Oil Companies Made a Mess. Will Taxpayers Clean It Up?
Imagine this: Cans of solvents illegally left open by a contractor are ignited by a lightning strike causing a blaze that destroys your home.
Your government’s solution: Hire the contractor’s workers left jobless by the blaze to clean up the site and rebuild your house — but at your expense, not that of the guilty contractor who caused the disaster.
Hard to imagine?
Not if you dig into the “win-win” label being given to a plan being pushed by state and federal lawmakers: Using up to $16 billion in taxpayer money to hire laid-off oil and gas workers to clean up as many as 2 million oil and gas wells either shut down improperly or deserted by their employers and leaking a list of pollutants into our land, air and water.
It’s a “win-win” all right. A win for the oil industry and another win for the corrupting influence of money in our politics.
How did we get here?
Well, your state legislators let it happen as a favor to oil and gas companies that are steady sources of campaign funding. So these politicians, many of whom scream against “socialism,” agreed to socialize the costs of these businesses while allowing profits to remain privatized.
Here’s how the game is worked. When a well begins losing volume, as they all do, production falls and so do profits. At that point large wealthier companies sell to smaller, often local, companies happy to settle for smaller profits. The sale comes with the responsibility and high costs of cleaning up. Yet decades ago it became obvious rather than clean up at the end of profits, many smaller companies would either leave the state or file bankruptcy passing the costs to the state — meaning you.
Read the rest of the article at The Times-Picayune.
