Shout out to Kathryn Slater-Carter, who sent me this article. It discusses what California does with the hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated soil it digs up every year. According to CA law, such contaminated soil must be “disposed of at a facility specially designed to handle such dangerous material.” That’s expensive, but fortunately someone in our state government came up with a brilliant alternative:
Send it somewhere else. And don’t ask questions about what happens when it gets there.
Here are the key points from the article (quoted directly):
Much of the waste is going to landfills in Arizona and Utah with fewer safeguards and less oversight than permitted hazardous waste disposal facilities.
Two of the most popular destinations are next to Native American reservations [emphasis mine]. One of those landfills has a spotty environmental history, Arizona records show.
One of the biggest out-of-state dumpers is the state’s own Department of Toxic Substances Control which, since 2018, took more than 105,000 tons of lead-contaminated soil from the area around the Exide cleanup in Los Angeles County and disposed of it in Arizona. Most went to a landfill that Arizona regulators labeled in 2021 an “imminent and substantial threat.”
The Department of Toxic Substances Control said its decision to take the waste to Arizona is driven by cost and acknowledged the agency doesn’t really know how the out-of-state landfills are managed.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office wouldn’t comment.
“Gov Gavin Newsom’s office wouldn’t comment” has got to be the least surprising thing I’ve read in 2023.
What gets me riled up about this article is that the Democratic party is constantly held up as being so much better for minorities than the Republican party. But is it? Is it really?
As a Congressional candidate, I discussed in one of our candidate debates that I would be willing to increase investment in carbon capture, which would leverage what America does best- technology and innovation- to create new technologies we could then sell to the rest of the world. Jobs and money, in other words- things we conservatives are quite fond of. It would also offer a path to reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, which I know is a priority of liberalism. But I went further and said that one of the additional selling points of this strategy is that since carbon can be taken out of the atmosphere anywhere, I would be willing to use federal financing to place carbon capture facilities in two places that would be high priorities for me:
Places that will be hurt economically as we shift away from fossil fuels (examples: West Virginia, North Dakota, Wyoming)
Native American reservations (if they’re interested- I would of course want their buy-in)
In other words, I was talking about a strategy that would lead to a significant amount of market-generated (not taxpayer!) money into Native American communities. Can you identify any remotely comparable plan from the Democratic party? If so, I’d love to hear about it, but I’m not holding my breath.
In one of our other candidate debates, I talked about using the soft power of a Congressional seat to organize one of this area’s unique strengths, which is a raw amount of business expertise, and in particular, the raw amount of entrepreneurial expertise, to help people in our underserved areas develop new ideas for businesses. Then I’d work to connect those folks to the other unique strength of our area, which is a tremendous pool of investment capital.
This policy approach would overwhelmingly help minorities, since they are overrepresented in underserved areas, AND would not require any legislation out of DC or Sacramento, or any new taxes. Just private and nonprofit sector people coming together, with my role as a government official to merely jumpstart/coordinate the activity and reduce the barriers to getting things done. A quintessentially conservative approach, in other words.
Thus, while I take the point that my party has a past that has led it to a pretty dismal electoral place with minority groups, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, and I would encourage everyone to view the issue of which party is better for minorities with more nuance than you typically get from mainstream media.
Great article Gus- i recently heard about how Richmond is trying to build apartments on a site heavily polluted with toxic soil. They can’t build a hospital or an old folks home or a school there but they want to build apartments?! Apparently there are two main polluters I think astra zeneca and chevron who should be responsible for removing all of the toxic material, it shouldn’t land on the taxpayers