I feel like it's really common for people involved in energy extraction to tell the people living in a community "we promise it will all be fine". And then suddenly when things aren't fine, they'll pay the absolute legally enforced minimum (usually nothing) to those in the communities they've crippled.
People are right to be afraid, giving money to a few well owners in exchange for your entire water table potentially getting destroyed is a bad deal
One egregious example of this are the mining companies which create a toxic mess and then let the shell company go bankrupt. I can't imagine going into any community downstream of that and saying that the law protects them knowing that not a single penny of the extracted value will be recovered.
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.
To your latter point, industries with this sort of externalized risk should be required to issue real stock to stakeholders (Such as the neighbors of the pipeline, the downstream water users, upstream water users as well, groundwater users, etc)
They are already unwillling investors in the pipeline. They invest with the cost of their health and safety at a cut-rate of $0 to the operator of these critical systems.
"I got mine!" is a terrible foundation on which to build a society.
It’s not about the people, it’s about the oil and gas industry’s gross negligence. Can’t we pay oil and gas workers to cap and remediate wells instead of producing with them using Superfund dollars?
If you’ve proven yourself wildly irresponsible as a steward of a resource, you should not be shocked when activists attempt to drive you out of business. Hence, “kill these jobs”. No different than coal miners and workers.
My understanding is that it is standard operating procedure for small LLCs to be spun up for the profitable extraction period and then the wells and LLCs are abandoned when they are no longer useful. All of the pollution and other externalities are dumped on society while a small group of greedy sociopaths take all of the profits. These types of loopholes need to be closed. Ideally all of the people participating in these types of "investments" would be held accountable.
Basically it's a lot of the same people owning and running a whole bunch of entities that are technically not the same but functionally are, but they use legal loopholes to shelter their profits and make other people pay for the cleanup.
If it possibly might end badly, it must never happen out of lab. One can't even predict how it could end up. Low gains, gigantic risks for everyone and everything living nearby.
This is an act of eco-terrorism done by corporations. It shouldn't be treated better than oil spilling.
Maybe they don’t think they will suffer the consequences because they can screen their own water and soil. It could be that they have a scarcity mindset where their potential wealth is being used to test soil and water of other people at the expense of protecting them.
That sounds extreme, but many businesses weigh profits vs liability. For example, there are old industrial areas pretty much everywhere contaminated by all sorts of toxic waste. There was a furniture refinishing business not far from here, and there's a huge groundwater plume of toxic solvents under me. So no wells for us, here.
In page 60 or so the document talks about how to impose laws and security without a govt. There's also a section on non-government approaches to make polluters pay. Presumably the owner of the well would end up much poorer for their actions than when they started.
No. You're trying to shift the focus away from reality and on to an imaginary world where an industry that has consistently lied and done the worst thing they can get away with will do the right thing if we stop holding them to account. And where the very real externalities at mines and fabrication plants and enrichment plants and reprocessing plants that have been accumulating since the 50s are not allowed to be spoken about. And where there will never be an actually bad accident in spite of the yearly near misses and frequent events that 'can never happen'. And where the promises of reactors that exist on paper will come true despite that being the opposite of what happened every single other time.
And you're positioning dealing with this as necessary due to an imagined need that can't be better solved with alternatives.
And instead of acknowledging the industry's unbroken history of gaslighting and lies you are positioning anything other than credulous paying of the scammers to continue doing nothing other than grift as an unfounded panic.
I like the general idea of linking the consequences of some actions to the actors involved to prevent cheating and bad behavior. The examples from Babylon and Rome were probably much more effective in this than cutting the bonus of a banker (ie they paid with their lives).
I had a similar thought when I started reading about fracking (http://www.propublica.org/series/fracking). A simple solution there for the pollution caused by the wastewater is to force the executives and their families from the companies doing fracking to live in the communities they affect and use/drink the water they claim is safe.
Energy Transfer Partners (aka Sunoco) are pulling similar crap in Pennsylvania. Through or under dense housing, shopping malls, tearing up little league fields, occupying rights-of-way for years on end with drilling machines. They've already ruined many aquifers, poisoned a drinking reservoir, caused sink holes, even damaged their own nearby pipelines. All this before the thing gets pressurized with propane, ethane and butane. They subvert legislatures using public utility classification, eminent domain anything they want, and then bully anyone observing. Then they play the national security card for anyone asking about a disaster plan or blast radius.
There must be enormous profit here for such enormous public harm.
The problem is that it's the job of the government to ensure that private companies meet their consequences.
So, if you cannot trust government, you cannot trust private companies to not poison you either. I guess it's possible to have governments break down just enough to screw up the local water supply while not quite rolling in the bed with multinational companies yet, but I doubt such an arrangement would be stable for long.
> The only reason these scams are allowed to happen is the EPA doesn't have enough manpower to constantly watch over every facility to make sure fuel is actually being produced.
So, if you don't have that manpower don't set up a scheme like that.
That's the theory, but there are remarkably few consequences for oil companies that don't do the right thing, and even where there are nominally consequences, you have to fight very hard for anyone to enforce them.
For example, in Iowa, if an oil pipeline spills, the oil company's damages are capped at something like $1M. IIRC that's in total across the state per spill, not per landowner; you can imagine costs to actually clean things up being far in excess of that. They're essentially allowed to externalize all the environmental/health/safety risk to the landowners, nearby residents and workers, the state, etc. And that's in a situation where the pipeline company was allowed to seize use of the land under eminent domain. [1] So the landowners had no choice and will have essentially no recourse if there are problems.
“If money had to be clean before it was spent, we’d all be living in caves.”
Any attempt by feds to steal this money or sanction Redox for using it should be considered a direct attack on the project for its own sake, meaning the feds feel that Redox is a threat and they want to shut it down. The origin of the money is not a valid concern.
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.
I’m sure businesses that rely on dumping arsenic into the local lake don’t like having their livelihood threatened either. Property rights matter. Right now the market is broken.
This reminds me a bit about a story retold from the book Stangers in their Own Land, a former oil worker who ratted out the oil industry dumping poison in the water supply. And the coal industry in WV. There are people who will put up with cancer causing chemicals for jobs, but dammnit any government control is beyond the pale.
I don't know how you reason with these people. It's not limited to the southern region of the US - it happens when people in PA and Upstate NY fight over permissions for fracking on private land. However it does seem like wherever there are knowledge economy opportunities people will prioritze health and welfare, while in areas that are not as advanced will fight tooth and nail to let these companies do what they want, even if it means it will kill them. I can only shake my head.
People are right to be afraid, giving money to a few well owners in exchange for your entire water table potentially getting destroyed is a bad deal
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