Sewage Plants Struggle To Treat Fracking Wastewater 264
MTorrice writes "When energy companies extract natural gas trapped deep underground using hydraulic fracturing, they're left with water containing high levels of pollutants, including benzene and barium. Sometimes the gas producers dispose of this fracking wastewater by sending it to treatment plants that deal with sewage and water from other industrial sources. But a new study (abstract) suggests that the plants can't handle this water's high levels of contaminants: Water flowing out of the plants into the environment still has elevated levels of the chemicals from natural gas production."
Adama must've... (Score:5, Funny)
...made Tigh the project lead.
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And I read through the whole thread and there are still only three. I am a sad BSG fan. (Why I read all the fracking threads - there are usually some fracking funny comments. But frack that.)
(Where's my fracking wastewater? Over there, next to your regular one.)
Nothing to see. (Score:5, Funny)
Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was full to bursting. The next day - nothing. Swept away. But I showed them. I had a lobotomy in the end. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people - leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It's so small, no one knows it's there until - BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad. That's what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he's well again.
Re:Nothing to see. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a movie quote. Specifically, Repo Man.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087995/quotes?qt=qt0280548 [imdb.com]
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Wrong movie. It is really Dr. Strangelove [imdb.com]
Re:Nothing to see. (Score:5, Informative)
John Wayne, oddly enough did perform in the last movie Howard Hughes made which was called "The Conqueror."
It's relevant here because they chose a site that was downwind from a nuclear test site. There are pictures that exist of John Wayne holding a Geiger counter on set.
As IMDB notes: As of November 1980, 91 of the 220 cast and crew members had developed cancer. Forty-six had died, including John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz (who shot himself soon after learning he had terminal cancer), Agnes Moorehead, John Hoyt and director Dick Powell. The count did not include several hundred local Native Americans who played extras, or relatives of the cast and crew who visited the set, including John Wayne's son Michael Wayne.
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I know my posts are good because of all the "Overrated" mods...
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I think the bigger travesty though was the decision to cast John Wayne as Genghiz Khan.
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John Wayne, oddly enough did perform in the last movie Howard Hughes made which was called "The Conqueror."
It's relevant here because they chose a site that was downwind from a nuclear test site. There are pictures that exist of John Wayne holding a Geiger counter on set.
As IMDB notes: As of November 1980, 91 of the 220 cast and crew members had developed cancer. Forty-six had died, including John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz (who shot himself soon after learning he had terminal cancer), Agn
Formula for success (Score:5, Insightful)
How to be successful:
* Socialize the risks
* Privatize the profits
Even commercial car washes have limits on pollutants they pass forward to water treatment plants. I guess someone just conveniently forgot to include these energy companies.
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* Socialize the risks
* Privatize the profits
very true. Ever asked yourself why are people able to socialise the risks? Think about what it means, to socialise the risks. It means that the property rights are not enforced. It also means that government owns so called "public property" and it doesn't care about it, so this is the huge way for corporations to be able to socialise risks by using "public property" to do business there. There shouldn't be any "public property", it's an oxymoron, but if there is such a thing, then nobody should be allowed t
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Great, now I can buy land, pollute the shit out of it and ruin for future generations. All without a worry for the law.
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So even though no one will ever be able to use the land again you are ok with it?
Try to remember that one day it will cross onto someone else's property, but I will be dead by then.
Those steel barrels I keep all that nuclear waste in won't last forever, but since I will be dead before they burst I am ok.
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Nope, I am talking about storing nuclear waste in my basement. It will leak after I am dead.
I have no offspring, nor family. There is no other owner, no one will buy property housing leaking nuclear waste barrels.
It will begin to contaminate the ground water.
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The property is sold, in this case there will be no buyers.
I am storing it for a one time payment. That way I get the most money now, and who cares about after I am dead.
When those barrels start leaking into the groundwater the lawsuits will be for far more than my property is worth.
The point is property can be ruined to the point total loss of value. Right now we call them superfund sites. Under your system they would just sit and leak. With no owner to sue the adjoining property owners would be screwed.
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So even though no one will ever be able to use the land again you are ok with it?
- you clearly think that a land owner is incapable of doing his own cost benefit analysis. There are lands that are not going to be mined on, they are very good for agriculture. There are lands that will have miners on them, there are resources there that will be mined one way or another.
By only allowing people to do business on their own private property we get rid of the externalities, which means of the ability to socialise costs. Once a person owns the land, it's his. If it's not, then we don't have rights. By buying and destroying a piece of property the owner makes a calculation that it will be more profitable to do that rather than to maintain that property. If he is right, then he allowed the economy to get the maximum effective output from that property at that time.
Yes, if a person buys and "destroys" a piece of property, he should have the right to do that, he paid for it.
Somebody will have to hold those nuclear barrels. Somebody will own that property at any time, it's not like once the owner disappears there is no other owner.
Stop paying taxes....
So you plan on eliminating property taxes...I'll forget to pay the excise taxes on what i take out.
Let me guess you don't plan on having those taxes either.
I'll just dump my barrels on your land when you take a vacation, or maybe put your name on em and dump em elsewhere. You don't mind using your resources to prove it was me. Even then so what..i have no money (accessable to YOU) I do have a piece of land you could take................
Re:Formula for success (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a strangely restrictive idea of who should be allowed to have property rights. If the duly elected representatives of the people determine that is prudent to, for example, build a highway, why should they not be able to purchase the land on which to build it and to operate the highway as the think best for their constituents? You see, if the road were privatized, there is a strong possibility that the highway would never be built at all, and that the owner would seek to maximize his own profit rather than promote the welfare of the general population.
The idea of public property has existed since at least Roman times. To eliminate public property is as much a fantasy as to eliminate private property, and equally misguided.
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Yes there is. The government could abolish itself except for a very narrow range of criteria concerned with the enforcement of property rights, with all public property auctioned off to individuals, and all our problems will be solved.
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This Libertarian speaks the truth. The courts have so far proved fully adequate at protecting private property and the health of individuals and their livestock when affected by pollution. There is no political derision directed at the concept of externalities, and the harm of externalities can be precisely measured, and the threat of litigation has been an excellent deterrent preventing pollution in the first place, far more effective than legislation and regulation. So there is really no reason why we sho
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This rant is a clear example of why libertarian thinking is total bullshit. This just won't work in the real world.
Forcing corporations to only do business on its own property, and only deal with externalities with immediate neighbors? That might sound great, but it worthless. 3 seconds into this paradise of greedy-self-regulation and all the corporations involved will simply setup off-shore holding companies and do all the dirty work through under-funded contractors. E.g. BP wouldn't drill anymore, their s
Private property rights solves nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Form corporation named Timebomb.
2. Timebomb buys land
3. Timebomb "stores" pollutants in a manner that is safe for a whopping 10 years, charging tiny fees to mother corporation
4. Neighbors see coming disaster (maybe), but efforts gets tied up in courts
5. Mother corporation sloughs off Timebomb as independent legal entity
6. Timebomb poisons the water tables
7. Timebomb dies, and its only assets are poisoned land (which has negative value once it is a proven hazard)
Isn't it awesome how property rights solve all problems?
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You screwed up the name.
They called it Superfund. You know, when the government was forced to spend upwards (they stopped counting in 2003) of $8.5 billion dollars of taxpayer money remediating contaminated ground from companies and owners who no longer existed or were destitute.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfund [wikipedia.org]
Re:Formula for success (Score:4, Informative)
How to be successful: * Socialize the risks * Privatize the profits
Even commercial car washes have limits on pollutants they pass forward to water treatment plants. I guess someone just conveniently forgot to include these energy companies.
Bush Jr, he exempted them from the clean water act. They can legally dump then it's the city and county's problem.
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Thanks for that disestablishmentarian boilerplate, but last time I checked, waste water treatment wasn't "socialized" at all; you pay for it just like water.
If your point regards the "cost" of having elevated metals in the treated water (which is emphatically not drinking water), then the problem lies in the fact that the sewage treatment they are paying for is inadequate in the eyes of a few people. If that needs to be addressed, then it needs to be addressed as better standards for industrial waste water
The Solution to Pollution is Huge Fines (Score:5, Insightful)
So that simple-minded corporations won't confuse themselves wondering if it might be cheaper to risk getting caught.
There's no excuse for allowing energy companies, some of the most profitable in existence to off-load (externalize) the cost of their operations and subsidize their profits by burdening public utilities with the clean up expense, especially when those facilities were never intended to deal with substances like those used in the 'proprietary mixtures' that fracking companies have protected from the prying eyes of the public.
Setting standards that require these morons to clean up their own mess, and attaching penalties for failure that put violartors out of business is the only thing U.S. corporations understand.
Re:The Solution to Pollution is Huge Fines (Score:5, Interesting)
Fines don't do it. Jailtime for CEOs would. My rule of thumb- any crime bad enough to be fined a 100K dollars should include 6 months of jailtime for a CxO or the president of the board of directors. For every 100K after that, add 6 months for another of them. No parole. THAT would get companies to clean up their act.
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Fines don't do it.
Agreed. If that were effective, BP would be really hurting right now.
Re:The Solution to Pollution is Huge Fines (Score:5, Insightful)
Fines don't do it. Jailtime for CEOs would. My rule of thumb- any crime bad enough to be fined a 100K dollars should include 6 months of jailtime for a CxO or the president of the board of directors. For every 100K after that, add 6 months for another of them. No parole. THAT would get companies to clean up their act.
No, it would merely limit fines actually imposed to $99,999.99 ;-)
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Not nearly enough. Every investor needs to share responsibility.
You cannot finance an operation and have no liability towards who it kills/effects.
every investor? (Score:2)
You must not understand where your IRAs are, because they're in these companies.
Does that mean every mutual fund must pass this punishment on to its customers? There's no way, because that might be a breach of confidence.
You (as the investor) have no way of knowing exactly what gets done because the information doesn't come out until it's too late for you to make an informed decision.
Are you a senator or congress critter? Upper management of a US automaker?
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Well if you are irresponsible enough to not know where your money is and what it is doing, than you are as responsible as a gun owner who does not know where his gun is or what it is doing.
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You can hardly fault someone for playing the game, when the whole economic system is built around playing the game, even if the game is evil. You would have to go to the barter system to avoid somehow financing evil.
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Fines don't do it. Jailtime for CEOs would. My rule of thumb- any crime bad enough to be fined a 100K dollars should include 6 months of jailtime for a CxO or the president of the board of directors. For every 100K after that, add 6 months for another of them. No parole. THAT would get companies to clean up their act.
Under those rules the head of BP would get life on the day he was appointed.
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The CxO/board at the time the crimes were committed of course. Not at the time of the ruling, that would be ex post facto.
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No, that completely destroys the point of incorporating and would hurt small companies immensely.
Instead, there should be fines appropriate to the scale of the problem and the scale of the company. Make them big enough and the shareholders will start suing the board of directors for the screwups. Heads will roll, and reputations will be destroyed.
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Following the current paradigm we would end up having high class privatized prisons full of CEOs working at a lower rate.
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How about similar sentences courts are handing out for file sharing?
If file sharing is linked to poisoning thousands for profit, sure.
"Sometimes...." Realy? (Score:2)
Sometimes the gas producers dispose of this fracking wastewater by sending it to treatment plants that deal with sewage and water from other industrial sources.
And Here I thought I heard that they *usually* just dumped it down their unused wells... In fact, that was where MOST of this horrible liquid waste ended up, a few miles down..
Apparently this is a slow news day...
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Civilisation (Score:2)
Because in a civilised society the polluter pays, he'll have to pay so much for polluting that working clean becomes the logic and easy solution.
The oil industry has plenty of money and the solutions are since years on the shelf, pumping it back into this or a depleted reservoir is generally the cleanest way to get rid of the crud.
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Wait, you mean send engineer units in to clean up the polluted squares?
Fracking is good technoglogy (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is it has clear environmental risks that the frackers don't want to discuss.
They don't want to tell you what they put into the ground (because they are afraid people will sue them - or steal their wonderful business secrets).
Being in business means you get sued. Deal with it. As for business secrets - ever hear of patents????
The truth is that Frackers are having problems not because the technology they use is more dangerous than other tech, but because they are so damn greedy they want to do so without taking reasonable safety and anti-pollution precautions. Let's be honest here - the EPA is not know for being a hard-ass. They let people get away with amazingly evil misdeeds before they take action.
I am all in favor of fracking - if they publicly reveal everything they pump into the ground and take reasonable steps to ameliorate the problems.
Yes this will cost more. But fracking will still be cheap. We have a right to cheap CLEAN energy, not just cheap energy.
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FWIW, Congress told the EPA to study this. Their first progress report was issued December 2012.
http://epa.gov/hfstudy/ [epa.gov]
I've only skimmed the report, so I can't be sure, but it looks like the report is long on methodology but short on actual results.
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You probably will not be in favor of fracking once you find out what they pump into the ground and what they consider "reasonable steps".
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The basic mechanism of frakking guarantees that there will be broad contamination of any aquifers near the frakking site.
Oh, and let's not forget that frakking is yet another way to accelerate global warming. There is no possible way to compensate for that aspect of this horrible, horrible practice. We need to be getting off of fossil fuels, not investigating new ways of dredging up every last hydrocarbon stored un
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Being in business means you get sued. Deal with it.
The sad thing is that it seems a lot of people actually agree with this.
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I am all in favor of fracking - if they publicly reveal everything they pump into the ground and take reasonable steps to ameliorate the problems.
Yes this will cost more. But fracking will still be cheap. We have a right to cheap CLEAN energy, not just cheap energy.
I'm confused by this...
How do you get CLEAN energy by way of any process that involves fracking?
Is CLEAN an acronym for something that excludes hydrocarbons(which are notoriously not clean energy) as an energy source?
The mind boggles........
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Like breathing out a pollutant (CO2). Let's put it another way: the EPA is just one among a number of tools used by the politicians to beat at oponents and score points with the dickheads who vote them in (left or right), even if it means (logically implying if not explicitly saying) that you shouldn't have a right to exist, the politicians and their tools will do it, when it becomes convenient. I am all for forcing these compa
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Bullshit. Why were you given any modpoints? There is no such right, and Energy has never been "clean'--even those damn solar panels require a ton of waste and dirty stuff before they go into production. Your own friggin' body produces a ton of shit (literally!) to make and then use energy. Put another way: you have a relative right not to be unduly harmed out of negligence or willful knowledge of harmful consequences of actions taken anyways, wi
Industry-wide reckless disregard - thats COAL! (Score:3, Insightful)
Fracking Exempt from Clean Water Act (Score:5, Informative)
Why do they accept it? (Score:2)
Why is the waste water treatment plant accepting waste they cannot treat?
Don't accept it and make the driller send it to someone who can handle it if you can't. Seems simple enough to me.
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Why is the waste water treatment plant accepting waste they cannot treat?
Don't accept it and make the driller send it to someone who can handle it if you can't. Seems simple enough to me.
You seem to be misunderstanding water...and gravity...
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You seem to be misunderstanding water...and gravity...
So-called "gravity" is a socialist myth. A vast invisible centrally-mandated field stretching across the galaxy, coercing otherwise herorically isolated atoms of matter to collide together and "cooperate" by force? Only hard-core Marxists could believe in such an economy-destroying fiction.
No, in the libertarian space utopia, every lifeform provides their own personal collection of photon and graviton particles, powered solely by their own sweat and gumption, and no particle interacts with any other except
BS alarmist article (Score:2)
Re:BS alarmist article (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mod Parent UP!
They are totally correct, this article is generally just FUD. The standards being quoted are "DRINKING WATER:" standards! Why is a waste water treatment plant being dinged for not meeting drinking water standards on what it discharges? We don't require them to meet the drinking water standards, so they don't.
http://water.epa.gov/scitech/swguidance/standards/criteria/current/index.cfm
These Anti Fracking nut cases need to go argue with the EPA and get the law changed if they are going to
Why can't they just re-use it? (Score:3)
And when they're done fracking at one site, they can just haul the waste water to the next site for re-use. There are probably some sediments that come up with the water, but those should be pretty easy to filter out.
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I read somewhere that a lady was saying that some frac water spilled on her land, and now the grass won't grow. I got a safe hunch that it was salt water and not some magical toxic chemical.
I work for a company that makes fluid additives (Score:5, Informative)
We make a host of additives for frac fluids, like viscosifiers (the chemicals guar or xanthan gum), friction reducers like PHPA (the chemical partially hydroxylated polyacrylamide), and sand (the chemical silicon dioxide) or ceramic beads (typically bauxite based).
The items mentioned in the article make it sound like "they are adding benzene and barium to the fluids, and we had no idea that they do this!". I'll help you guys out. Barite (barium sulfate ore) is added to every oil well in the world as a weighting agent for the drilling mud. It's solubility in water is nil. Would water that is flushed down a well that has been drilled capable of picking up barium that has formed a filter cake on the walls of the bore? Sure, but it's also in EVERY WATER OR OIL MUD USED IN EVERY WELL IN THE WORLD.
Benzene in the frac fluid? Nobody adds benzene to frac fluid. Here is most likely how it got there: oil based drilling muds use diesel as a carrier fluid (if the drilling is done on land, not the case offshore). Diesel has 30% aromatic content (ie. benzene, toluene, xylene). IF the well was drilled with an oil mud AND the well was recently finished being drilled AND it was recently cleared out, then the first part of the "waste" frac fluid will probably contain benzene.
They don't care right? WRONG. They do on site testing to make sure the sample doesn't sheen or have any type of oil based fluids in the water. If it does, then the water has to be treated before being disposed (i.e. sewage, lakes, rivers, etc). So my question to the people testing these fluids: At what point did they test for benzene? Did the frac water come from a well that was drilled using diesel? Did the frac water come from a well using water based fluids? Were these random frac waste samples? What part of the country did these frac water samples come from? Did the frac water encounter aromatic hydrocarbons in the formation?
These things are needed to come to a conclusion as to where did these chemicals come from.
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Shh. You're going to confuse the anti-frackers with facts and reality, we can't have that.
Re:I work for a company that makes fluid additives (Score:4, Informative)
The treatment plants bear responsibility too (Score:2)
Fracking created the the waste. But why didn't the treatment plants know they weren't removing the contaminants? Why did they release water into the watershed without testing it first? If you run an industrial waste water treatment plant, and a company says "hey, I've got some water here I'd like you to treat" I would expect a part of the process is asking "what is in the water?" and "can our process handle this?"
It sounds like some due diligence was not done here. It is thankful that the graduate stude
prior art exists (tm) (Score:2)
particularly, from large chemical plants to (what I have studied lightly) film processing operations. and the usual rule is, if your effluent does not meet certain parameters, you either pre-treat on site or you pay for us to do it and we also charge you whatever we like to run and maintain it. this is determined at time of connection, and contracted, and generally there should be a periodic review of conditions.
meaning in practice, if you have a large fracking field, you have a pretreat system. if you h
So wait, a public cost on Fracking? (Score:3)
Okay. I've heard enough. I have not heard of any private water processing plants so I'm going to go out on a limb and presume that this is a public cost and that the frackers aren't really paying for what they use. So someone out there, if you know, please put my rage to ease by explaining that the frackers are paying for the full cost of the water treatment... better, I see a way that the public can benefit in some way -- let the frackers pay for more than their own clean-up... make it like a TAX! It's not fair to put the tax burden only on the consumer which is more or less how it's done now as I understand it.
Re:Flouride.. (Score:5, Funny)
Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
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Fluoride is a naturally occurring component of ground water.
Re:Flouride.. (Score:5, Funny)
So are commies. They're everywhere.
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deadly neurotoxin? Posh posh. People willingly inject far more dangerous neurotoxins [wikipedia.org] all the time.
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Of, for fuck's sake...
WTF is wrong with you? (Score:3)
Sorry, dork, your tinfoil hat tea party sites may swallow your bullshit, but there are a few here at slashdot who are a little better educated.
You may want to consider adding "culture" to your education. There's a wonderful little film making fun of these tin-foil hats called "Dr. Strangelove" which is arguably the most famous black comedic film of all-time. Type "communism fluoride" into Google and watch General Ripper give a lecture about it. It's supposed to be funny, but you haven't seen the film, so
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I see they've gotten to you too. This goes a lot deeper than I thought.
Re:Externalities Rule (Score:5, Interesting)
This one is particularly easy to fix - make them pay for upgrades to the plants.
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Or make them put it in deep injection wells like we do in Ohio, it's probably the ONLY part of Ohio's approach I agree with (does not apply in geologically active areas since it can set off earthquakes).
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From the anecdotal news I see, injecting used fracking water underground seems to turn any area into a geologically active area. See: DFW, North Dakota, Pennsylvania.
I could be wrong, but, based on what I have read to date, these areas were geologically active on a tiny scale prior to fracking, at least in Pennsylvania. There was a documentary on fracking that I saw where they were blaming methane coming out of the sink on fracking and I seem to remember local residents commenting after the video came out that this was somewhat common even before the fracking started.
In my opinion, the problem is that we still know very little about tiny geological shifts as it seems t
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The first oil well in the US was in PA, next to Oil Creek. It was called Oil Creek before the first well was drilled, I wonder why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Well [wikipedia.org]
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Which means they will just choose to only pollute the water ways of the poor, or just make it hard to prove it is them doing it.
Privatizing the waterways would make this worse.
Re:Externalities Rule (Score:5, Insightful)
Then the government could claim Eminent Domain to take the waterways away and give them to the power companies. Everybody (with enough money to buy politicians) wins!
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Of course, for Libertarian ideals to stand a chance of working, we would need to get rid of government interferences in the free market - such as corporations.
I'm not sure you fix could be considered "easier". :)
Re:Externalities Rule (Score:5, Insightful)
What the "free" in free market actually means is "everyone is free to participate", excluding corporations would by definition make it a restricted market. Also an economic "market" is not a mall or an auction room, it's a set of rules governing trade, for example a market cannot exist without property rights. If government does not define and enforce those rules, then who will?
As to the OP, yes, one possible solution to the "tragedy of the commons" would be to privatize the commons, the problem with that is even if it worked ( in an environmental sense), the people would still lose their commons.
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It seems a lot of American's have been conned into thinking "free market" means a market that is free from government oversight,
I actually screwed up when I typed that. I didn't mean to invoke the free market, which wasn't really the topic. The Libertarian objection to corporations is the limited liability part. You can't rely on property rights when the power to bring a suit is so limited. The people calling the shots at a corporation don't necessarily have much skin in the game. At the very least, it seriously screws with the ideal order of things.
Corporations are also a huge example of government regulation of the free markets, b
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This one is particularly easy to fix - make them pay for upgrades to the plants.
Good luck with that, they can't get the coal plants to install the scrubbers that are required by law. All they have to do is whine about lost profits and Congress runs for cover like cockroaches from light. We need to start enforcing the laws instead of doing things like exempting oil and gas from the clean water act.
Re:Externalities Rule (Score:5, Insightful)
The real answer is to fill the CEO's swimming pool with it. If it fills up, fill the bathtub, kitchen sink, etc finally, just water his lawn with the rest.
I'll bet if we implemented a lottery system where that would happen at random, that water would be sparkling clean coming out of the plants no matter what the cost.
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I would think that it would create a boon in waste plant worker jobs.
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Can I have your address? I need to send some people over with some... literature.
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You can't tell me you believe it was OK to pump benzene into your water treatment facilities without disclosing it.
I would say it rather depends on whether or not the facility was equipped to handle benzene.
Furthermore, why do you want public health facilities (in this case water treatment plants) to become de facto dumping grounds for anything industry might wish to use in its operations, especially when the chemicals become more dilute and therefore more difficult and costly to extract from you drinking water?
I want them to pay for whatever they use. If they make the chemicals harder to extract, then they should pay for that additional capability as well. This certainly shouldn't be rocket science.
Re:Externalities Rule (Score:5, Funny)
Severe restrictions on industry by "concerned" people 100 years ago would have left us with, maybe, a cleaner environment, but 1980-level tech instead of 2013. Net effect: Magnitudes more deaths, not fewer.
Tell me about it. I remember the 1980s. Those were hard years, man. We had to scrape by with computers with cassette drives. And we had 64 kilobytes of memory and 2400 baud modems.
The horror still haunts me. If we'd only had iPads and Facebook, millions of young lives could have been saved!
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This is effectivly done in all cities, in that the next city down river drinks the waste water from the city upstream.
So it's not actually "effectively done" since no one is actually drinking their own waste water.
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Actually, in most cases we'd be better off treating our waste water and putting it right back in the drinking supply since municipal (not industrial) waste water effluent is cleaner than the bodies of water we are discharging to. Unfortunately people have this 'ick' factor with drinking their own former poo/pee despite it being cleaner than drinking our own poo/pee mixed with large quantities of nature's pollution.
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Re:Unemployed? (Score:4, Informative)
Even if your thesis were correct, extraction industries are among the least compelling examples you could choose:
Historically, even your hardcore actually-in-Soviet-Russia-not-as-in-joking-about-it communists successfully managed to run big mining and drilling towns(if anything, more people might have been employed due to questionable capital allocation and lower available tech levels). Minerals are like nature's subsidies, you can get net-positive energy output just for digging a hole in the ground! If the situation is structured so that you don't internalize the externalities, even better.
There are a few ways to fuck up a local extraction boom: if the resource in question doesn't ship well, you are at the mercy of regional demand and sometimes things are so bad that people just don't want what you dig up. If the resource does ship well, you can end up with a situation where(by either market or state coercion, it's been done both ways) the locals end up living in the tailings pile and the surplus value gets shipped out(see also Appalachian coal country, the Niger Delta, Zambian central province, etc.). Finally, you can either exhaust your mine, or get scooped by somebody else who has a much higher quality one(England, for instance, isn't exactly a coal-mining power anymore).
If you want to talk the virtues of capitalist enterprise, try something with a much more complex supply chain, returns to innovation, need for a keen grasp of customer demands, and no history of communists pulling it off. Seriously.
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That's a pretty serious cut-down.
"Even the Soviets could do it."
Zing!
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Mr. Cheney: We've told you a hundred times, please log in when you post.
Oh, and how's the heart old boy?
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Corporate Socialism, of course, is AOK!
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An old-fashioned oil boom.
Don't fall too much in love with booms. Let's not ignore that the other end of any such boom is a bust. Entire towns, or even cities can spring up and, perhaps within a decade, end up as ghost towns when the jobs vanish along with the resource. It also doesn't have anything to do with socialism vs capitalism. When a natural resource is exploited and people are needed to do the work, jobs are created regardless of what system you're working under.
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Sounds reasonable to me.