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Here is my alternate proposal. Corporations who engage in risky long-term behavior should have to purchase long-term insurance to cover liability for what they

Here is my alternate proposal. Corporations who engage in risky long-term behavior should have to purchase long-term insurance to cover liability for what they are doing. These insurance contracts would be on terms set by insurers. And voila! Very little regulation. No regulatory capture. And people will get compensation. No. The whole point is that these "risky behaviors" are quite capable of inflicting damages (such as the permanent contamination of water tables in certain areas) that can't possibly be compensated by the any conceivable "insurance payout". Such behaviors (once identified) should be strictly prohibited. Economic penalties against the corporate entities (aka "regulation") will of course never be sufficient. The only effective deterrent is jail time for for the decision makers (in addition to complete confiscation of their personal assets). And BTW by "jail time" I mean serious jail time, as in multiple decades of jail time, and/or life sentences if necessary. Flipping back in the chronology of your post a bit: We lurch between economically damaging regulations after something really bad happens, to regulatory capture after industry lobbying gets the attention of politicians. I agree with you wholeheartedly about the need to stop lurching. That's why we need to get serious about criminal penalties for this kind of behavior -- not to throw in the towel and entrust the safety of our irreplaceable freshwater resources wondrous self-regulating powers of the insurance industry. The environment is not a casino, in other words. This is the health of uncounted generations we're talking about -- which will come into being long after any of these massive insurance payouts your proposal would seem to bank on could have possibly had any ameliorative effect.

sitkack 11y ago
Some mistakes can only happen once. Money doesn't fix that class of mistake.
- narrator 11y ago
  One of the most annoying cliche arguments in American political discourse is that money is the universal 100% effective solution to all problems. We just had a nuke plant melt down? That's going to just cost a lot of money! We want to provide universal top quality free on-demand healthcare for everyone? Just quadruple spending and change absolutely nothing else! We want to colonize mars in 10 years. That will just be a few trillion. No problem! Nine women working together to have a baby in 1 month? Just a few billion in government R&D bucks and we'll have it solved in a jiffy!
  - cat-dev-null 11y ago
    Argh, that's a frustrating fallacy, often posited with sincere intentions but often disconnected from practical implementation considerations. In general terms, effectiveness and affordability of budget outlay should be the primary concerns. Instead, budget is typically orthogonal to effectiveness of quality of problem characterization, planning, procurement, execution and follow-up. Oddly, better results can sometimes be paradoxically realized by reducing budgets where there are capital-inefficient organizations by teaching resourcefulness... many bad habits emerge when people have too much cash available to spend frivolously. There are many instances where greater outlays are cheaper TCO-wise in the long run, so the "penny wise, pound wise" mantra tends to be a good guideline. Also, in the US, defense spending, education and social security are sacred cows for various reasons. Question military-industrial complex spending and be prepared for accusations of unpatriotism and treason for "not supporting the troops." These are completely specious but used to guard the hen-house. Robert Gates was the most recent, effective reformer of DoD, but the honeymoon didn't last long. Education is seen as important human right however NCBLA has foisted short-term pseudo-results upon teachers. So the problem is still seen as not enough money, usually because administration bureaucracy typically consumes a disproportionate fraction of total budget (or in extreme cases, embezzles cash outright). Social security is a tough one because many people have no direct retirement savings, and no one humane wants to go the way of Korea, where the elderly are de-facto shunned and have nothing.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    Money is all we have left. We tried "sanctity" - more or less religious purity. We tried "honor" - ( bring back dueling? ). Duty, country, sacrifice - all pretty much deprecated. I don't have an answer here - it's the stuff of Adam Curtis films. He's hardly perfect, but has an interesting way of constructing frameworks to look at these things.
- cat-dev-null 11y ago
  If we ever need any reminders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat... http://www.damninteresting.com/undark-and-the-radium-girls/ http://www.damninteresting.com/undark-and-the-radium-girls/ http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/koch-industries-plant-linked-to-cancer-epidemic-in-arkansas-community-video.html http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/koch-industries-plant... http://www.democracynow.org/2004/12/6/yes_men_hoax_on_bbc_reminds http://www.democracynow.org/2004/12/6/yes_men_hoax_on_bbc_re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill and plenty more The moral of the story is libertarian idealism (sans facism/authoritarianism) is simply the mirror opposite utopian extremism of communism... ever-refined balance is needed, which tends towards democratically-elected, semi-socialism: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." - James Madison
  - astrodust 11y ago
    What about something on the scale of Bhopal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster)?
    - cat-dev-null 11y ago
      See the 4th link.
forgetsusername 11y ago
>And BTW by "jail time" I mean serious jail time, as in multiple decades of jail time, and/or life sentences if necessary. Have severe jail sentences rid the world of illicit drugs users, murderers, cutpurses, burglars, vandals, fraudsters, rapists or anything else? If the chance of being caught and going to jail is lower than the expected gains of not getting caught, criminals gonna criminal. How do you aim to stop that with a threat? Throwing someone in jail is "too little, too late".
- cmdrfred 11y ago
  > Have severe jail sentences rid the world of illicit drugs users, murderers, cutpurses, burglars, vandals, fraudsters, rapists or anything else? No, but you have to put things into context. Prison is a lot worse for a 50+ year old with a few million in assets than someone who's only other alternative is working at a fast food restaurant for minimum wage. When the choice is deal drugs or simply not make enough to survive there really isn't much of a choice.
  - onetimePete 11y ago
    Good government prevention detects such attacks on the allmende before they happen. If you are going to make a paint factory, and you have no contracts, and no money paid, to handle your waste, you are a crook. If you have a paint-production-recyling factory and you have no means to safely handle the remains, you are a crook. This chains can be checked, the quantities handled can be booked. Its a lot of bureaucracy - but its worth it. And i say that, having worked in one of those "regulated" factories and having a inspector being a pain in the ass. Its really, really necessary. Just saying "Nothing can fix this." is easy here, but i dare you say that to the face of a mother or father who just lost there child to cancer. So not even prison- just deny the freedom to be a parasite- to public goods.
Scarblac 11y ago
The kind of damages that can't possibly be compensated by any conceivable insurance payout are also not helped by some people being in jail for life, so this isn't the solution either.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  But it may be the best we can do. Otherwise, it'd be like telling drunk drivers "Hey it's your call, bro! You just need to wear a seatbelt and carry lots of insurance, 'k?"
simonh 11y ago
In our current legal and regulatory framework, companies have to seek licenses from the government to carry out these activities. So it seems to me you are advocating handing out 'serious jail time' to people who carried out legitimate business activities, regulated by the government and for which they obtained legal licenses. Or am I missing something? The fact is environmental impact should be taken into account properly at the licensing stage. That's where the accountability falls.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  it seems to me you are advocating handing out 'serious jail time' to people who carried out legitimate business activities, regulated by the government and for which they obtained legal licenses. No, I'm saying that high-risk industrial activities shouldn't merely be "regulated"; they should be banned out right. It's when you violate the ban that you get handed a jail sentence.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
I remember a story from my Operations Research class ( most likely apocryphal ) that Stalin, riding a coal train to the front, watched as another coal train passed them and said "have whoever schedules the trains shot." The oil industry isn't even a close second to agriculture in terms of risk to freshwater resources in the American West ( where the story takes place ). After a while as you read about our West, you realize that people may actually not be all that much supposed to live there at all, at least in parts of it. Trying to elevate freshwater to "irreplaceable" ignores almost all the behavior that actually surrounds it. No, really - there's a book - "Cadillac Desert" which provides much context for this. The fact that regulation seems always end in capture tells me something. For one, it's very hard to do. Think about how hard it is to assemble 100 people who truly understand something that is very complicated deeply. Something that takes dedicating your life to. Now think about how you'd assemble say, 200 of them. It's be some exponent or power harder, wouldn't it? Criminal penalties may sound like a good idea ( to some; not to me ) but I don't really have a way to take such statements at face value. I'm not prepared to take what is generally considered legitimate activity and round up certain classes of mistakes to "go to jail." Investing groundwater with "rights" and the ability to suffer "criminal torts" ( regardless of the horrors that may be inflicted on it ) seems a bridge too far. Even if we sum the rights of all the people who depend on it, it's difficult. After all, people have had to leave places before. There could ( and perhaps should ) be some authority that must approve such activity in certain places. In the example, there should be no messing with formations that are that shallow. But that approval process sounds easier than perhaps it is.
SilasX 11y ago
>No. The whole point is that these "risky behaviors" are quite capable of inflicting damages (such as the permanent contamination of water tables in certain areas) that can't possibly be compensated by the any conceivable "insurance payout" Those are the extreme exception, not the rule. That might be true of nuclear operations, but everything else can be fixed at some cost, with maybe ~$1 trillion for tail end risks, easily coverable by reinsurance networks. Environmental damage is bad, but it's not infinitely bad. If the costs were anything like you suggest, that would justify vigorous bans of most industrial operations, not some mere regulatory enforcement as could be accomplished even with jail time.
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  Those are the extreme exception, not the rule. Right, it's not the average case we're discussing here. But I think we can both agree that wrecking a water table in a geographic area of significant size (for example) would qualify as "extreme." Everything else can be fixed at some cost, with maybe ~$1 trillion for tail end risks, easily coverable by reinsurance networks. No - plenty of things in life cannot be fixed at any price. Environmental damage is bad, but it's not infinitely bad. Between "bad" and "infinitely bad" (the latter being obviously a red herring) there's another category which would seem to apply for the scale of mishap here: "unacceptably bad." If the costs were anything like you suggest, that would justify vigorous bans of most industrial operations, not some mere regulatory enforcement as could be accomplished even with jail time. Again, you're arguing by referring to extremes: "Yeah, drunk driving carries risks, but so does sober driving. If we really want to eliminate risk of death and dismemberment in horrifying accidents, then, we should ban all forms of driving." No -- I'm just saying we should ban drunk driving. Which -- the more we get into the basic research behind these activities -- (certain classes of) fracking and other forms of large-scale resource extraction are increasingly looking to be aptly analogous to.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    >Right, it's not the average case we're discussing here. But I think we can both agree that wrecking a water table in a geographic area of significant size (for example) would qualify as "extreme." No, we can't. In the context of the specific point you were making, extreme means "no feasible amount of money could undo the damage". That's not true of damage to a water table, which can be remediated with a feasible amount of money. >... I'm just saying we should ban drunk driving. No, the point here is that, if drunk driving's effects were as uncountably bad as you claim the potential environmental damage is, we should ban driving, because the effect would wipe out all the benefit of driving, since the insurance cost would make it infeasible. But that's absurd, so we must conclude that your estimates of the harm size are as well. Remember, you're the one arguing that the extreme cases dominate the risk calculation (to the point of uninsurability), not me!

sitkack 11y ago

Some mistakes can only happen once. Money doesn't fix that class of mistake.

narrator 11y ago
One of the most annoying cliche arguments in American political discourse is that money is the universal 100% effective solution to all problems. We just had a nuke plant melt down? That's going to just cost a lot of money! We want to provide universal top quality free on-demand healthcare for everyone? Just quadruple spending and change absolutely nothing else! We want to colonize mars in 10 years. That will just be a few trillion. No problem! Nine women working together to have a baby in 1 month? Just a few billion in government R&D bucks and we'll have it solved in a jiffy!
- cat-dev-null 11y ago
  Argh, that's a frustrating fallacy, often posited with sincere intentions but often disconnected from practical implementation considerations. In general terms, effectiveness and affordability of budget outlay should be the primary concerns. Instead, budget is typically orthogonal to effectiveness of quality of problem characterization, planning, procurement, execution and follow-up. Oddly, better results can sometimes be paradoxically realized by reducing budgets where there are capital-inefficient organizations by teaching resourcefulness... many bad habits emerge when people have too much cash available to spend frivolously. There are many instances where greater outlays are cheaper TCO-wise in the long run, so the "penny wise, pound wise" mantra tends to be a good guideline. Also, in the US, defense spending, education and social security are sacred cows for various reasons. Question military-industrial complex spending and be prepared for accusations of unpatriotism and treason for "not supporting the troops." These are completely specious but used to guard the hen-house. Robert Gates was the most recent, effective reformer of DoD, but the honeymoon didn't last long. Education is seen as important human right however NCBLA has foisted short-term pseudo-results upon teachers. So the problem is still seen as not enough money, usually because administration bureaucracy typically consumes a disproportionate fraction of total budget (or in extreme cases, embezzles cash outright). Social security is a tough one because many people have no direct retirement savings, and no one humane wants to go the way of Korea, where the elderly are de-facto shunned and have nothing.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Money is all we have left. We tried "sanctity" - more or less religious purity. We tried "honor" - ( bring back dueling? ). Duty, country, sacrifice - all pretty much deprecated. I don't have an answer here - it's the stuff of Adam Curtis films. He's hardly perfect, but has an interesting way of constructing frameworks to look at these things.
cat-dev-null 11y ago
If we ever need any reminders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat... http://www.damninteresting.com/undark-and-the-radium-girls/ http://www.damninteresting.com/undark-and-the-radium-girls/ http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/koch-industries-plant-linked-to-cancer-epidemic-in-arkansas-community-video.html http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/koch-industries-plant... http://www.democracynow.org/2004/12/6/yes_men_hoax_on_bbc_reminds http://www.democracynow.org/2004/12/6/yes_men_hoax_on_bbc_re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill and plenty more The moral of the story is libertarian idealism (sans facism/authoritarianism) is simply the mirror opposite utopian extremism of communism... ever-refined balance is needed, which tends towards democratically-elected, semi-socialism: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." - James Madison
- astrodust 11y ago
  What about something on the scale of Bhopal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster)?
  - cat-dev-null 11y ago
    See the 4th link.

forgetsusername 11y ago

>And BTW by "jail time" I mean serious jail time, as in multiple decades of jail time, and/or life sentences if necessary. Have severe jail sentences rid the world of illicit drugs users, murderers, cutpurses, burglars, vandals, fraudsters, rapists or anything else? If the chance of being caught and going to jail is lower than the expected gains of not getting caught, criminals gonna criminal. How do you aim to stop that with a threat? Throwing someone in jail is "too little, too late".

cmdrfred 11y ago
> Have severe jail sentences rid the world of illicit drugs users, murderers, cutpurses, burglars, vandals, fraudsters, rapists or anything else? No, but you have to put things into context. Prison is a lot worse for a 50+ year old with a few million in assets than someone who's only other alternative is working at a fast food restaurant for minimum wage. When the choice is deal drugs or simply not make enough to survive there really isn't much of a choice.
- onetimePete 11y ago
  Good government prevention detects such attacks on the allmende before they happen. If you are going to make a paint factory, and you have no contracts, and no money paid, to handle your waste, you are a crook. If you have a paint-production-recyling factory and you have no means to safely handle the remains, you are a crook. This chains can be checked, the quantities handled can be booked. Its a lot of bureaucracy - but its worth it. And i say that, having worked in one of those "regulated" factories and having a inspector being a pain in the ass. Its really, really necessary. Just saying "Nothing can fix this." is easy here, but i dare you say that to the face of a mother or father who just lost there child to cancer. So not even prison- just deny the freedom to be a parasite- to public goods.

Scarblac 11y ago

The kind of damages that can't possibly be compensated by any conceivable insurance payout are also not helped by some people being in jail for life, so this isn't the solution either.

kafkaesq 11y ago
But it may be the best we can do. Otherwise, it'd be like telling drunk drivers "Hey it's your call, bro! You just need to wear a seatbelt and carry lots of insurance, 'k?"

simonh 11y ago

In our current legal and regulatory framework, companies have to seek licenses from the government to carry out these activities. So it seems to me you are advocating handing out 'serious jail time' to people who carried out legitimate business activities, regulated by the government and for which they obtained legal licenses. Or am I missing something? The fact is environmental impact should be taken into account properly at the licensing stage. That's where the accountability falls.

kafkaesq 11y ago
it seems to me you are advocating handing out 'serious jail time' to people who carried out legitimate business activities, regulated by the government and for which they obtained legal licenses. No, I'm saying that high-risk industrial activities shouldn't merely be "regulated"; they should be banned out right. It's when you violate the ban that you get handed a jail sentence.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

I remember a story from my Operations Research class ( most likely apocryphal ) that Stalin, riding a coal train to the front, watched as another coal train passed them and said "have whoever schedules the trains shot." The oil industry isn't even a close second to agriculture in terms of risk to freshwater resources in the American West ( where the story takes place ). After a while as you read about our West, you realize that people may actually not be all that much supposed to live there at all, at least in parts of it. Trying to elevate freshwater to "irreplaceable" ignores almost all the behavior that actually surrounds it. No, really - there's a book - "Cadillac Desert" which provides much context for this. The fact that regulation seems always end in capture tells me something. For one, it's very hard to do. Think about how hard it is to assemble 100 people who truly understand something that is very complicated deeply. Something that takes dedicating your life to. Now think about how you'd assemble say, 200 of them. It's be some exponent or power harder, wouldn't it? Criminal penalties may sound like a good idea ( to some; not to me ) but I don't really have a way to take such statements at face value. I'm not prepared to take what is generally considered legitimate activity and round up certain classes of mistakes to "go to jail." Investing groundwater with "rights" and the ability to suffer "criminal torts" ( regardless of the horrors that may be inflicted on it ) seems a bridge too far. Even if we sum the rights of all the people who depend on it, it's difficult. After all, people have had to leave places before. There could ( and perhaps should ) be some authority that must approve such activity in certain places. In the example, there should be no messing with formations that are that shallow. But that approval process sounds easier than perhaps it is.

SilasX 11y ago

>No. The whole point is that these "risky behaviors" are quite capable of inflicting damages (such as the permanent contamination of water tables in certain areas) that can't possibly be compensated by the any conceivable "insurance payout" Those are the extreme exception, not the rule. That might be true of nuclear operations, but everything else can be fixed at some cost, with maybe ~$1 trillion for tail end risks, easily coverable by reinsurance networks. Environmental damage is bad, but it's not infinitely bad. If the costs were anything like you suggest, that would justify vigorous bans of most industrial operations, not some mere regulatory enforcement as could be accomplished even with jail time.

kafkaesq 11y ago
Those are the extreme exception, not the rule. Right, it's not the average case we're discussing here. But I think we can both agree that wrecking a water table in a geographic area of significant size (for example) would qualify as "extreme." Everything else can be fixed at some cost, with maybe ~$1 trillion for tail end risks, easily coverable by reinsurance networks. No - plenty of things in life cannot be fixed at any price. Environmental damage is bad, but it's not infinitely bad. Between "bad" and "infinitely bad" (the latter being obviously a red herring) there's another category which would seem to apply for the scale of mishap here: "unacceptably bad." If the costs were anything like you suggest, that would justify vigorous bans of most industrial operations, not some mere regulatory enforcement as could be accomplished even with jail time. Again, you're arguing by referring to extremes: "Yeah, drunk driving carries risks, but so does sober driving. If we really want to eliminate risk of death and dismemberment in horrifying accidents, then, we should ban all forms of driving." No -- I'm just saying we should ban drunk driving. Which -- the more we get into the basic research behind these activities -- (certain classes of) fracking and other forms of large-scale resource extraction are increasingly looking to be aptly analogous to.
- SilasX 11y ago
  >Right, it's not the average case we're discussing here. But I think we can both agree that wrecking a water table in a geographic area of significant size (for example) would qualify as "extreme." No, we can't. In the context of the specific point you were making, extreme means "no feasible amount of money could undo the damage". That's not true of damage to a water table, which can be remediated with a feasible amount of money. >... I'm just saying we should ban drunk driving. No, the point here is that, if drunk driving's effects were as uncountably bad as you claim the potential environmental damage is, we should ban driving, because the effect would wipe out all the benefit of driving, since the insurance cost would make it infeasible. But that's absurd, so we must conclude that your estimates of the harm size are as well. Remember, you're the one arguing that the extreme cases dominate the risk calculation (to the point of uninsurability), not me!