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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.
...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.
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.
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.
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"
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
it's US law that you can't go after the stockholders
and back in those days most people didn't care about pollution
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
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.
I am officially gone from
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