From InsideClimateNews:The Blackjewel coal mining company can walk away from cleaning up and reclaiming coal mines covered by more than 30 permits in Kentucky under a liquidation agreement that was reached Friday in federal bankruptcy court in Charleston, West Virginia, attorneys participating in the case said. About 170 other Blackjewel permits in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia will be placed into legal limbo for six months while Blackjewel attempts to sell them to other coal mining companies, the attorneys said. Any permits that are unable to be transferred can then also be abandoned by the company, once the nation’s sixth-largest coal producer.
Interesting, though I think not a new concept; I can't recall commenting earlier so I will now.
Looking at Top twenty-three coal-mining companies in the United States, 2018 on wiki, bankruptcy is hardly a surprise; and more can be expected; coal production in the US in the not-particularly-long term is doomed. The emotive language about "walk away from" doesn't add very much; they're bankrupt, so however much you might like the CEO to go out there with a shovel and tidy things up, not much will come of it. There are, it would seem, supposed to be bonds to cover remediation, but, surprise! Both the state and the companies that issued bonds guaranteeing clean-up and reclamation of the dynamite-blasted landscapes had warned in court proceedings that there might not be enough money to do all the required work. So, over-friendly regulation by the state, I suspect, which didn't want to force the miners to post large enough bonds since that would probably just have bankrupted them earlier.
How do I fit this into my Great Political Scheme? After all, this is a clear example of the State needing to step in to regulate the industry better, or clean up afterwards. But I think not. the state routinely screws up regulation, as it would appear to have done in this case, and trying to fix that is hard work. Instead, I think I'd just recognise that dying industries tend to leave junk behind them; not all problems have neat solutions. By their very nature, dying industries tend to be financially small, so I think there is easily enough money floating around the US to fix things up, if anyone wants to: in other words, sell off the carcass to the highest bidder.
Refs
* Fairness > equality by Tyler Cowen
What a surprise! The public gets screwed again.
ReplyDeleteI mostly disagree. The public benefited from the coal, after all, which was why they bought it, or the electricity made from it. And (although this bit is murky) it looks to me like public pressure (think of the poor coal miners and their kids) lead to the govt being lax about the bonds for remediation; so (in that version) the public decided to screw themselves. But also I suspect it's just not that big a thing. The affected bits are doubtless horrible looking but leave them alone for 100 years and they'll be fine; or, fix them up - whilst emitting more CO2 of course - for what by modern standards is no great amount of money.
ReplyDeleteSo, umm, who should have cleaned up after Deepwater?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean "would have"? BP paid for it, no? After Obama and the US turned gangsta. Or do you mean who was legally on the hook for it?
ReplyDeleteWilliam: one hundred years does not cleanup make. Go visit the midlands or Cornwall. Or come over here to view the
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit
That's a fair (ish) comment, though I notice that article says "The mine was opened in 1955..." so it hasn't had 100 years of existence, let alone cleanup; it was shut (just) less than 40 years ago. But OTOH, it your pit a *bad* thing? the page also says "The Berkeley Pit is a tourist attraction...".
ReplyDeleteThe Berkeley Pit might be a tourist attraction, but so are places like Chernobyl, Pompeii and the Murambi Genocide Memorial.
ReplyDeleteGiven that coal kills people, many of whom did not consent to poison exposure, I think the argument that "a positive thing about the Berkeley Pit is that it attracts tourists" might not seem like a very important benefit in other decisions to continue coal mining or affect cleanup plans, no?
A handful of locations could be culturally important dark tourism, "roll up roll up, come and see the industry that dug the rock to kill countless millions and helped your ancestors change your climate."
The issue here isn't the damage that coal-burning does via emissions, but the clean-up liabilities on the ground. I don't doubt that there are some; but it seems like this Pit might not be a brilliant example of such. It can be left as-is as a tourist attraction; or remediated. Which is the better choice; and how would you tell? I agree that whether or not the remains form a tourist attraction is unlikely to figure highly in whether coal mining continues; but no-one has suggested it should.
ReplyDeleteWilliam, tch, tch. Mining in Butte began shortly after the railroad arrived. This activity was underground until 1955.
ReplyDeleteThen several communities were destroyed. Once the pit filled with water it has killed migrating snow geese, but you skipped noting that.
In addition, it is wrecking ground water. The only positive feature is that when the price of copper is high the pit water is a copper ore.
"The affected bits are doubtless horrible looking but leave them alone for 100 years and they'll be fine"
ReplyDeleteApparently you have never lived in mining country. In Colorado, where I live, the mountains are full of mines that have been abandoned for a century or more. Although the wooden structures decay, the tailings look as if the mine had been active yesterday. Nothing grows on mine tailings.
You've got me there: I have not. However, I've been to Wales, and northern France, and I've seen plenty of remediated sites. Perhaps 100 years was an underestimate. I may have to fall back on my preferred answer, which was to find someone who wants to look after the land.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good place to add "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones", most recently seen in a twit from JM, though I'm not sure he thought it through, since it suits my purposes.
I think remediation should be a much bigger issue. Here in the states we could start with fly ash...
ReplyDelete