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Yep. It's a great racket. Open a mine with huge tax breaks, then don't worry about safety over output and pay fines much lower than any profits you might have made. When the mine is no longer profitable, walk away and leave it up to the taxpayers to figure out what to do about it.
Literally that, and it's sickening. FYI: I live here and deal with this in my day job (well, the technical/administrative side of it, anyway).
We have various reclamation funds that are supposed to cover these scenarios; there's several funds covering different types/scopes of reclamation. They're all largely funded by reclamation bonds (or rather, the forfeiture of those bonds when operators abandon a site) as well as various fees on coal tonnage and penalties (permitting violations, etc). The system wasn't designed for abandonment and bond forfeiture to be a standard business practice, and that's what's killing us (literally, environmentally, and financially).
Luckily, for the most part, the taxpayers aren't on the hook. At least, not locally. What tends to happen is sites eventually get so bad that they have to have remediation funded by the EPA's Superfund program (see: Minden, WV as the latest example). So yes, we all have to pay for it, but since it's federally funded at that point, the locals don't see the cleanup expenses coming out of their pockets.
It really is a racket, and everything in our state government seems to encourage the practice - we've had ample opportunity (years to decades) to increase bonding amounts, close loopholes, etc and we've chosen not to.
Considering how most of our legislature and our frigging governor have close ties to the coal industry, I'm completely stumped as to why we've done so little. /s
Oh great, so all of us in the other 49 states who didn't even have an opportunity to vote against your grifting politicians get to foot the bill.
Yep! That's the grift.
That's that "Business Innovation" Republicans were talking about back in 2012
Same as Texan and Albertan oil wells.
Gov'ts just don't give a shit about people.
But jobs! Jobs! Jobs!