Slashdot Mirror
EPA To Buy Small Town In Kansas
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."
Where it will become a nature reserve.
FHA is doing the financing.
Times Beach, Missouri.
...didn't put a DOME around it, barring everyone in the town from the rest of the world!
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.
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
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.
Once the mining companies go belly-up, it's hard to say where the money's gone and who is responsible, because many people were involved. One thing is for certian, we all benefitted from the lower priced minerals, and now we all have to pay to clean up the mess.
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.
Well, in all seriousness, it is worth noting that Pat Roberts is a Republican pushing for government intervention in an environmental problem. It's not so controversial when it's something an tangible as lead-poisoned children.
Because the perfectly legal free market system crashes the markets, destroys lives, and also destroys the world in the name of increased profits.
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.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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.
Corporations are people, too: http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.html
So I guess they merit "social engineering", eh?
/SarcasmOff
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
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.
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Some photos from around Treese:
Chat
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579757
Cave Ins
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579725
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.
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.
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.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Just apply the free-market solution to this bunch of pathetic pinko trash: fuck 'em. You want mommy government to buy out the town? No, let it fetch the free market price of $0.01 an acre (if you find a sucker willing to pay that much). This crying about lead poisoning is communist bullshit anyway. If it weren't for the commie EPA they wouldn't know it was bad at all and the town would be rolling in the riches of the free market. They'd also pull themselves up by the bootstraps and not complain about the commie fire department from the socialist town next door not being there anymore. If you can't afford a fire department in your town, tough shit, you fucking commie pinko. They're all probably dependent on pinko commie socialist Welfare, socialist pinko commie Farm Subsidies, socialist commie pinko Social Security, pinko socialist commie Medicaid, and commie socialist pinko Medicare. Probably send their kids to commie pinko socialist public schools. Don't even get me started on the socialist commie leftist fascist public police force, the goddamn unamerican pinko jackbooted islamic thugs. If it weren't for the fact that the mines are depleted, we should declare war on them.
This post brought to you by the Cato Institute.
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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
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.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Allowing a government to buy a town is clearly unfair competition and socialism. Only private businesses should be allowed to buy towns.
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.
Considering how ridiculously broke our federal government is, I'm not sure in what sense it can continue to be said that it is "buying" or "paying" for things.
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.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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.
"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.
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.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Mines come in when it's profitable, screw up the environment because nobody can stop them (that would be government regulation, which would be socialistical), and leave having raped the land of the only thing that was worth anything. The people left behind have no money to clean up the mess the mines made, and the mine companies are under no obligation to do so themselves. Yet another example of why libertarianism is a pipe-dream utopia second only to Communism in its impracticality.
I piss off bigots.
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!