Bush's proposal shifts the burden of toxic clean-up to the taxpayers. My mom always made me clean up any mess I made. Apparently her admonitions don't apply to those businesses that pollute our rivers, turn our air brown, kill our wildlife, kill us. Peace
Gazing across the pond it has always struck me that the average American will not stand for such measures and take to the streets in protest. (It's here in England where we shrug and sigh !) Tell Mr dubya 'it's not on' with enough voices and things may change come on you guys, you're not going all soft on me now are ya? If lobbying doesn't do it you can always fall back on plan 'B' and shoot the sonofabitch!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
In the US if a corporation causes excessive environmental damage it is legally responsible for cleaning up the mess. (Monsanto is being forced to pay for PCB pollution this week.) The Superfund was to cover cases in which the original polluter went out of business. The Superfund tax applied to corporations whether they polluted or not. Basically one company is taxed to pay for the cleanup of another company’s (or the government’s) messes. The Superfund was to be an insurance policy guaranteeing the government wouldn’t be left paying for environmental cleanups. In practice it became a new tax to pay for whatever environmental projects the government wished to support. (Superfund money was spent to cleanup the major environmental damage done by Oak Ridge National Laboratories during weapons development.) This hamster doesn’t claim to know whether the Superfund served a good purpose or not.
You could always try not buying products from companies that pollute. That way the people would have a clear conscience that they didn't contribute to the pollution in the first place and have a solid basis for complaining about being slugged taxes to clean up. Well, that's my take on the matter. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Unfortunately, the herd instinct takes over quickly. The people and the media are outraged for a flitting moment, and then easily settle back into the cud-chewing routine. There are more than 85,000 known or suspected hazardous waste sites across the country. Beginning in 1980, only the worst 1,335 arecurrently listed as Superfund sites. So far, only 1/3 of these sites have been completed. The Superfund program was initially supposed to last five years, with a budget of $1.6 million. So far, Superfund's budget has consumed more than $30 billion, and is expected to require close to $1 trillion. Everyone pollutes, even if only through waste heat or noise. But I understand your point, and it is excellent in theory. The problem is untangling the web of ownership during this period of mega-corporations. How much time do we spend following a convoluted trail to determine if all of the parent companies are as environmentally concerned as we would like. How do we know if what they are reporting as their standard is even true? Peace.
As I sit here and stew over this one, I often wonder why we don't front-load these things? For example, many old cities have severe problems with tons of ancient, decrepit housing. Little can be done about it because, typically, the owners are absentee landlords. The cost of tracking these people down and taking effective legal action is usually prohibitive, as is the cost of condemning the property and taking it down as a health hazard. Similarly, it is only after a company folds up, its various officers and other staff dispersed (along with the money they earned, if any), that many pollution situations are discovered. It becomes very expensive to track down the people who actually were responsible for the pollution, and it is often a moot point as to whether enough money can be recovered from them to pay the costs of the cleanup. So why not make such things front-end expenses of these types of businesses? When you buy land with a structure on it, part of the price is automatically sufficient money to demolish the structure if needed. This could be fund into which part of each mortgage payment is channeled. When you start a business that in any way involved potentially polluting substances, part of the cost of buying or building a structure for your business is a fund that will be used to clean up after you, if necessary. If your structure does not need to be demolished when you sell it, you get the money back. Ditto for businesses. It would then be up to the new owner to replenish the fund. True, it would raise the cost of business, but then so do the pollution taxes that so many want Congress to reauthorize. So do the effects of the pollution. So what? Yes, this might slow the development of certain types of businesses. Is this a vital loss to the economy? And then again, if there's a big demand for what a business wants to market, then there's no reason they can't charge enough to cover this cost. There are bound to be difficulties -- estimating the cost of demolition and/or cleanup in advance, for example -- but so what? There's plenty of difficulty in the current pollution laws, God knows. Not the least of which is that they don't work very well. The front-end laws should apply equally to all government agencies as well. They'd have to build the costs of cleanup/demolition into the budget for every project. No harder than the environmental impact statements that help make our highways so hideously costly and slow these days. Peace.
