Citizen sleuths exposed pollution from a century-old Michigan factory (2019)
science.org
science.org
> The group, which ultimately named itself Concerned Citizens for Responsible Remediation (CCRR), collected maps, dug into newspaper archives, and filed requests for public records. Members spoke with scientists knowledgeable about tannery chemicals and hired an environmental attorney with a background in geology to help them strategize.
This is a great example of civic action leading to results. But it's an even better reminder that you need nontrivial resources, in the form of time and money, to get companies to admit wrongdoing and to nudge the government (at any level) to do anything about it. For every ex-company town that succeeds in this kind of recognition, there are ten others (usually, but not always, poorer and not as white) that are quietly suffering from externalized pollution.
Also - I'd challenge the fact that people don't care about 100yo pollution if you've ever talked to someone living in the neighborhood of a superfund site.
They just have fewer resources. But saying they "don't really care" is like saying that somebody who skips buying medicine to buy food doesn't really care about medicine.
For example poor cities typically have to subsidize their trash pickup more (for equivalent results) because their residents won't just bend over and take fee for use, they'll burn it or dump it wherever. Poor people don't buy pet licenses so that means animal control gets more funding out of the general fund. Even if you take in equivalent money (which you don't) having poorer people to serve results in catches like this in every endeavor of municipal government from the library to the roads to the police.
A distinction without a difference, they're both "insufficient resources."
Please enlighten me as to why my comment is a distinction without a difference whereas the one I am replying to is not.
This isn’t totally true. Poorer people frequently live and work on land that is substantially more economically productive. If you have 20 working adults using the same amount of space as a single family, you’ll usually have a lot more tax revenue from the same amount of land. Without requiring much more infrastructure. Which means in terms of tax revenue versus outlays, poorer districts frequently subsidize wealthier ones.
> the average twentysomething woman today is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/18/toxic-...
PFAS though are just one of the chemicals listed as the cause.
A few have been busted so far but with the explosion of fracking / waste in the past 15 years - there's no way for regulators to stay on top of it.
https://www.opb.org/news/article/radioactive-fracking-waste-...
> The agency found that Chemical Waste Management dumped nearly 1,284 tons of radioactive waste it received from Goodnight Midstream over a period of three years, totaling over 2.5 million pounds.
..
> Initially, Chemical Waste Management had no records of a relationship with Goodnight Midstream. But it was later confirmed that the North Dakota company contracted a third party, Oilfield Waste Logistics, to dispose of its solid waste. Shipping manifests showed that OWL was sending Goodnight Midstream’s waste to Arlington.
https://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/2014/03/fracking_com...
> The owner of a Youngstown oil- and gas-drilling company pleaded guilty today to ordering an employee to dump tens of thousands of gallons of fracking waste into a tributary of the Mahoning River.
https://www.ehn.org/fracking-wastewater-spread-on-roads-2573...
Lawyers will follow the money if any harm came to any people. And jurisdictions like mine have companies guilty until proven innocent.
Strong whistleblower rewards would go a long way toward making the worst offenders at least work a little harder.
This is one of the main reasons that these sorts of environmental contamination problems tend to persist for extended periods: tort law really doesn't have it covered most of the time.
Local Nebraska man shows up with fracking fluid to ask the commission if they would drink it themselves.
You had me until here. Poverty isn’t racist. Correlation!=causation.
But to state the obvious: distributions of poverty belie the US's long history of racism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
In many places of the world, certain groups were discriminated against because they were richer than average (Jews in Europe, Chinese in SE Asia, Igbos in Nigeria).
But this is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, which is about the US.
Agreed. I’m just tired of everyone shitting on white people. The US is far less racist than many other countries.
White people in America have inherent economic advantages on the whole - not all white people share these advantages but there is a pretty clear correlation and there is causation: Red-lining was an intentionally racist policy that denied an economic opportunity to most African Americans.
Nobody is "shitting on white people," and I'm not even remotely interested in the whataboutism of "someone else is even more racist than us!" We're plenty racist enough to complain about without any frame of reference.
> For every ex-company town that succeeds in this kind of recognition, there are ten others (usually, but not always, poorer and not as white) that are quietly suffering from externalized pollution.
This caught my eye. What's the evidence for this? Are you saying non-white people are less likely to engage in this type of civic action for some reason?
I highly recommend that anyone reading these disable JavaScript.
https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/
https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/03/new-teflon-toxin-causes-...
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/19/teflon-toxin-contaminati...
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/15/the-teflon-toxin-goes-to...
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/18/pfoa-pfas-teflon-epa-lim...
I've been working on trying to highlight the issue in Gary/Northwest Indiana by trying to be a "citizen sleuth" by tracking air pollution and open sourcing the data. Still a WIP, but recently added gas tracking to the data too https://millerbeach.community
You're right about worst offenders closing shop after pillaging, or they just sell and move on to the next location.
In 2019 ArcelorMittal spilled cyanide and ammonia into a Lake Michigan tributary, closing the National Park, local water intake, killing 3000 fish, etc.
In December 2020, ArcelorMittal was bought by Cleveland-Cliffs for $1.4 billion.
Cleveland-Cliffs made record $20 billion in revenue in 2021. https://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/cleveland-cliffs-mad...
A local news article from today: https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/consen...
> The proposed consent decree requires Cleveland-Cliffs to complete "comprehensive operational upgrades to the steel mill to prevent future cyanide and ammonia violations," the environmental groups said."
> The steelmaker agreed to improve its notification procedures and pay $3 million in civil penalties, which are to be split between Indiana and the U.S. Treasury.
$3 million, and to prevent future cyanide/ammonia violations... but still dump into Lake Michigan. Aren't we lucky!
https://www.epa.gov/outdoor-air-quality-data/interactive-map...
(from there, click through to the map and then turn on layers of interest)
Indiana is one of, if not the most toxic state https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-e...
I live on the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan, the rest of Gary, Whiting, Hammond is directly south of the Gary Works, BP, etc. There should be way more hyper-localised air quality monitoring, 1-2 isn't enough, the air I breathe, isn't what school kids in Gary/Whiting breathe.
It's articles like this that absolutely refute the idea that private ownership of property leads to good environmental outcomes (it doesn't; it leads to exploitative, destructive extraction of value from land, leaving behind carnage whose damage was estimated at below the bottom line, leaving a comfortable margin for profit) and that citizens would be proactive and well-informed (they aren't; they are constantly stonewalled, lied to, and officials stupid or paid off).
Now, ironically, in this advanced state of tech today, we have finally got the tools that citizens can be informed about the environmental impacts...of decades dead corporations and gluttonous barons that have long since moved on from the smoking, toxic craters they knowingly created. What an exciting future we have now, mining the graveyard of a century of bad policy, dealing with the lies and denial of others, and a complete lack of accountability. Meanwhile, these toxins, here a trace, there a torrent, sit as mute reminder of the horrible cost we've exacted on this planet (so far).
SACRIFICE ZONE WARNING
The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone.
The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land
whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value.Sure it could be outsourced in part but that’s just moving around the goalposts because there would, and could only be, one customer.
Most libertarians will say we shouldn't have publicly funded police, schools, or fire departments (and plenty a libertarian city is going without fire departments). How then could you envision a publicly funded environmental protection agency?
"Taxation is theft" is the credo of the libertarian.
The only government I've seen universally supported by libratarians is a strong judicial system to enforce no harm principles.
In our system, the EPA allows companies to pollute your land, water, and air... so long as they don't do it too much or they bribe the officials enough.
Having to go to the courts for everything will always favor people and institutions with money. The little guy simply can't afford lawyers, expert witnesses and so on to challenge players with deep pockets.
We need institutions like the EPA who enforce the rules and we need them to actually do that and not be captured by industry or underfunded by politics.
We HAVE strong property rights in the US. If you can prove harm from a company you can make a lot of money from them. The issue is that proving harm is a very costly and time consuming endeavor.
How do you make everyone whole when the damage done by a company exceeds it's ability to repair? What about the irreparable like toxic waste in a water supply?
Even if we granted the premise that this is a better system, how is what we have today made better by installing cronies into the EPA which systematically gum up and deregulate as much as possible before having stronger property rights in place?
That's not strong property rights. Strong property rights would include any unauthorized use regardless of "harm". It would mean Does Chemical needs to remove every molecule of dioxin from soil of any homeowner in Midland, MI. However, the EPA allows a set amount. I shouldn't need to prove "harm", I didn't authorize them to place their chemicals on my property and that should be sufficient.
Similarly, I didn't authorize coal plants to put toxins into my air on my property, and thus they should be prevented from any emissions until they find a way to keep it off my property.
We haven't anything even approaching a libertarian ideal and we aren't going to, because people/companies wouldn't be allowed to pollute and that's bad for business. Instead we have a socialized system where the government decides how much people are allowed to pollute your property, and your singular voice is inconsequential.
How could you justify killing off a coal plant and not any fossil fuel burning machine? How do you figure out harms already done?
Also, how do you respond to my earlier question?
In sixth grade, we had a visit from a community member. I forget the nominal purpose, but it was in the sixth grade building which at the time was just down the street from WWW. I remember him saying to us, "Lots of people say the tannery smells terrible. I think it smells like money."
In the 19th Century chromium was intoduced into the tanning process as an alterative or adjunct to using tannin/tannic acid for converting skins and hides into leather. It turned out that chromium was particularly effective in tanning leather albeit a toxic one. (It has been since abandoned for this purpose.)
I'm therefore surprised not to see mention of large-scale chromium pollution on the site - given the age of the plant it'd be very surprising if chromium wasn't present.
Given the toxicity of chromium salts I'm also surprised it isn't a big deal in and of itself (and that chromium isn't mentioned by name as the principal polluting agent).
BTW, it's a shame that chromium is toxic because it's an excellent agent for preserving leather.
This fact was brought home to me a few years back when I saw a documentary that showed part of a WWI battlefield in Belgium that was being made way for a factory. As part of the preparation, battlefield archeologists were scouring and documenting the area before the factory was built and in the process they came across the bodies of soldiers from that conflict.
Essentially, nothing remained of these soldiers other than their skeletons and their boots - and the boots were in near perfect condition in that the chromium used in their tanning process had preserved them that way under the moist ground for nearly a century. Apparently, the chromium salts in the leather had stopped any bacterial action taking hold, thus keeping the leather well preserved.
A good example is platinum: it is one of the least reactive metals, but can serve as catalyst for some reactions.
Many have what's call binding sites - other molecules fitting to those sites won't be altered or alter the chemical structure of the protein. They alter the shape. Proteins are machines, pretty much literally. For example, there are channel proteins, and a molecule docking on a binding site of such a protein might open or close that channel for certain molecules. The variety of those molecular machinery (really, literally) is huge. You can influence machines not just by breaking them down, you can just throw a spanner between their gears.
Things that matter are not just shape and size, but also polarity of the parts. Polar components of a molecule influence polar components of proteins if they can get close enough, which influence the shape.
Binding sites, as only one example:
Description: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Structural_Biochemistry/Protei...
Images: https://www.google.com/search?q=binding+site+protein&source=...
Example - 22 second movie - for a protein-machine whose function it is to move stuff around: https://youtu.be/y-uuk4Pr2i8
Example for ion channels that open and close: https://youtu.be/ZKE8qK9UCrU
Last, a movie showing one of the most important and most famous proteins in any eukaryotic organism in action, the protein that generates ATP: https://youtu.be/kXpzp4RDGJI (Part of a free course: https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cell-biology-mitochondria)