Our legal system has created limited liability corporations to improve economic efficiency, and then a network of regulations to keep corporations from doing bad things that liability might dissuade a normal person from doing. We lurch between economically damaging regulations after something really bad happens, to regulatory capture after industry lobbying gets the attention of politicians.
It seems to me that the whole thing is a mess that doesn't work very well.
Here is my alternate proposal. Corporations who engage in risky long-term behavior should have to purchase long-term insurance to cover liability for what they are doing. These insurance contracts would be on terms set by insurers.
Behind the scenes insurers could cover these contracts by putting money into index funds. The fund would cover liability, the cost ensuring compliance with insurance terms, and after the period was up, would pay off investors.
These funds would therefore trade at a discount to regular index funds that represents market estimates of the present value of future liability. Therefore the insurance costs to companies would be a free market estimate of the cost to others of what you are doing.
And voila! Very little regulation. No regulatory capture. And people will get compensation. (And LLCs can remain limited liability.)
Here is my alternate proposal. Corporations who engage in risky long-term behavior should have to purchase long-term insurance to cover liability for what they are doing. These insurance contracts would be on terms set by insurers. And voila! Very little regulation. No regulatory capture. And people will get compensation.
No. The whole point is that these "risky behaviors" are quite capable of inflicting damages (such as the permanent contamination of water tables in certain areas) that can't possibly be compensated by the any conceivable "insurance payout". Such behaviors (once identified) should be strictly prohibited. Economic penalties against the corporate entities (aka "regulation") will of course never be sufficient. The only effective deterrent is jail time for for the decision makers (in addition to complete confiscation of their personal assets).
And BTW by "jail time" I mean serious jail time, as in multiple decades of jail time, and/or life sentences if necessary.
Flipping back in the chronology of your post a bit:
We lurch between economically damaging regulations after something really bad happens, to regulatory capture after industry lobbying gets the attention of politicians.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about the need to stop lurching. That's why we need to get serious about criminal penalties for this kind of behavior -- not to throw in the towel and entrust the safety of our irreplaceable freshwater resources wondrous self-regulating powers of the insurance industry.
The environment is not a casino, in other words. This is the health of uncounted generations we're talking about -- which will come into being long after any of these massive insurance payouts your proposal would seem to bank on could have possibly had any ameliorative effect.
The moral of the story is libertarian idealism (sans facism/authoritarianism) is simply the mirror opposite utopian extremism of communism... ever-refined balance is needed, which tends towards democratically-elected, semi-socialism: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." - James Madison
One of the most annoying cliche arguments in American political discourse is that money is the universal 100% effective solution to all problems.
We just had a nuke plant melt down? That's going to just cost a lot of money! We want to provide universal top quality free on-demand healthcare for everyone? Just quadruple spending and change absolutely nothing else! We want to colonize mars in 10 years. That will just be a few trillion. No problem! Nine women working together to have a baby in 1 month? Just a few billion in government R&D bucks and we'll have it solved in a jiffy!
Argh, that's a frustrating fallacy, often posited with sincere intentions but often disconnected from practical implementation considerations.
In general terms, effectiveness and affordability of budget outlay should be the primary concerns. Instead, budget is typically orthogonal to effectiveness of quality of problem characterization, planning, procurement, execution and follow-up. Oddly, better results can sometimes be paradoxically realized by reducing budgets where there are capital-inefficient organizations by teaching resourcefulness... many bad habits emerge when people have too much cash available to spend frivolously. There are many instances where greater outlays are cheaper TCO-wise in the long run, so the "penny wise, pound wise" mantra tends to be a good guideline.
Also, in the US, defense spending, education and social security are sacred cows for various reasons.
Question military-industrial complex spending and be prepared for accusations of unpatriotism and treason for "not supporting the troops." These are completely specious but used to guard the hen-house. Robert Gates was the most recent, effective reformer of DoD, but the honeymoon didn't last long.
Education is seen as important human right however NCBLA has foisted short-term pseudo-results upon teachers. So the problem is still seen as not enough money, usually because administration bureaucracy typically consumes a disproportionate fraction of total budget (or in extreme cases, embezzles cash outright).
Social security is a tough one because many people have no direct retirement savings, and no one humane wants to go the way of Korea, where the elderly are de-facto shunned and have nothing.
Money is all we have left. We tried "sanctity" - more or less religious purity. We tried "honor" - ( bring back dueling? ). Duty, country, sacrifice - all pretty much deprecated.
I don't have an answer here - it's the stuff of Adam Curtis films. He's hardly perfect, but has an interesting way of constructing frameworks to look at these things.
I remember a story from my Operations Research class ( most likely apocryphal ) that Stalin, riding a coal train to the front, watched as another coal train passed them and said "have whoever schedules the trains shot."
The oil industry isn't even a close second to agriculture in terms of risk to freshwater resources in the American West ( where the story takes place ). After a while as you read about our West, you realize that people may actually not be all that much supposed to live there at all, at least in parts of it. Trying to elevate freshwater to "irreplaceable" ignores almost all the behavior that actually surrounds it.
No, really - there's a book - "Cadillac Desert" which provides much context for this.
The fact that regulation seems always end in capture tells me something. For one, it's very hard to do. Think about how hard it is to assemble 100 people who truly understand something that is very complicated deeply. Something that takes dedicating your life to. Now think about how you'd assemble say, 200 of them. It's be some exponent or power harder, wouldn't it?
Criminal penalties may sound like a good idea ( to some; not to me ) but I don't really have a way to take such statements at face value. I'm not prepared to take what is generally considered legitimate activity and round up certain classes of mistakes to "go to jail."
Investing groundwater with "rights" and the ability to suffer "criminal torts" ( regardless of the horrors that may be inflicted on it ) seems a bridge too far. Even if we sum the rights of all the people who depend on it, it's difficult. After all, people have had to leave places before.
There could ( and perhaps should ) be some authority that must approve such activity in certain places. In the example, there should be no messing with formations that are that shallow. But that approval process sounds easier than perhaps it is.
>No. The whole point is that these "risky behaviors" are quite capable of inflicting damages (such as the permanent contamination of water tables in certain areas) that can't possibly be compensated by the any conceivable "insurance payout"
Those are the extreme exception, not the rule. That might be true of nuclear operations, but everything else can be fixed at some cost, with maybe ~$1 trillion for tail end risks, easily coverable by reinsurance networks.
Environmental damage is bad, but it's not infinitely bad. If the costs were anything like you suggest, that would justify vigorous bans of most industrial operations, not some mere regulatory enforcement as could be accomplished even with jail time.
Right, it's not the average case we're discussing here. But I think we can both agree that wrecking a water table in a geographic area of significant size (for example) would qualify as "extreme."
Everything else can be fixed at some cost, with maybe ~$1 trillion for tail end risks, easily coverable by reinsurance networks.
No - plenty of things in life cannot be fixed at any price.
Environmental damage is bad, but it's not infinitely bad.
Between "bad" and "infinitely bad" (the latter being obviously a red herring) there's another category which would seem to apply for the scale of mishap here: "unacceptably bad."
If the costs were anything like you suggest, that would justify vigorous bans of most industrial operations, not some mere regulatory enforcement as could be accomplished even with jail time.
Again, you're arguing by referring to extremes: "Yeah, drunk driving carries risks, but so does sober driving. If we really want to eliminate risk of death and dismemberment in horrifying accidents, then, we should ban all forms of driving."
No -- I'm just saying we should ban drunk driving. Which -- the more we get into the basic research behind these activities -- (certain classes of) fracking and other forms of large-scale resource extraction are increasingly looking to be aptly analogous to.
>Right, it's not the average case we're discussing here. But I think we can both agree that wrecking a water table in a geographic area of significant size (for example) would qualify as "extreme."
No, we can't. In the context of the specific point you were making, extreme means "no feasible amount of money could undo the damage". That's not true of damage to a water table, which can be remediated with a feasible amount of money.
>... I'm just saying we should ban drunk driving.
No, the point here is that, if drunk driving's effects were as uncountably bad as you claim the potential environmental damage is, we should ban driving, because the effect would wipe out all the benefit of driving, since the insurance cost would make it infeasible. But that's absurd, so we must conclude that your estimates of the harm size are as well.
Remember, you're the one arguing that the extreme cases dominate the risk calculation (to the point of uninsurability), not me!
No, we can't [agree about large-scale water table damage being remediable with feasible amounts of money].
Well, we disagree then.
As to the other stuff -- it seems you're doubling down on extremification techniques, attributing words ("uncountably bad") to me that aren't mine. All I can say is I don't find that line of reasoning helpful, and I don't know what to say to it.
There are no "extremification" techniques; it's just that you made a very specific claim about the nature of environmental risks, that such harms are typically (at their worst) so bad as to be uninsurable.
My point is that this claim cuts both ways -- in order for the environmental damage of industrial disasters to be that bad (above the ~$1 trillion that a reinsurance network could cover), it would also have to be so bad as to justify banning most classes of industrial activity -- not allowing them even with regulation. Since you probably don't believe that, then you're probably overstating the mangitude of this tail risk, and dismissing its applicability to your own alternative.
(Remember, regulation doesn't turn off the extreme events; it's just one way to reduce their likelihood.)
Which technique do you think that argument is unhelpfully using?
It's just that you made a very specific claim about the nature of environmental risks, that such harms are typically (at their worst) so bad as to be uninsurable.
"typically (at their worst)"?
I'm not even sure what you mean by that. (I have some guesses at what you might be getting at, but they also point to things I didn't say, either).
In order for the environmental damage of industrial disasters to be that bad (above the ~$1 trillion that a reinsurance network could cover), it would also have to be so bad as to justify banning most classes of industrial activity.
(1) I don't agree (nor do I think most people would agree) that all environmental or human disasters have measurable impact (let alone have a dollar value -- even a very high one -- which would suffice to repair or compensate for the loss the incur).
(2) The second half of your statement does not follow from the first.
Which technique do you think that argument is unhelpfully using?
Then review the original usage, which should have made it clear -- I was distinguishing operations where (I claim) the worst case is insurable from the cases where it isn't. I remarked that the worst case is rarely uninsurable, and gave the example of nuclear operations (which means nuclear power and nuclear weapons).
So, typically (across the set of environment-risking things), the worst case (within one of those things) is not beyond the reach of insurance.
Sorry if that whole "typical extreme" thing threw you for a loop, but I thought it was clear from context. Let me know if you know of a better way to communicate this concept. You seem to be deeply familiar with these kinds of considerations, so I bet you have one.
>(1) I don't agree (nor do I think most people would agree) that all environmental or human disasters have measurable impact (let alone have a dollar value -- even a very high one -- which would suffice to repair or compensate for the loss the incur).
Well, then you've inserted infinities in your model, which fundamentally breaks things and renders further debate pointless. The moment you say "this outcome is so bad that it dominates all other outcomes", then even small probabilities of it are unacceptable -- the Pascal's Wager dynamic. But that equally cuts against regulatory approaches, and it's not a reason to favor top-down regulation vs the insurance system advocated in the thread.
Generally speaking, the moment you refuse to quantify the damage, it's no longer in the reach of reasonable debate. "This thing is infinitely valuable" makes for nice platitudes, but not sound policy.
>Reductio ad absurdum
It's valid to point out how someone's claim implies an absurdity they disagree with :-p Certainly, you can dispute that the implication follows, but I'm not sure where you're coming from with a categorical dismissal.
So, -typically- (across the set of environment-risking things), the -worst case- (within one of those things) is not beyond the reach of insurance.
Right -- I think I've been making it pretty clear, though, that I was referring to high-risk industrial activities, not to average case ones.
Generally speaking, the moment you refuse to quantify the damage, it's no longer in the reach of reasonable debate. "This thing is infinitely valuable" makes for nice platitudes, but not sound policy.
I disagree; I find that qualitative reasoning can often be quite useful. Especially to avoid the pitfalls of purely quantitative reasons, which can often lead one to either-or arguments (such as you are invoking above), reduction to extremes, or other cul-de-sacs of the mind.
In particular, you'll note that I've never used the phrase "infinitely valuable" (or "infinitely bad"), and have in fact specifically eschewed it, despite your repeated attempt to assist the contrary.
All I'm referring to, basically, is the fact that some forms of damage are basically irreparable -- which is quite different from saying "the thing is infinitely valuable" (or that wrecking it is "infinitely bad"). In other words, it's a distinction of kind, rather than simply degree. And all I'm saying, policy-wise, is that industrial activities which carry a high enough risk of large-scale, irreparable environmental damage are of a different kind, such that it is no longer reasonable to believe that insurance requirements (or any threat of civil penalties against the corporate entities engaging in them) will provide adequate protection; instead they should banned outright.
Like, you know -- drunk driving.
I don't see this as an unreasonable position, not does is it (as you would seem to suggest) undermine our axiom systems to such a degree that everything becomes unknowable and all debate becomes pointless. Rather, it's just common sense, qualitative reasoning -- that's all.
The kind of damages that can't possibly be compensated by any conceivable insurance payout are also not helped by some people being in jail for life, so this isn't the solution either.
In our current legal and regulatory framework, companies have to seek licenses from the government to carry out these activities. So it seems to me you are advocating handing out 'serious jail time' to people who carried out legitimate business activities, regulated by the government and for which they obtained legal licenses.
Or am I missing something?
The fact is environmental impact should be taken into account properly at the licensing stage. That's where the accountability falls.
it seems to me you are advocating handing out 'serious jail time' to people who carried out legitimate business activities, regulated by the government and for which they obtained legal licenses.
No, I'm saying that high-risk industrial activities shouldn't merely be "regulated"; they should be banned out right.
It's when you violate the ban that you get handed a jail sentence.
>And BTW by "jail time" I mean serious jail time, as in multiple decades of jail time, and/or life sentences if necessary.
Have severe jail sentences rid the world of illicit drugs users, murderers, cutpurses, burglars, vandals, fraudsters, rapists or anything else?
If the chance of being caught and going to jail is lower than the expected gains of not getting caught, criminals gonna criminal. How do you aim to stop that with a threat? Throwing someone in jail is "too little, too late".
> Have severe jail sentences rid the world of illicit drugs users, murderers, cutpurses, burglars, vandals, fraudsters, rapists or anything else?
No, but you have to put things into context. Prison is a lot worse for a 50+ year old with a few million in assets than someone who's only other alternative is working at a fast food restaurant for minimum wage. When the choice is deal drugs or simply not make enough to survive there really isn't much of a choice.
Good government prevention detects such attacks on the allmende before they happen. If you are going to make a paint factory, and you have no contracts, and no money paid, to handle your waste, you are a crook.
If you have a paint-production-recyling factory and you have no means to safely handle the remains, you are a crook.
This chains can be checked, the quantities handled can be booked.
Its a lot of bureaucracy - but its worth it. And i say that, having worked in one of those "regulated" factories and having a inspector being a pain in the ass. Its really, really necessary. Just saying "Nothing can fix this." is easy here, but i dare you say that to the face of a mother or father who just lost there child to cancer.
So not even prison- just deny the freedom to be a parasite- to public goods.
If I understand you correctly under this scheme a person injured by fracking would have to file an insurance claim for damages. But insurance companies don't like paying claims, so then the injured party has to sue some giant battalion of highly paid insurance lawyers. The people that persist through the legal gauntlet for years would finally get a fraction of the actual damages because damages are defined very strictly in that they don't take into account a host of external factors, including things like the livability of a town for your grandkids. All of this under-payment of claims is calculated into the market's original risk calculation of the insurance policy because this is how insurance companies and the legal system have performed historically. So the end result would be that frackers get to destroy small towns for less than the actual value of the destroyed town.
This makes a lot of sense, but I see a few issues.
One, you say 'risky long-term behavior'... so how do we define something as being risky? If I am a corporation who wants to take risky long term behavior, why wouldn't I just hide the risk? If the bad thing happens, oh well, they have limited liability... if the bad thing doesn't happen, sweet we got to take the risk and not pay for insurance!
If we say every corporation needs insurance, and that insurance company is supposed to take unlimited liability for the corporation that they are insuring, then this insurance is going to be CRAZY expensive. The insurers are running huge risks, since the possible liability is infinite. If we say the the liability is capped at some number, then we are back to the same issue where the company taking the risky behavior is not liable for the full damage.
I would say that deliberately hiding risks is grounds for piercing the corporate veil and making shareholders personally liable. :-)
Obviously in practice there needs to be a cap. But the cap should be set high enough to cover the upper limit of the claims that reasonably could happen. Which means that the cap needs to be astronomically high.
For example if you're potentially affecting the health of a town, you should be able to compensate them for their actual losses. Including the cost of supporting sick people on disability for the rest of their lives. Like it or not that is the actual potential liability of your action. You shouldn't have to pay anything like that up front. But if 1% of fracking wells leak, and 1% of those leaks get into a town's water supply, then yes, you may have to be ready to compensate dozens of people for the cost of medical care and years of disability.
That's still not a great solution. If you gave me the choice between an insurance settlement and a loved one NOT dying from contaminated water, I'll take the loved one every time.
However if you said we couldn't engage in any activity that could kill people, your loved ones would die due to causes that technology can save.
A balance has to be achieved that allows productive activity to make our lives better, while providing incentives to make the side effects of that activity not harm us.
> However if you said we couldn't engage in any activity that could kill people, your loved ones would die due to causes that technology can save.
Would you mind expanding on how the first part of that sentence relates to the second part?
Are you proposing the argument "We can't have cars because they might kill people" is valid? I don't think so.
Whereas "We can't have fracking because it poisons the ground water" seems reasonable. Benzene is a known human carcinogen[1][2]
You write of a balance and propose that a way to achieve balance is to financially compensate, via an insurance, people, but how do you limit the liability of the insurance? Can people four generations hence make a claim too?
>Whereas "We can't have fracking because it poisons the ground water" seems reasonable. Benzene is a known human carcinogen[1][2]
How many people die in auto accidents as compared to Benzene originated cancers? Cars kill humans on a vast scale. They even sometimes kill people who want nothing to do with cars, like pedestrians, or cyclists. If your success metric is "lives saved", then pulling cars off the road is the sure winner, no?
I'm not saying deliberately leaking Benzene into the water system and vehicular accidents are the same. I'm saying this problem is difficult.
It's a plan, but it's still driven by economy, and still allows disasters to occur. The only thing it does is pay off victims from such disasters (if I understand you correctly) - the victims wouldn't be victims if disasters didn't happen in the first place. How about just not going anywhere near risky behaviour when it comes to the environment and/or people, ans simply disallow any such thing from happening unless companies can provide sufficient proof it won't cause damage? It's far from a perfect system either (see pharma) but should in the end lead to less damage.
> It seems to me that the whole thing is a mess that doesn't work very well.
Fritjof Capra discusses how areas of science have transitioned from a reductionistic / mechanical approach to a more systems approach - but law has not kept up and still treats parts of the world as disconnected, an individual's right, protected by the state.
Do you mean that in the sense that there's also "very little risk in operating a nuclear power plant"? As in, we know how to do it safely and contained (perfect world scenario), but there's a lot of risk in non-optional secondary processes?
I don't mean anything utopian. I mean that my understanding is that environmental risk due to fracking is very carefully monitored and can be controlled to some acceptable epsilon.
FWIW, there IS very little risk of operating a nuclear power plant. Incidents, while spectacular, are extremely rare. They say ( whoever "they" is ) that molten salt and other technologies are safer yet.
It depends on the risk, but for frequently-encountered circumstances, you'll have significant amounts of historical data on risks, usually expressed as financial costs, associated with various scenarios and outcomes.
Where things get tricky are where you're dealing with small n or very-large-impact, or both, events.
It's easy to get insurance for automobiles, or homeowners, or healthcare, as there are large numbers of policies and extensive history. The risks are known.
Insurance companies typically exclude coverage for acts of war. Some events such as floods or major storms (hurricanes / typhoons) or earthquakes cover large areas and may overwhelm even large insurers.
Rare instance risks -- tech, industry, spaceflight -- are also hard. But such projects do usually get underwritten.
Yes but would it be better to prevent such behaviour in the first place? Trashing a piece of land and the ecosystem on top of it isn't easily fixable and might prove to be very costly financially and time wise.
> Corporations who engage in risky long-term behavior should have to purchase long-term insurance to cover liability for what they are doing
Startups engage in "risky long-term behavior" all the time. It would be prohibitively expensive for them to have to purchase insurance, especially when they're insuring against risks that aren't well-defined in the first place.
So you want to limit your long-term costs with limited liability, and your short-term costs with no insurance. And you also want to be free to engage in behavior that puts MY life at risk?
And you see nothing wrong with this???
If you want to reap potential rewards for your behavior, you also need to take responsibility for the potential costs.
> And you also want to be free to engage in behavior that puts MY life at risk? And you see nothing wrong with this???
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth.
> If you want to reap potential rewards for your behavior, you also need to take responsibility for the potential costs.
"Potential costs" (ie, risks) are very difficult to define in advance. You can sometimes identify them after-the-fact, but having to wait until afterwards defeats the whole point of insurance in the first place.
"The research paints a picture of unsafe practices including the dumping of drilling and production fluids containing diesel fuel, high chemical concentrations in unlined pits and a lack of adequate cement barriers to protect groundwater."
... So it isn't the fracking per se, but toxic waste disposal and leaking in transit.
Pavilion is a pathological case. It's the rare area where producible oil is only hundreds of feet below the surface, at the same depths as groundwater [1]. All other plays of interest in the US are one to two miles deep. It's irresponsible to permit fracking in Pavilion. At the same time, polluting groundwater in Pavilion does not condemn fracking operations miles below the surface.
As I understand it shale formations holding petroleum are often 500 to 1000 feet down. Add that these are also fracked horizontally over hundreds of feet as well and I'll suggest there's a real worry to deal with. I also think there are too many people in the industry relying upon information derived from older history and not taking into account just how different fracking really is under the shale revolution.
> As I understand it shale formations holding petroleum are often 500 to 1000 feet down.
So I just recently left a job doing downhole tool design and everything I was hearing was high temperature, high pressure, high shock & vibe. I saw plenty of well plans that were 10k feet down and then 15k feet sideways, and little else.
I'm not saying that other things can't exist, but the cookie-cutter wells that drillers were doing as of a year or two ago were largely down deep and long sideways.
Yeah, sadly there doesn't seem to be a free and publicly available body of data we can get a true picture from. It would be nice to have a list of all horizontal wells drilled in the last 5 years with target depths and lengths, but I doubt that will ever be available.
I will say this: I spent years reading geological logs looking for bypass pay and I know there's plenty work being done or to be done in the depth range I mentioned. So in my mind the worry is real and people do need to get their heads wrapped around it.
Each state offers a free or small fee service where you can view detailed well information. I work at a company that aggregates that information.
There are 475 oil and gas drilling rigs running in the US today. The shallowest well is permitted to 1600 feet. The next shallowest is 2600 feet. In all, only fourteen of these actively drilling wells are permitted to depths shallower than 5000 feet.
Which does not surprise me. Under the current economic conditions only the most prolific wells are going to be drilling. That's why I suggested the last 5 years. Also, I eluded to the work that is "to be done". So when the low hanging fruit is taken then the other opportunities will show a broader range of depths.
All of this ignores the salient point I've made - That the risk is very real. If not from wells drilled today then from past or future drilling.
Note I'm not suggesting that people should freak out, but I am suggesting that industry players are spending too much time downplaying the risks and not taking a serious look.
Yes. As I understand it (chemical engineer, not a petroleum engineer), fracking for oil and gas (in addition to normal oil drilling) is USUALLY done thousands of feet below the water table. For some reason here they were fracking at a much shallower depth, in addition to doing things like "dumping of drilling and production fluids containing diesel fuel, high chemical concentrations in unlined pits" (from TFA).
Fracking is like setting a bomb off underground, but you can imagine there being something a city block or two of solid rock between where the bomb's going off and the water table.
The statements by the researchers are intended to give the impression that fracking is inherently dangerous. Their data do not back that up; rather, their data show that fracking is a process that can be very dangerous and environmentally damaging when not done properly and regulated to ensure it is done properly.
Except without any regulation or enforcement there is no incentive or companies to care about the environmental impact.
So yes, if you do fracking nicely and care about the impact then there is no problem. The reality is that no one involved in fracking cares and it's all about the bottom line so screw the environment.
Growing up my dads best friend was CEO of Alcoa... And there has long been the debate about fluoride in water.
I was told that fluoride is a by product of aluminum production, and it is extraordinarily toxic/acidic...
They can't dispose of it... So they found that small quantities in water wasn't toxic, per se, but helped with "tooth health" - but what I was told next stayed with me to this day "what better place to store it than in your liver"...
The earth is a lot more - but it's certainly the liver of humanity.
Basically they use toxic waste to force out the profitable product.
If one glass of beer makes you feel good but having too much can kill you, does one ban beer? Fluoride is basic, not acidic (H-F has a specially strong covalent bond) and the ion used as the source of fluoride in dental supplementation is not usually straight fluoride. Furthermore, the beneficial concentration is very different from the one which is toxic.
My point was that you take toxic waste, Flouride, and distribute it amongst a massive population of deposits (people) - even if its beneficial.. and you find a way to dispose of waste.
I personally dont have an opinion on the safety of fluoride in water - I just know that in the early 80s this is what I heard hanging around the CEO of ALCOA...
Finding a novel way of storing a bunch of toxic waste spread all across everything is the same thing.
Fracking fluids can basically be made from anything, so just randomly pumping random chemicals into the ground to store them there is the same as spreading the volume of aluminum production byproducts across a vast population is the same thing.
Further, with respect to fluoride - like I said, the CEO of Alcoa said this to my dad... So that comment holds some fucking merit.
No, they did not due to fracking. Its a result of salt walter injection activities, which is different.
The problem is a few local producers disagree on how much salt water can be reinjected. No its not going to cause a california style earth quake, the midwest doesnt have those kind of fault lines. Its likely to settle itself out over time, if regulation in this particular part of the state doesnt hit first.
But to be clear, it has nothing to do with fracking. Fracking actually stablizes rock layers (they inject porous sand into formations) rather than slickens them. Why would a producer want his formation to move and close off his production
Not fracking. Deep injection wells. There is a big difference. More accurate to say oil and gas production activities, but it is incorrect to the point of being misleading to say it's fracking.
"As a result of the magnitude 5.6 earthquake on November 5, 2011, an estimated one million dollars in damage occurred in and around the Prague area.[51] So far, there has not been a significant amount of damage reported from other earthquakes"
Most industries cost the community 1 million $ (assuming this particular earthquake was even due to fracking)
This is why they pay tax.
You're not in a movie, fracking is not going to cause some sort of earthquake catastrophe.
Ever company that uses trucks could and does kill people.
>>You're not in a movie, fracking is not going to cause some sort of earthquake catastrophe.<<
I have in-laws that live north of Edmond OK and the almost daily tremors and quakes there have changed their lives to a certain degree...
My father-in-law goes out to check the brickwork on his house on a regular basis now, paying special attention to his chimney...things occasionally rattle off shelves and fall to the floor...
Injection well frequencies and volumes have now been reduced or entirely curtailed in certain areas of the state...
So, maybe life does indeed seem a bit surreal if you live in an affected area...
Drilling, fracking, and the use of injection wells to dispose of waste-water have apparently led to Oklahoma becoming as quake-prone as California...
Industries don't pay taxes to make up for otherwise unaccounted for externalities such as environmental damage. The most succinct and mostly neutral answer to why they pay taxes is: the same reason everybody else does.
I'm not surprised at all, nor am I surprised by the brutal effectiveness of corporate funded influence on legal, regulatory, and community remedies to these problems. Its as if the system 'wants' people to suffer.
People in places like Wyoming pretty regularly vote for less government interference and regulation of that kind of industry, so I guess they get what they're voting for.
And meanwhile, the rest of the US is extremely car-centric, so we do our part to increase demand for oil.
My partner works in civil engineering and water remediation throughout Wyoming. Most farmers and ranchers there aren't too keen on fracking, because they suffer from the practice more than anyone (runoff/polluted water tables). But, there's no chance for any sort of political opposition, because the vast majority of people simply won't vote blue, no matter what. Often times, on the city/county level, there is no alternative candidate, it's red vs. red and neither want to "take away jobs" by buying into "leftist tree-hugger" nonsense.
It will only change when the "jobs" are cleaning up the mess, which has already started, but most roughnecks aren't qualified; cleanup requires educated city-folk from out of town, which widens the us vs. them gap even more.
I'm generalizing, but the above is often exactly the case.
My guess is that a lot of these places are going to be doubly screwed, because of the shakeout in that industry due to the falling oil prices: even in cases where a company is provably causing damage via bad practices, there may not be a company left to sue for damages.
Dealing with this is a large part of the job. Picture a small community, or group of families, fighting a major corporation that just repeats "the science isn't conclusive" and "we worked within legal guidelines and can't be blamed". Outside firms have to be hired, by people whose livelihoods have been squashed, to do extensive, and expensive, testing. It's frustrating and sad.
Red vs. red doesn't necessarily mean no debate on environmental issues. If there's enough disagreement among the state's population, it just gets moved to the primary. For example, Texas is almost exclusively GOP-controlled on a state level, and yet has implemented an extensive plan of government support for wind power development [1]. There are hardline small-government conservatives who thought that was a bad idea, but they didn't win enough primaries and lobbying battles to set policy. In this case the winning coalition was a mixture of environmentalists (who like wind energy), West Texas landowners (who like a new source of revenue), and state budget wonks (who like a new source of tax revenue that isn't an income tax). There aren't enough pure environmentalists in a state like Texas (or, I'd guess, Wyoming) to win only with their support, but if it can be aligned with preferences of a significant share of say, farmers, ranchers, and other landowners, it's possible to pass things.
That's a good point, but in your example, wind energy is basically an 'extra', rather than the government regulating an industry. I'd be curious to hear examples of the latter in places like Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
What happens on ranch X may affect the groundwater on farm Y or in town Z, a few kilometers away. I have no idea about the distances involved, and presumably they vary a lot depending on a number of factors that you'd have to ask scientists about.
Ideally, you would be able to detect pollutants moseying off the property underground, just as you would cattle wandering off the ranch above ground, and your property system would work fine ("Bob, yer frackin' byproducts done cross over into mah property yesterday, an I cain't abide by that") , but presumably it's not easy.
Seriously though, water tables don't respect property borders, and runoff doesn't stop at fence lines. If that happened, there would be no issue.
These people aren't stupid, and the last thing they want to do is ostracize themselves from their peers by raising environmental concerns. They're forced into these positions by a lack of alternatives.
>> And meanwhile, the rest of the US is extremely car-centric, so we do our part to increase demand for oil.
This is the one thing I'll never understand.
We always talk about getting off of foreign oil so we don't need to invade middle eastern countries for their oil (a crazy conspiracy theory, but a belief held by many) and other things yet we. . .
1) Don't support US oil companies when OPEC floods the market, crashes the oil markets here and puts American companies out of business - keeping OEPC's grip on oil production intact.
2) Absolutely refuse to build more refineries or seek out new areas where we can drill for oil to create our own supply
3) Are totally against new technologies that make drilling for oil easier (not necessarily fracking but other technologies as well) and thus do not support an industry trying to find a better way to create a US oil supply and compete with middle eastern oil countries.
Everybody in the US complains about gas prices being so high, but literally everything we do to try and get off of foreign oil gets killed by environmentalists, lobbyists and other special interest groups because of some reason or another. It's such a contradiction, it's maddening at times.
We want one thing, but we do everything to make sure it can never happen.
Trying to compete in the oil industry is a race to the bottom. Why would I want to further subsidize an industry that's destroying the environment when I could instead invest that money into researching/building cleaner sources and improved efficiency of homes and electronic devices?
For that matter, it's also illegal in most places to build cities that are denser and thus encourage use of old technologies like bicycles that are extremely efficient in their use of energy. The most efficient form of human transportation, in fact, on anything resembling a road.
Bailing out companies is generally fraught with problems and there are good reasons to avoid it. It quickly becomes very political.
because it is more consistent than the false claim of WMD (while ignoring those in nearby Israel), or the justification after-the-fact of defending the rights of women (while ignoring nearby Saudi Arabia)
Just finished reading Sen. Warren's book A Fighting Chance. It was remarkable how cozy the lobbyists got with "our" congressional representatives, how they continuously bombarded them with lobbyists to drown out the citizen perspective, and how many billions they spent on lobbying. All the bellyaching about not being able to afford regulation rings hollow given the huge scads of money corporations spend on elections and lobbyists.
It seems you vastly overestimate the citizenry; there is a great deal of evidence that elected representatives listen when their constituents have a strong view, but the citizens rarely bother to take a side.
Most people aren't aware of any particular industry or business that causes difficulty for a minority or permanent damage to the environment somewhere most don't see or some critical infrastructure most people aren't aware of unless some media choose to point it out. There's no way to be aware of every scam that some faction with a bunch of lobbyists and business connections to media outlets is running - they thrive on silence and/or misdirection and the effort to keep it is a predictable business expense and an industry in itself.
edit: If our government, in order to act, has to rely on the majority of the population both understanding every critical subject and forming a similar opinion on those subjects that is in opposition to current policy, then our government has become purely parasitic.
Honestly, it's called policing, and it doesn't just have to happen to poor people.
Partly because citizens expect the representatives to make the effort to ask them of their opinions. It's like software: most people won't file a bug report if it's broken, they'll just look for some other program that works properly.
In addition, it is a bit naive to expect a typical two income family that struggles to pay its bill to set up camp in DC or engage in a concerted letter writing campaign to outline their grievances to their congressional representative. For those that do stick their necks out, their alleged corporate-brought "representatives" often tell them to leave: http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/03/ms-state-rep-to-constit... .
An important factor on what a corporation might be able to "afford" is the return on that spending. There's a nice short story from NPR's Planet Money [1] estimating on the order of a 22,000% return for money spent on lobbying.
Granted that estimate was for tax breaks specifically, but it rather suggests big industries can't afford /not/ to lobby.
A given "system" will defend itself if it perceives a threat.
I don't think you realize how pernicious the long term consequences of USA v. RJR will turn out to be. Fracking looks like one front and CO2 another for similar with respect to oil operations.
And I don't mean there aren't oil operators that do things wrong ( Macondo much?) . But that's really not what we're talking about here, is it? Vanishingly few stories about "fracking" are not essentially terrorism stories with "terrorism" lined thru and "fracking" substituted.
The problem is that neither you nor I know as much as the "corporate funded influence" and we don't have anyone who works for us who does . The information asymmetries are profound. So the easiest thing to do is to cooperate with regulators, and have regulators cooperate with the regulated , which affords influence.
It's as if "the system" knows that without fracking, oil sands, and enhanced oil recovery technologies, with conventional crude and gas having peaked a decade ago, we would be facing a fairly significant energy shortage today, and an even worse one a decade hence.
Everyone wants to eat the bacon but nobody wants to butcher the hog. Energy supply is THE NUMBER ONE THING that enables modern civilization to repel entropy as well as it does. We, as a species, will do whatever it takes to ensure the energy supply remains. We will accept climate change and poisoned water because the alternative, short of a miracle in solar capture, is the death of several billion people.
I was hoping for an article that showed how chemicals drifted thousands of feet through impermeable rock layers. Instead I see a picture and a bunch of fluff.
Modern wells with double casings and bentonite seals are far more advanced the loose standards used through the late 70s. Is there a link anywhere to the actual research?
I've heard that the new laws being written in NY to prevent hydrolic fracking are being carefully wordsmithed so they will still allow fracking with natural gas instead. I wish I could find a source but im not sure how well known this issue is. Can anyone comment further?
They should not have fracked in Pavilion, where oil is only hundreds of feet below surface. However, general opposition to fracking is nothing more than NIMBY sentiment. Let's see how that works:
1. Fracking should be banned => oil supply decreases
2. Gas price should stay low => import oil from the gulf
3. We should not support Wahhabist Saudi Arabia => American energy independence!
4. Back to step 1
People want to drive their cars and don't want to pay tax for public transportation. At the same time they want to protect the environment and be called "leader of the free world". They want to tell people they vote Bernie Sanders but deep down they wish Donald Trump wins the election.
The problem is there's no definition of what's technically safe, what's technically unsafe, and few, if any guidelines defining acceptable fracking procedures.
What goes into the ground? A proprietary mix of who knows what, and you can't find out because they won't tell you. It's a trade secret.
Where does that stuff go? Again, few if any simulations have been run on the long-term consequences of injecting this stuff into the ground.
It's not that fracking should be banned, it's that it should be understood.
How can I ever know who gets it right in such a highly politicized topic? Topics like that pose an epistemological problem to me because nobody can be trusted to report truthfully, without any political motivations.
It seems to me that the whole thing is a mess that doesn't work very well.
Here is my alternate proposal. Corporations who engage in risky long-term behavior should have to purchase long-term insurance to cover liability for what they are doing. These insurance contracts would be on terms set by insurers.
Behind the scenes insurers could cover these contracts by putting money into index funds. The fund would cover liability, the cost ensuring compliance with insurance terms, and after the period was up, would pay off investors.
These funds would therefore trade at a discount to regular index funds that represents market estimates of the present value of future liability. Therefore the insurance costs to companies would be a free market estimate of the cost to others of what you are doing.
And voila! Very little regulation. No regulatory capture. And people will get compensation. (And LLCs can remain limited liability.)