US officials drop mining cleanup rule after industry objects

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US officials drop mining cleanup rule after industry objects
By MATTHEW BROWN    |    Today
https://www.apnews.com/cb2e928657fa44379b3ed696b492d40e/US-officials-drop-mining-cleanup-rule-after-industry-objects



BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration announced Friday that it won’t require mining companies to prove they have the financial wherewithal to clean up their pollution, despite an industry legacy of abandoned mines that have fouled waterways across the U.S.

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The U.S. mining industry has a long history of abandoning contaminated sites and leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for cleanups. Thousands of shuttered mines leak contaminated water into rivers, streams and other waterways, including hundreds of cases in which the EPA has intervened, sometimes at huge expense.

The EPA spent $1.1 billion on cleanup work at abandoned hard-rock mining and processing sites across the U.S. from 2010 to 2014.

Since 1980, at least 52 mines and mine processing sites using modern techniques had spills or other releases of pollution, according to documents released by the EPA last year.

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Typical crony capitalism/fascism.  Leaving the taxpayer to clean up after industry.

"In actual fact, it is the State, i.e. the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise. As long as business was good, profit remained to private initiative. When the depression came, the Government added the loss to the tax-payer's burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."
                                                                 --Under the Axe of Fascism, by Gaetano Salvemini, p. 416 (1936).