A tale of profit, pollution and who pays to clean up the messes

“Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” ― Milton Friedman, The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays, 1935 (Businesses do not stay within the rules of the game, and they probably never did. Deception and fraud have always been there. They were and still are important, not trivial aspects of normal business operations. And, most or nearly all businesses hate open and free competition.)

In America there are hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells. Many of them continue to emit into the air and/or ground the potent greenhouse gas methane and/or toxic compounds such as xylene. In coming years, millions of wells will be abandoned as the economy transitions from carbon energy to other energy sources. This 13 minute video shows that private funds and taxpayers pay ~$30,000 to $1,000,000 each to plug and cap wells that drillers and well owners abandoned. 

Most owners of abandoned either cannot afford to cap their wells or they cannot be found and the land sold to other people, many of who are not aware that they have one or more abandoned wells on their property. The problem is left to the states, which choose to not fund well capping.

An obvious solution to this problem, assuming one sees it as a problem worth solving, is to (i) require plugging and capping before a well is abandoned, and (ii) tax what each well produces so that there is money to properly plug and cap old and newly abandoned wells. 

Obviously that solution is politically impossible. Oil and gas companies will scream bloody murder and unleash their hordes of lobbyists and campaign contributions to kill any such measure. On top of that massive barrier, the Republican Party will scream bloody murder, accusing the effort as more evil socialist tyranny, pedophilia, cannibalism, satanism and whatever else they come up with in their raging ideological fever dreams and crackpot conspiracy theories.

This is just another example of how callous and irresponsible people and companies that profit from pollution are. They could not care less about environmental or human damage. That is the heart and soul of energy sector capitalism. Laws could have and should have been passed decades ago making it mandatory to plug and cap wells. 

But as usual for most American capitalism, there is no such thing as social conscience. Social conscience is subversive to profit. Despite contrary capitalist public relations* rhetoric, social conscience is intolerable. It is blasphemy to core capitalist dogma of profit above all else. 

* Public relations from big corporations is mostly just propaganda, largely consisting of lies, deceit, opacity, deflection, flawed motivated reasoning, etc. 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Peach Freeze for bringing this video to my attention.