Superfund At 40 - In Short, It's A Mess; Biden Administration Has More Than 1,500 Sites To Handle

[hatrack]

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The public next got a bellyful of toxic waste and Superfund news in 1982, when the town of Times Beach, Missouri, hired a waste hauler named Russell Bliss to spray oil on its dirt roads to keep the massive clouds of dust down. Bliss took the opportunity to get rid of another load of waste, mixing in a dioxin-contaminated liquid with the oil. Soon, horses dropped dead and people fell sick. Times Beach was evacuated. Superfund next hit the headlines in 1983. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne Gorsuch, a Reagan appointee and mother of current Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, was forced to resign in a scandal that sent her aide, Rita Lavelle, to a six-month prison term. Lavelle ran the Superfund program and was convicted of lying to Congress about her previous employer's pollution.

The Superfund law operated on the "polluter pays" principle. Polluters—even defunct ones like Hooker—would be hunted down and held to pay for past sins. A separate fund would cover cleanup at sites where "responsible parties" can't be determined. Nice plan, but it failed to factor in another sometimes-toxic phenomenon: Lawyers. In no time flat, Superfund cases ran into the toxic quicksand of protracted courthouse battles delaying many cases, and many cleanups, for years.

By Bill Clinton's first State of the Union speech in 1993, a Democratic President was moved to speak ill of a blockbuster environmental law. "I'd like to use that Superfund to clean up pollution for a change and not just pay lawyers." Also in 1993, one of my favorite Superfund stories hit the headlines: Residents of Triumph, Idaho, a lead-mining community turned wealthy second-homeowner haven, battled to keep Superfund out. One of the community's leaders was the late Adam West, better known as TV's Batman. The imagery doesn't get much clearer than Batman versus the EPA. The case dragged on until 2018, when a conservation group settled with Idaho's state environment agency.

In 1995, Congress let a special tax that fed the cleanup fund expire. Superfund has toiled on as a pauper program ever since.

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https://www.dailyclimate.org/superfund-program-2650682437.html

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Some of these sites are very toxic, and require quite a bit of detailed work into cleaning them

up to some certain standards, some sites probably may never be able to be cleaned, it'll take probably decades and decades to make a dent in the list of sites to be cleaned, but at least, we're doing it. When the Superfund was set up, it was all the rage, raring to go, and the perfect solution to cleaning up those toxic messes. And of course, the ones creating the toxic messes are either long gone or changed their business names etc. and are still operating in some shape or form.

The polluters should pay, after all, they originating the pollution, but the demand for the product caused the product to be made by consumer demand, thus perhaps both sides should pay. Perhaps if they're looking a source of clean up funds, tax the lawyers?