EvC Forum: Japan

Dr Adequate writes:

In America it's an oddity for government to intervene in the risk factor relative to creating energy from anything. Since our republic was founded, it's been up to citizens and companies as to whether risk should be a factor in any kind of mining industry.

Mining has always been a huge factor in the welfare and prosperity of America. The '49er California gold miners knew the high risk of venturing out for their fortune. They had a lot to do with opening up the West and exploration etc.

Considering all of the benefits of coal to the nation over the centuries and the millions involved in mining it, relatively few have lost their lives. Any enterprise involves risk. That's life.

What people forget is how many millions have lost their lives due to the loss of freedom or trying to regain lost freedom. Let freedom ring and let people decide whether the risk of death or injury is worth the venture.

But the problem, my dear Buz, is that the "risk of death or injury" does not always fall exclusively on the people undertaking the venture (and receiving the profit).

If my house backs onto yours and I build a gunpowder factory in my backyard, what would you have to say about that --- "Let freedom ring"? Do I really have the freedom to put you at risk in that way?

Here's the KMK plant in the Soviet Union (as it then was).

What the people in that town were breathing was not the clean air of freedom but the stench of tyranny, or to be more prosaic, carbon monoxide. When someone else is deciding what's in the air you breathe and the water you drink, how free are you? Freedom involves freedom from someone else poisoning you or blowing you up or giving you radiation sickness, and it is this freedom that the government is protecting with "regulations", just as it has other "regulations" to prevent people from whacking you over the head with a bit of two-by-four.

President Clinton, with the stroke of a pen, declared a large portion of Utah government land ...

No he didn't.

The Grand Staircase-Escalante region was already federal land. What Clinton did was make it a national monument.

Nuclear energy, due to it's risk of impact on large populations and regions has the potential of affecting large populations and regions.

So does burning coal, alas.

Your points are well taken, so far as a reasonable amount of safety regulation. The problem is that the environmentalists have managed to influence the government to the extent of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater so as to make the US dependent on rogue nations for our energy when we have enough to be self sufficient.

The point I intended to make was that President Clinton rendered the good clean burning anthracite coal reserves in Utah off limits to mining by declaring them a national monument.

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