Yeah... why are they singling out a certain software development company, in the first place? Trying to shut the coal mining industry down by pressuring one of the software suppliers with an organized mob rage campaign makes no practical sense, from an environmental activist perspective.
Im sure the lawyers thought of that angle, but the mining company currently doesn’t do anything to effect change so they probably won’t unless their customers (tech companies) demand a change.
It really is unfortunate. The mining company should build out proper infrastructure but I’m guessing they just delegate to (corrupt) locals.
This is no different than all the global environmental issues we’re facing with large scale production facilities (bottled water, petroleum, etc. are a huge problem too). The indigenous populations are getting fucked over because they live in remote areas prime for exploitation. Then the factories close down and don’t clean anything up.
I should point out this is also happening in developed countries like Canada and the USA. For instance, what is the difference between children mining cobalt and children being exposed to mercury poisoning because their rivers upstream there’s a paper plant dumping toxic waste into the food supply in Ontario, or petrol industry in Texas poisoning neighboring schools with chemical fumes.
The goal of these organisations is to end US coal exports, and that they will abuse the court system with any vexatious lawsuit they can dream up. They had the opportunity to present evidence to support their claim that shipping coal through the city posed any health risk to the community, and they failed to produce any evidence to that effect.
I wish the article would have talked more about the alleged danger this environmental group posed to warrant a 6 year plant like this. Did these environmentalists make threats, act on threats, how severe were the threats/actions? It just seems so overblown.
It felt like the lede is buried at the end of the article, and signals a deeper institutional issue. It looks like the Department of Environmental Conservation was petitioned to take a look at the permit for the plant claimed to be damaging lake’s environment. Meanwhile, DEC didn’t consider environmental damage when reviewing plant’s permit, wants to ignore (seemingly on a technicality) the evidence for one particular kind of damage, and furthermore last year it has discontinued the funding for tests for that kind of damage. Encouraging more coal plant construction seems strange in this age, even if we forget about this particular use case.
You've got to wonder how many times per day nearly identical "environmental impacts" are occurring due to mundane causes such as the use of explosives in mining, building demolations, or whatever.
This is a bunch of attention seekers latching on to a famous company like leeches.
Reminds me of when Tennessee Valley Authority let contractors certify the dams for its coal plans, which they failed terribly at, leading to a dam breech that spread toxic material all over the valley and watershed outside the Kingston Fossil plant. I covered the protests back in 2009:
This seems like the political equivalent of "rolling coal". Damaging the nation's health and well-being purely to spite political opponents, with barely a fig leaf for rationale ("jobs" somehow, I guess, although of course that makes no real sense).
Where do you draw the line? Is a company that manufactures mechanical pencils complicit, because they might be used as writing instruments at a coal plant?
I agree that accountability is a good thing, and we need to be doing more as a society to protect the planet. But at some point one has to come to terms with the idea that they're building a generic tool and simply can't be responsible for how others use it.
(I'd argue the blame primarily belongs on the plant itself, those who buy coal from it, and the government that allowed it to operate.)
I didn't create any false dichotomy, I simply noted your original middlebrow dismissal of the article was based on the absurd premise that its criticism of a mining company for causing a problem and lowballing with compensation was analogous to the criticism meted out to those whose philanthropic proposals "observe or interact" with problems they couldn't fully solve. The mining company doesn't stand accused of observing problems whilst not doing enough to help, it stands accused of creating problems whilst paying off just enough to get a contract.
Nobody is suggesting the mining company is the "bad guys" for having an interest in making a profit. They are suggesting they might be the "bad guys" for allegedly exploiting the naivete of local residence to pay a pittance to wreck their environment.
Blaming the EPA for an incident that happened at a horribly toxic mine is like blaming your doctor for your gall bladder exploding while it was being removed for being infectious.
The EPA is in charge of these horrible mines because the previous owners abandoned them to destroy the environment after the profitable stuff was pulled out of the ground.
The worst thing about this is that this company will get nothing more than a slap on the wrist. And their larger fish farm that they want will of course get approved, even though they can't handle a smaller one. It's incredibly offensive how little government officials actually care about the environment.
Maybe they are concerned in an abstract sense, and definitely they are when it negatively impacts them. The problem is they offer little to no support for EPA, and red states have been gutting their state EPAs (or putting into place shills for mega-polluters) for decades now, because they are "bad for business".
A few years ago I was reading about an issue with the cleanup of a coal fired power plant. The power plant owners collected a cleanup surcharge for the entire life of the plant, and put it into escrow. It was supposed to be used to handle site cleanup after decommissioning. For some reason, the company was allowed to sell the site, escrow, and all liabilities to some random 1-person LLC. This person then spent all the escrow funds paying companies he owned to do none of the work properly, and now the people in the region who are dealing with the effects of this botched cleanup have no recourse. Coal retention ponds are nasty, nasty things and because they weren't properly dealt with, its leaking into the water supply.
My understanding of that thehill.com article is very different. We have the "honor system" (my words). where most entities are self monitoring and reporting, with regulatory oversight. Industry is seeking permission to gut their own monitoring and reporting staff.
IANAL and don't have skin in this game. I did, however, volunteer at a treehugger org for a decade. The mission was to protect wetlands for fish, birds, flood control, pollution. I got hear plenty from the org's scientists and lawyers about the merits of self-policing.
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