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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Crazy that creditors took priority over cleanup, given that the purpose of the Superfund system is to prevent exactly that from happening.

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Call your Congressperson to properly prioritize the charging order with legislation. Environmental cleanup, pensions, then creditors can have whatever is left, instead of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses (Superfund & Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation).

Or even better, push the liability for this clean-up onto the investors. This sort of environmental vandalism is an abuse of limited liability.

If you owned stock in exxon mobile due to a mutual fund as part of a pension, and you were held liable for an oil spill and lost your life worth, how would you feel?

Not a great example; Exxon's liabilities for the Exxon-Valdez spill were fully paid by the company in 2009, while it remained a limited-liability company.

Also it's Mobil, not Mobile.

Exactly - a change in the rules would cause investment managers to more appropriately risk oil assets.

Forcing divestiture by institutional money of petroleum investments? Love it.

As long as you're okay when the general public is shut out of a potentially quite lucrative part of the market, and everything is owned by some foreign shell company, I guess.

I want to push the US public out of industries we’re about to financially destroy, yes.

If the Saudis want to invest and take a bath like their SoftBank and Uber investments, I have no qualms.

Why would they invest, when they can just sell us their own oil at exorbitant prices, now that big part of competition is gone?

If the price is too high, they would sell less oil.

They'll sell less oil than there is currently sold in total at lower price, sure, but if competition from US is out, they'll sell more than they sell right now, at prices higher than now.

Making investors liable when a company goes bankrupt would have lots of other unintended consequences.

Would you even dare to buy ETFs anymore?

It's this hypothetical person's own fault for not diversifying.

Superfund has been a joke for a while.

Originally, the cost of covering cleanups where the offending party could not pay was covered via taxes on chemical/petroleum products. But since 1995 it's funded by normal taxpayers.

This has also had a huge impact on the ability to actually clean anything up.

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