Superfund Tax Needed For Polluter Pays -- But They Don't
In a letter to Congress, EPA has requested the reinstatement of the Superfund “polluter pays” tax. Superfund is the federal law that deals with the nation’s most polluted sites and, if reinstated, the tax would aid funding the investigation and remediation of orphan sites – contaminated sites where a responsible party cannot be found or the party is bankrupt.
The original Superfund tax expired on December 31, 1995, under a Republican-controlled Congress. The fund peaked in 1996 at $3.8 billion and ran out of money in 2003. Since then, clean up at orphan sites has been paid out of general funds – that is, tax revenues – to the tune of $1.2 billion per year for the past 4 years.
While the tax existed, the source of the funds was primarily a tax on the chemical industry. Specifically, there was a tax on crude oil and imported petroleum products at the rate of $9.70 per barrel, hazardous chemicals at varying rates of $0.22 to $4.87 per ton and a charge for imported substances that use hazardous materials in their production. When an orphan site was identified, the fund could be tapped for the costs.
The request to Congress would reinstate the tax for 10 years (2011 – 2021) and would cause manufacturers of hazardous chemicals to pay into the fund for use at the sites that find pollution that includes hazardous chemicals and for which no one else can be found to pay for the release.
In support of the legislation, Mathy Stanislaus, Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Energy Response, said:
If Mr. Stanislaus really means what he says, the administration should be adamantly opposed to the Superfund tax because this does nothing to "support the reinstatement of the polluter pays system."
That's not to say that the Superfund tax is necessarily a bad idea. It adds a few cents to every gallon of (legal) hazardous substances sold so that there will be a pool of money readily available to clean up toluene, for example, identified at a site for which a responsible party cannot be found. By doing so, it spreads the risk of contamination out over the universe of those who benefit from the sale of a hazardous substance.
But it is time to stop saying that this, in any way, supports the concept of “polluter pays.” It doesn’t. If the Recreational Toluene Company pays $50,000 into the fund in a given year and the fund pays out $50,000 to a contaminated site, it doesn’t mean that Recreational Toluene's toluene was identified at the site, so it was not the polluter. Even if it was somehow determined that Recreational’s toluene was actually at the site, it doesn’t mean that Recreational was the polluter. It means that someone who was sloppy used Recreational’s legal product in an illegal manner. Recreational was not the polluter, but it paid. Call it the “innocent manufacturer pays” tax, or the “someone-other-than-the-general-public-pays” tax, but not the “polluter pays” tax, because they don’t and it isn’t. If that’s what our elected officials want to do in the case of the environment, that’s fine. Just don’t pretend it's something that it's not.
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