The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has long criticized the federal Superfund program – which cleans up heavily polluted sites, from Love Canal to the Atlas Tack facility – for its “unreasonable liability and cleanup standards,” and says that the program is “slow, ineffective, very expensive, and has managed to address very few sites,” as quoted this week in The New York Times.
While the Superfund program has had great successes (says Steve Cohen of the Earth Island Institute: “If we hadn’t had Superfund, we would have 30, 40, 50 million people in the direct pathway of exposure to toxic wastes,”), it's absolutely true that hasn't done enough -- but that's an argument for its strengthening, not dismantling. One of the great advances of the Superfund law was that it established the principle that the polluter must pay for cleanup. More...
