anywhere if his family wasn't in the top 20% to begin with. Where would he have gotten the money to buy DOS?
Good luck on playing toady to those in power. Maybe if you kiss enough powerful but
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You're right, it wasn't 60%. It was 75% turn over after any 10 year period. through the 1990s it was actually 97%. Though you are right the top 1% which holds almost 10% of the total wealth doesn't have much turnover.
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Too bad they make more than 85% of the money, meaning they still don't even pay their fair share.
Do you really think that rich folks stealing from other rich folks, as you are trying to spin this, is ok?
Let me get this right (Score:4, Informative)
Corporations turn town into a toxic sludge dump.
Taxpayers pay for people to relocate.
=> Free Money solves the pollution problem!
By converting the planet's natural resources into limitless virtual symbols for value, we are approaching a point when we'll have to eat, breathe, and drink money.
I think it may be time to reform money: http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_a_new_beginning [realitysandwich.com]
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Corporations turn town into a toxic sludge dump.
Taxpayers pay for people to relocate.
Are they relocating them to Hiroshima?
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Municipalities typically have very little say as to controlling what goes on; most of that is state and federal law.
Re:Let me get this right (Score:4, Insightful)
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Has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with education. The factory pours chemicals into the river. River smells horrible. You catch a fish from the river. Fish doesn't look any different than any other fish you've caught. Therefore, you can eat the fish. If you never took a chemistry or biology class, and never followed a news story talking about carcinogens, then how are you supposed to know the fi
Re:Let me get this right (Score:4, Insightful)
What you are saying is pretty much that communities should disallow businesses to operate that might cause pollution. Because no matter how much a business says they aren't going to, once they do in the stealth of night, it is done. And then someone has to clean it up.
So the obvious solution for a community - if they had control - is to disallow any business that has the potential to cause any sort of pollution of anything. So you block the dry cleaner because of PERC, the auto shop because of waste oil, refrigerant, spilled gasoline, etc. Then you need to block the small metal shop because of dangerous organic solvents and metal chips. Eventually, you have a perfectly safe community (like California is trying to achieve) without any commercial activity at all.
They figured this out in about 1950 and today communities have no control. It is decided at the state and federal level, far far away from anyone that might be impacted.
This is also why the manufacturing has moved out of the US and either across the border to Juarez or across the ocean to China. No matter what companies tried to do, they were getting blocked by lawsuits and stupid regulations. A stupid regulation is California's Prop 65 - all it is going to do is drive businesses across the state line. It will not force car dealers to eliminate the lead in the batteries or the oil from the cars. But by all means, keep passing these regulations and drive all those industries over somewhere else. We can all work for the Government.
Better timeline. (Score:2)
Corporations turn town into a toxic sludge dump.
Corporations go out of business.
People become more aware of the general problem of industrial pollution.
Laws are passed to limit such behavior.
People in the town get sick.
After realizing that the horse has left the barn, taxpayers pay for people to relocate.
I hope this is a lesson to China. (Score:5, Insightful)
The goods manufactured there are cheaper for us because they export the true cost onto the Chinese population and the environment. Those costs will catch up to them, just as they've caught up to us.
Re:I hope this is a lesson to China. (Score:5, Informative)
Not yet: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=1036/ [nasa.gov]
They're killing themselves, just to enrich our few and their few - no one has to emit that level of pollution to manufacture goods. Luckily for the wealthy in all countries, huge piles of cash make you immune to pollution.
I guess.
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I will match your imagine of Chinese pollution with pollution of East Coast USA [nasa.gov].
Does your conclusion that "They're killing themselves, just to enrich our few and their few - no one has to emit that level of pollution to manufacture goods." still apply in this case?
Use for town (Score:2)
They could use if as a location for a live FPS game. Americas army with live ammo!
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Lead levels is exaggeration (Score:3, Insightful)
The comment about lead levels is exaggeration. Lead levels between 5 and 10 mcg/dl are more likely caused by chipping lead paint or lead dust from home renovation. Those lead levels more likely indicate that the mining is NOT causing elevated lead levels.
Lead levels above 10 mcg/dl are considered "elevated." Lead poisoning refers to lead levels above 24 mcg/dl.
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Yeah, I wish I could get a EPA buyout of my home - My boys have elevated levels, my oldest was up to 34 at one point. 2 kids in the town have 5-10? big whoop-de-doo.
Lead is a real problem, but I would start by looking at the paint condition in the house, doing lead containment or abatement, and using HEPA filter vacuum cleaners. Sounds like the surrounding environment really isn't that bad.
I hate government spending but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't $3 Million seem a bit cheap. Essentially, they could clean it up for billions, but instead they are just gonna move the population away for a measly $3M and hope that everyone just forgets about the place.
I don't think that this "solution" will work in all cases, but in this case I am glad they decided to spend $3M rather than cleaning up the mess. If left alone for a couple of centuries, I'd wager that nature will take care of much of the mess.
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With only 100 residents left, you could probably do it for $3m. The remaining abandoned property will be snatched up, through eminent domain or something similar (there's bound to be a statute for this sort of thing...
Hedley Lamarr: Wait a minute... there might be legal precedent. Of course! Land-snatching!
[grabs a law book]
Hedley Lamarr: Land, land... "Land: see Snatch."
[flips back several pages]
Hedley Lamarr: Ah, Haley vs. United States. Haley: 7, United States: nothing. You see, it can be done!
Not the first time (Score:2)
Times Beach [wikipedia.org], Love Canal [wikipedia.org], etc.
Photos of the pollution (Score:5, Informative)
Some photos from around Treese:
Chat
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579757 [panoramio.com]
Cave Ins
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579725 [panoramio.com]
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Some photos from around Treese:
Chat
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579757 [panoramio.com]
Cave Ins
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579725 [panoramio.com]
I don't know what's uglier, the ground level photos or the satellite images.
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hah, i like the sign that just says "US Property. NO"
Re:Photos of the pollution (Score:5, Interesting)
I grew up near this area over the state line in neighboring Joplin Missouri.
Back in the 70s and 80s piles of chat hundreds of feet tall could be seen for miles. Chat is the local term for the mining waste -- in this case mostly limestone that's been pulverized and the lead and zinc removed. But there are trace amounts of lead remaining. Most of the chat has since been removed and used as railroad ballast and road base.
As kids we used to play in these chat piles -- you could find all kinds of interesting minerals and occasionally fossils. Occasionally the ground would collapse around the flooded and abandoned mines.
I was just back to this area several months ago and me and some friends spent the day taking pictures around Picher, OK and nearby Route 66. Picher is essentially a ghost town nowadays, but interestingly you can still drive and walk around the area, even though it's an EPA superfund site.
BTW, there's a geek connection to Picher. One of the companies to survive the mining is Eagle-Picher; they were an early innovator in battery technology and became a major supplier of batteries in aerospace, including the batteries for the Apollo missions. In nearby Quapaw, OK that built a boron enrichment plant producing boron 10 isotopes for the nuclear industry, too.
Communists! (Score:2, Funny)
Require mining companies to post a bond (Score:5, Insightful)
Prior to starting the mining, the company should have to commit
to paying, say, 25% of top-line revenue into a fund to be held in escrow
by the government.
If the company cleans up adequately, and operates cleanly all along,
then at termination of mining operations, they get the funds back with interest.
If the government has to clean up, it uses the fund. There should be a penalty
catch, something like: If the government has to spend more than 25% of the
fund cleaning up, then the government fines the company the rest, and
such money is made available to an R&D pool that companies and universities
can access only for purposes of R&D into more environmentally responsible
methods and technologies for extracting resources.
This is probably an appropriate place to state that my signature line is ironic,
being a listing of two oxymorons.
your tax dollars at work (Score:2)
Companies extracted the minerals without actually paying the true cost of their actions (and thereby generated higher profits), and now the taxpayer needs to pick up the bill. Of course, the relocation is only the tip of the iceberg: medical costs and environmental costs are likely to be many times over the cost of the relocation.
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Agreed. But money exchanges aren't the answer. Companies simply factor that as a cost of business, even if it's a risk of cost, not a cost ultimately paid.
The fix for this sort of thing is jail time.
OK, wait. That's all it costs!??! (Score:2)
You mean I can buy an entire town for $3,000,000? That's not a lot of money for a bunch of buildings and some land.
So what do you do with a polluted site?
I can't think of any business model, but there has to be something...
Wind farm? Solar? Landfill?
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Movie site? Museum of baby boomer mentality?
That's a reasonably nice ending (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I think this sounds like a remarkably civilized end to a nasty story, and hope they can get the people out. I've worked with people who had chronic lead and mercury poisoning from old mine contamination and some of them are really seriously screwed up.
(*) There was an old mine called the Yak Tunnel, dug not for minerals but to drain all the other mines, at a much lower level than they were, so it served as the sewage drain for dozens of huge mines. Whenever one of the old abandoned mines would have a collapse, a huge surge of contaminated water would dump out the Yak and right into the upper Arkansas, killing everything downstream for dozens of miles.
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Socialism (Score:2, Funny)
Allowing a government to buy a town is clearly unfair competition and socialism. Only private businesses should be allowed to buy towns.
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private business has mad lots of profits by polluting and destroying the city and it's surroundings. now it's time for the community to pay up ... go figure.
early 1970s abandoned the mines?!? (Score:2)
That is why I hate early 1970s!
First Picher, then Treece (Score:2)
Something tells me [google.com] there's a nice investment opportunity in the Cardin, KS housing market...
You Keep Using That Word... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, the action of a free market! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ron Paul (Score:3, Funny)
Once again an inept bureaucracy of the federal government tries to solve problems with bigger, more expensive problems. We don't need an EPA, the constitution gives us property rights. If pollution encroaches on your private property you don't need to appeal to Big Environmentalism, just take the polluter to court!
Re:Greenies - broken accouting (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not a free market system. A faulty accounting system allowed the mines to extract profits without being responsible for the damages.
Now the tax paying public is cleaning up. So the "free market" now has tax payers paying while the company exits with its profits.
A proper market accounting system would have made the mining corporations pay for the cleanup.
So what happened here was a broken market system where the costs of the mines was not properly applied.
Re:Greenies - broken accouting (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that this accounting failure is the descendant of a deliberate choice made by various courts shortly after the Industrial Revolution, when they chose to rule for polluting manufacturers and against impacted property owners in a blatant display of "progressive" social engineering triumphing over property rights.
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Corporations are people, too: http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.html [ratical.org]
So I guess they merit "social engineering", eh?
/SarcasmOff
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Re:rubber hose cryptanalysis (Score:2, Informative)
I think the rubber hose has been phased out in favor of the oh-so-versatile wet towel.
You fold the wet towel up tight across its width, drop its temperature to the verge of freezing, and Voila!
A cryptanalysis tool that automatically self-destructs while you stall the International Red Cross.
re: a deliberate choice (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, and because we still haven't really learned that lesson (that property rights should *really* be treated as rights, and not subject to modification whenever government finds it more convenient), we're going to see this repeated.
It's certainly one of the ongoing battles with Monsanto corp. over some of the toxic waste sites they've left behind over the years. They've been playing all sorts of legal games to dodge paying for some of it though, including filing bankruptcy and spinning things off to a new company, Solutia.
If individual homeowners could file suits any time a corporation generates pollution that falls on their personal property, I bet they'd treat much more carefully. As it stands though, something like that would be a "David vs. Goliath" battle most homeowners can't afford to fight.
Re:Greenies - broken accouting (Score:5, Insightful)
My observations have been that when you talk about pollution with rabidly pro-free-market libertarians, it proceeds something like this:
Q: Won't that new plant they're building cause a lot of pollution?
A: Well they should have to pay for externalities like cleaning up after themselves.
Q: Ok, they built the plant, can't we stop it from pouring all that pollution into the environment?
A: That's not really pollution. It's shoddy science to say it is. There's no proof that it causes cancer. Who cares if the rates of cancer have tripled, correlation does not equal causation. Making it cleaner will cost too much.
Q: Well the plant's been shut down, now the area around it is a dead zone, the economy's shot, and people are dying, isn't this a failure of the economy?
A: Well they should have been made to pay for externatlities like cleaning up after themselves.
Re:Greenies - broken accouting (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who would oppose holding polluters responsible for damages evidenced by clear cases of cancer rationally attributed to their emission of carcinogens is no "pro-free-market libertarian," whatever they may call themselves. Yes, I know about the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but the only possible point of your comment would have to be an accusation that I would make such an argument based on my similarity to "libertarians" you've encountered in the past. I have made no such argument, and I have no plans to do so, so feel free to check your stereotypes at the door.
Of course, I'm not the one you have to convince. It would be up to a suitably impartial court to decide whether causation exists—and up to you to convince them that it does. Naturally (if there is no out-of-court settlement) the polluter is going to argue exactly the opposite, just as in any other court case.
Re:Greenies - broken accouting (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not completely correct in terms of your 2nd answer.
The free-market solution would be to not regulate any pollution, but to put the onus on the property owner to file a suit for any pollution placed on his property or in his airspace. Have fun proving the pollution in your air was created by a particular corporation.
This is why we have communal ownership of airspace rights and the government regulates pollution. The deal is that Monsanto et al. can emit a particular amount of pollution with impunity. In theory the regulators would look out for what the public safety, but as is with almost all regulatory bodies in this country, they are captured by the industries they attempt to regulate. Therefore the regulatory body is an arm of the industry, essentially charged with making sure the industry's costs are increasingly externalized.
Re:Greenies - broken accouting (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming that every taxpayer is a consumer, and that every consumer uses the product (and contributes to the pollution) in equal amounts. Neither assumption is well-founded, which means that there is a significant difference between holding the company responsible for its pollution and taxing everyone to clean it up. The tax-based approach creates major externalities, imposing the cost of cleanup disproportionately on users and non-users alike. It's also an after-the-fact approach, and "justice delayed is justice denied." The company should be held responsible when the pollution occurs, and not permitted to let the pollution accumulate.
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That's kind of a twisted way of looking at it - had the town been owned by a few landlords who gave the ok, it would not have been any better. Property rights only go so far in protecting the public good.
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A proper market accounting system would have made the mining corporations pay for the cleanup.
The problem is that when people suggest that corporations should pay tax on the externalities that their operations create they get called "tree hugging socialists" or something. There's a huge section of society that doesn't know what an externality is, doesn't care, and has been convinced that taxing companies based on the pollution they generate is some form of anti-freedom anti-American communism.
Faulty accounting (Score:2)
I agree! The fault is in giving a value to environmental, social and other intangible values. As it is, these values are given a value of zero. Laws against pollution are an attempt to rectify these problems but then corporations just move operations to some other country where they are allowed to pollute. Either that, or companies that want to pollute play fast and loose to get around the law. We really need to rethink a way to give value to intangible tings such as a clean environment.
Re:Greenies (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm so sorry my sarcasm was not lost on you :-)
P.S. I have still, even after Bush and Obama, huge difficulties differentiating between republicans and democrats.
Don't worry, it is the same problem in Finland, though we can "choose" from three (major) parties.
Eh ... perhaps you should worry.
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In an economics course, when they teach you about the free market, they start with something like, "When transaction costs are low, there are no barriers to entry, and property rights exist and are enforced, then the free market is efficient". Otherwise.... it's generally not. One of the things that lets negative externalities like pollution come to pass is that the "property rights" for "living in a town that's not crazy polluted" didn't exist / weren't enforced.
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"When transaction costs are low, there are no barriers to entry, and property rights exist and are enforced, then the free market is efficient".
So not in the real world, then.
Re:Greenies (Score:5, Insightful)
The government's fundamental purpose is to at least restrain individuals from harming other individuals. Anything less than that is not a free market by its very definition. A free market is not anarchic in nature but is instead the minimum intervention required to protect individual rights against various forms of violence. Environmental damage like this is a perfect example of a case where the government must intervene on behalf of those whose rights were abused. You are arguing against corporatism which is a perfectly reasonable position to have on the matter.
What's Your Solution? (Score:2, Insightful)
Do nothing? Okay.
Let's move to a totally free market economy. Let's forget about public roads. Someone will build a road to where I want to go. Except the road only goes one place. Did you catch the cost of switching from the road you are on to another road system? I can't get some places because the road owners can't agree to trade terms. That's okay though because it's unfettered capitalism.
The great thing about totally free markets is, kidnapping you and selling you into slavery is legal. But y
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I lived in Kansas for a year, and distinctly recall thinking "if I won the lottery, Id come here, buy up one of these countless craptastic mini "towns" and set the whole god damn thing on fire"
I could have potentially done certain residents a favor...and my coworkers called me crazy. HA!
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Oh noes, a few cans of tuna worth of elemental mercury. The sharp bits of glass would be the biggest real concern. Get some powdered sulfur and you would be fine.
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