Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

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The fracking disposal industry will likely be one of the next big dominoes to fall. It's awash in lowest-bidder LLCs dumping all sorts of horrifying chemicals wherever they can get away with it.

A few have been busted so far but with the explosion of fracking / waste in the past 15 years - there's no way for regulators to stay on top of it.

https://www.opb.org/news/article/radioactive-fracking-waste-...

> The agency found that Chemical Waste Management dumped nearly 1,284 tons of radioactive waste it received from Goodnight Midstream over a period of three years, totaling over 2.5 million pounds.

..

> Initially, Chemical Waste Management had no records of a relationship with Goodnight Midstream. But it was later confirmed that the North Dakota company contracted a third party, Oilfield Waste Logistics, to dispose of its solid waste. Shipping manifests showed that OWL was sending Goodnight Midstream’s waste to Arlington.

https://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/2014/03/fracking_com...

> The owner of a Youngstown oil- and gas-drilling company pleaded guilty today to ordering an employee to dump tens of thousands of gallons of fracking waste into a tributary of the Mahoning River.

A lot of the salt brine being spread around on the roads to fight ice is radioactive fracking waste.

https://www.ehn.org/fracking-wastewater-spread-on-roads-2573...

We actually had a thread about road salt pretty recently (6mo?). The prevailing opinion was that the new brine stuff can do no wrong.

https://www.ecowatch.com/watch-viral-video-nebraska-man-asks...

Local Nebraska man shows up with fracking fluid to ask the commission if they would drink it themselves.

No one says they would drink fracking fluid.

Yeah I’m an ardent environmentalists and I can appreciate the showmanship in these videos but things like urine are safe to drink - but if after saying that, someone handed me a jug of unlabeled urine I’d probably pass too. “Safe” doesn’t mean palatable or enjoyable or anything. (Not that I think 99% of fracking fluid is remotely safe)

I believe financial services regulators offer bounties for whistleblowers to expose malfeasance. Do environmental regulators do the same?

Tort law sort of has it covered ;)

Lawyers will follow the money if any harm came to any people. And jurisdictions like mine have companies guilty until proven innocent.

That’s honestly a terrible system. Not being able to proceed without actual damages gives polluters a huge boon that takes years to litigate and can be impossible to definitively prove. For the “success” of the tobacco settlements in the 1990s, they were knowingly poisoning people for decades after the first suits were filed, but since it’s hard to point to smoking as the cause of a specific cancer, they could defer and defer and defer.

Strong whistleblower rewards would go a long way toward making the worst offenders at least work a little harder.

I am very much in favor of whistleblower rewards. I am just pointing out that as a society, we've sort of passed the buck (literally) to the tort lawyers.

Unfortunately damages can be extremely hard to show in environmental cases, both because of the evolving state of the science and the tendency of environmental contamination to cause low-probability stochastic effects through a large population. It's very difficult for a lawyer to make money off of a situation that has caused a small but persistent increase in certain diseases in a certain population, and yet that kind of outcome is very common. It's not even clear who, if anyone, has standing in such cases, and courts have often dismissed environmental cases due to the inability of any one plaintiff to show damage (there is some progress towards addressing this but it is slow and uneven).

This is one of the main reasons that these sorts of environmental contamination problems tend to persist for extended periods: tort law really doesn't have it covered most of the time.

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