I'm talking about abandoned wells, mines and other relics whose profitability was sucked dry, left behind and when 'stuff happens' (Don Rumsfeld) it's up to US to fork out the moolah to take care of the problems.
And FIXING is never as cheap as PREVENTING.
OUR waterways, beaches, lakes and ponds belong to US. It's a fact that we also need energy. Also wood products. Other resources. But when companies go into PUBLIC (or private lands adjoining PUBLIC areas, like waterways) the risk of contamination from business activities is always present. For that reason, we need strong REGULATIONS of those activities to ensure OUR property interests in OUR resources are PROTECTED. Because, until we fix it, we have to live with it!
About a century ago, it was wide open, take all or laissez faire exploitation of those resources for individual business profit. You get it, you take, you walk. Examples of consequences of that behavior are literally EVERYWHERE in my state, California. You can't eat the fish in numerous mountain lakes because of mining wastes including mercury and other toxic contaminants. (Coal contributes as well) Our Central Valley is so polluted with exhausts, chemicals and effluents that you can't see more than a few miles on clear winter days. Yet, before all that industry and farming, visibility was HUNDREDS of miles year round. (I can attest to it)
Reason is simple. Financial incentive to maximize profit is more important than ANYthing else for 98% of businesses. Don't push that profit envelope to the limit and someone will buy your firm and suck that dollop of profit instead. Get enough industry doing a slew of stuff at or beyond the edge of ethics, and the accumulated effects to waterways, to healthy forests, to our air is DEVASTATING without regulation. To hear some people talk about it, burning water is a necessary 'evil' if you're gonna be NUMBER ONE!
Even 'good' business (think: local organic growers, retailers, producers) has effects on citizens around them in many ways from traffic to consumption of FINITE resources. We used to 'believe' the world's harvest was endless and now most of us know better: collapsing fisheries, scarce resources, contaminated drinking supplies, etc. With close to 8 billion of us, we can stand holding hands wrapped around earth several times. EVERYTHING matters and it's ALL interconnected.
This level of resource depletion/destruction demands cooperation and REGULATION of business for the very continuation of humanity. Or. We can ignore that fact then be compelled to live on a polluted planet with chronic health impacts, impoverished in 'sub-human' conditions. We already see this happening in the Cradle of Human Civilization, and many other places worldwide. When will this sink into American consciousness?
(Did I mention Republicans are pushing their 'version' of a 'clean water' bill which guts the Clean Water Act and other resource protections that's now in the Senate where it MUST be stopped?) Oops, I just did.
Here's the $700,000+ fix of a common business behavior which now is being paid by US:
A very old well on the coast (actually underwater except at the lowest tides) has been leaking slime for decades and fouling beaches, impacting wildlife and in general polluting. The source has been known for about a decade of head-scratching followed mostly by inaction... but we Californians like our coast clean and now it's 'gettin' done', or at least started.
SantaBarbara Independent, Keith Hamm reports: (http://www.independent.com/...)
The push to put a lid on the sticky, smelly oil seeps that plague Summerland Beach sent crews from the California State Lands Commission and Ventura’s InterAct engineering firm to the sand earlier this week to launch phase one of a plan to properly cap the long-abandoned Becker well.
During extremely low afternoon tides, bulldozers built a sand berm against a westerly swell as a backhoe excavated a deep, wide pit around the old Becker casing, a 7-and-3/4-inch pipe that tapped subsurface oil wells before it was inadequately sealed about a century ago. After taking measurements and assessing the condition of the pipe, crews marked the spot with a big blue buoy fastened to a 5-gallon concrete plug.
InterAct is now tasked with producing an engineering plan for the capping project. Total cost for this phase will be about $70,000, according to Steve Curran, a petroleum-drilling engineer with State Lands. Over the coming year, environmental-impact and safety studies will compose phase two, and optimistically, phase-three proper capping will take place next fall or winter, Curran said. Total cost has been estimated at upward of $800,000.
There is nothing below the pristine swell