Former BP Boss Overseeing Minnesota Project Safety. And Environment
Tony Hayward is getting his life back.
Nearby.
The oil company executive in charge at BP when its Deepwater rig blew up, killed eleven people and devastated the US Gulf Coast has a new job with Glencore, a major minerals company that is investing in a proposed Northern Michigan hardrock sulfide mine, it is reported :
Iron mining and northern Minnesota have gone hand in glove for a century. But the proposed PolyMet mine in Hoyt Lakes is a different animal. It is called hardrock sulfide mining. It will be going after copper and nickel and precious metals. It promises jobs in a job-starved part of our state.
But there are two things you should know about hardrock sulfide mining. The first thing is that the Environmental Protection Agency says hardrock mining generates more toxic waste than any other sector of the U.S. economy. The second thing you should know is that the history of this sort of mining shows that when the metals run out, the companies decamp. The real pollution starts after they leave with the winnings, go broke, or sell out...
Across the country, hardrock mine operations have left state taxpayers holding the bag. The cost of the cleanup falls primarily on folks who had nothing to do with the pollution. After a bad experience, our neighbor Wisconsin made a rule that states that if any company wants to hardrock mine, it has to put up a bond that will cover the expense of cleaning up the mess the company is sure to leave behind.I suggest reading the whole piece.
This next sentence is not a joke. Tony Hayward has been hired by Glencore as the executive expert in charge of environment and safety.
1 comment:
Here's a thought: a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico eliminates the need to protect a 'pristine' resource. Why object to continued drilling when the damage has already been done? Now, the same guy who presided over the Deepwater Horizon spill has been reassigned to work in an even cleaner and more heavily protected region. Maybe Tony Hayward has been sent to Minnesota and the Great Lakes to oversee the permanent contamination of our environment IN ORDER to blow the doors off full-scale resource exploitation across the entire region. With Koch Bros/tar sands pipelines in play, one [more] major spill could, at least in PR terms, pave the way for multiple additional mines -- why object to any one new proposed mine after an 'accident' has compromised the entire system and dealt a death blow to the core objective of preventing new pollution sources from hitting Lake Superior or the fairly clean Great Lakes as a system?
Time to run Tony Hayward out of Minnesota.
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