3 ms·

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

intrasight 5y ago
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.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  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.
  - intrasight 5y ago
    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.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  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.

intrasight 5y ago

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.

mikeyouse 5y ago
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.
- intrasight 5y ago
  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.
jcrawfordor 5y ago
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.