Mine owner quits in light of never ending regulations

Congrats Obama - you've killed a few more jobs ....


http://www.theblaze.com/stories/right-o ... -quitting/

Reading on the links-

The person commenting on the meeting wrote-

"I’m not going to take sides on that environmental issue, because I don’t know enough to stake out an informed opinion. (With most of the people I listened to today, facts didn’t seem to matter as much as emotional implications.) But Ronnie Bryant wasn’t there to talk about that particular mine. As a mine operator in a nearby area, he was attending the meeting to listen to what residents and government officials were saying. He listened to close to two hours of people trashing companies of all types and blaming pollution for random cases of cancer in their families. Several speakers clearly believe that all of the cancer and other deaths they see in their families and communities must be caused by pollution. Why? Who knows? Maybe just because it makes for an emotional story to blame big bad business. It’s hard to say."

Here in lies the problem - We in America have become spoiled and like to blame others for our problems. It must be someone elses fault for all of our problems. We want cheap energy, a pristine clean environment, a great lifestyle and have someone else pay for it.

Not that companies shouldn't be held responsible, but the facts have become lost in the emotions.

This is very true. Years & years of the "good life" have produced an out-of-control gigantic government, and treehuggers/militant vegans/animal rights activists. You don't see this kind of craziness in 3rd world countries. They're too busy trying to survive!

Only thing I could find on proposed new regulations were aimed toward the mountain top removal strip mines in W.V. & I don't think that has gone thru yet. I think this guy is just blowing smoke, the reg.s he's talking about are before Obama unless his are strip mines. Heck we don't need clean water to drink. http://www.msha.gov/mshainfo/mshainf2.htm

There you go Samhill - you just made Steamup's point loud & clear with that emotional comment "we don't need clean water".

Gimme a break Sam. Of course we need clean water. We don't need EXCESSIVE GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS. Use your head!

I think I am using my head Smitty, have you looked into the mountain top mining at all, it is just as it sounds the flattening of mountains without any regards to the streams or even reclaiming the characteristics of the land. In other words when all is said & done IMO the tax payer will end up footing the bill to attempt to fix what is left. We still haven't reclaimed all of the old strip mines from way before any regulations. This guy isn't even talking about strip mines but rather underground, those regs. were in effect for a long time, & do the math on his salaries, either he's lying or the salaries have gone way up.
In any event read up on the mountain top mining & then you tell me how it is not going to effect the water tables.http://mountainjustice.org/facts/steps.php
I even did some work for you & it's been a discussion before. There are plenty of links, find some you'll like.

Hell I ain't against business but don't want to step back into the 20s when businesses were doing anything & everything without regard for anything or anyone but profit. I`m going to a meeting either tonight or tomorrow(got to check date) to try & support a tires to energy plant for my area. It clean burns old tires as fuel for electric production, already passed all the EPA Reg.s & everything, will be a fairly big employer & is using an old military site thats zoned for it. It's being fought by people from outside the area, they defeated it for Erie & now they want to stop it here.

SMITTY wrote:There you go Samhill - you just made Steamup's point loud & clear with that emotional comment "we don't need clean water".

Gimme a break Sam. Of course we need clean water. We don't need EXCESSIVE GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS. Use your head!

Here's what needs to change. Get rid of all the regulations and regulatory agencies.

Then, if a business does something that infringes on my "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" then the owner/CEO can be criminally prosecuted.

If they own the mountain, they can turn it into a hole in the ground for all I care.

If the operation poisons the water or air around them, then they are guilty of violating all their neighbors rights.

Big deal, they will walk with billions, pay a couple grand in fines & leave the tax payers to foot the bill & maybe just kill some people in the process. The only reason we have regulations in the first place is because of what damage was done by irresponsible businesses have done in the past. Like most Americans if it ain't in your back yard you could care less.

samhill wrote:Big deal, they will walk with billions, pay a couple grand in fines & leave the tax payers to foot the bill ......

They are required to reclaim the land, the question has come up about whether it's being done well enough.

In addition to that for every ton of coal they mined there is tax applied that goes into a fund that is used to claim abandoned sites. New mining activity is actually beneficial to the environment in this regards because it provides the funding to clean up long abandoned sites where there is no one to hold responsible.

The regulations he is talking about is the nit picky ones or the ones that make absolutely no sense. There's been hundreds of small underground anthracite mines shut down simply because they can't make it profitable because of over bearing regualtions.

One new regualtion was discussed on one of Coalcast episodes. In that case they wanted wireless communication devices that didn't work that well in those types of mines and in fact could have been hazardous. As mentioned by Mike right on the side of the box of explosives is warning that it shouldn't be used near RF. These are the types of things mine owners have problems with.

Coalcast Ep5: "Anthracite Mining Regulations" - June 4, 2009

samhill wrote:Big deal, they will walk with billions, pay a couple grand in fines & leave the tax payers to foot the bill & maybe just kill some people in the process. The only reason we have regulations in the first place is because of what damage was done by irresponsible businesses have done in the past. Like most Americans if it ain't in your back yard you could care less.

That's how it works NOW.

I'm talking about how it's SUPPOSED to work.

Apparently the laws have either changed for strip mining or they don't consider mountain top removal a strip mine.http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/10/ ... p-removal/
The question I had about this article is who exactly put in the regulations.

Doesn't matter.

The regulations exist and that's what people have to deal with.

Some of them will undoubtedly just give up rather than jump through the hoops.

And beyond regulations, there is an overbearing culture of blame big business (even if the business in question isn't really that big). Law suits for trumped up environmental claims with slim evidence put before a jury that can't see past the hand picked group of three people with some horrific debilitating disease, attributed but not nearly proven to be because of business activities. Multi-million (sometimes hundred million) judgement. Don't want to risk getting a jury that's swayed by the violins played by a crafty plantiff's attourney? Settle for millions and still get put near ruin. Not providing good enough (by some connected advocate group's estimation) health care? Pickets, regulations, hearings, protests, boycotts. Not providing enough pay (by a few's estimation)? Unions, card check, NLRB effectively vetoing your ownership's/board's decisions, protests, boycotts. Didn't pay enough lipservice at the town hall meeting where you and your "kind" were being brow beaten (perhaps directly, perhaps by proxy)? Protests, boycotts, bad editorials, local permitting office issues, local zoning board issues. Offering health insurance that's too good? Obamacare taxes the living snot out of you for offering it (afterall, if you can afford top flight insurance for your people, you can spread a little wealth to the government for everyone else, right?), thus all but forcing you to offer less generous coverage to your employees. Bad press, protests, employee discontent, unions, card check, etc. Can't afford to keep offering health insurance? Not on Obama's good side, no waiver for you, bad press, unions, protests, card check, etc.

And keep in mind, salary is not the gross number on the paycheck. It is health care premiums covered by the employer. Unemployment insurance. Workers comp insurance. Accidental death/dismemberment insurance. Liability insurance premiums. Training costs (those are skills the employee gets, remember). Employer paid FICA and Medicare components. On a relatively low pay job, say $25-50k/yr, those additional costs can easily total up to 30% or more additional cost for the employer. Not to mention regulatory fees, some of which area assessed on a per employee basis, I would assume, in a mining type operation. Special equipment costs. and on and on.

Some regulations are the result of bad business practices in the past. Many, particularly those instituted in the past 10-20 years, are overbearing and used as means to extract penance for false evils or evils never once committed by the payee. In many ways we've reached the point of diminishing returns when it comes to regulation, they are costing businesses more and more to get less and less benefits. Clean water is a prime example of this. Not to long ago there was a proposal to limit some compound -- benzene, lead, mercury, something -- to some infinitesimal amount. It would have costs hundreds of millions if not billions for industry and states/cities to meed the standard and in the end the benefit was nill because the existing regulatory level for the compound was already well below levels needed to keep it from becoming a harm to people or the environment.

More recently, we have CO2 regulation attempts and proposals that would "necessarily" make energy costs "skyrocket", all based on global climate change paranioa and the highly dubious "science" proponents of such regulation use. Yet today, in a continuing stream of scientific news undercutting global warming theory, we have undeniable evidence of direct measurement of atmospheric heat loss over the past decade (and another proxy study covering mid 80s' through 90's) that give clear evidence that the planet it releasing far more heat than global warming theory says should be the case. All the "models" used to trump up catastrophic global warming are failing to produce results that measure up to recorded facts over the past few decades. Yet we are going to saddle the transportation and energy businesses (and thus all the customers, ie. you and me) with onerous regulations that attempt to fix a purported problem that is so poorly understood scientifically that we can't even get right the very basics of X amount of CO2 equals Y amount of change in temperatures and Z amount of radiative loss from the atmosphere. But the science is settled, and polar bears are drowning, and kids are crying from school to their parents arms as they scream "We have to save the planet, Knut is going to die".

Too out there for ya? Hydrofracking and all the trumped up bullshit surrounding that long used technology to get at clean burning natural gas reserves. PG&E and the whole Brockovich case. Turns out, the settled science in that case that resulted in a record breaking judgement, for the time, was completely wrong. The jury got it wrong. The defense got it wrong. And who knows what regulations were put in place after that that are completely or mostly unnecessary?

My guess is we're going to be seeing more and more business owners "going Galt". Maybe not for the purposes Galt did in Atlas Shrugged, but for the simpler, more universal reason of not wanting (or being able) to put up with it all anymore.

pvolcko wrote:And beyond regulations, there is an overbearing culture of blame big business (even if the business in question isn't really that big).

I often wonder if these large corporations aren't actively pushing for these regualtions behind the scenes to push the little guy out of business. If you want a great example look at the toy industry. After the lead scare over the toys coming from China our knee jerk reaction Congressman enacted legislation that is going to make toy producers test their products for lead. Sounds like a great idea until you realize that companies like Mattel who were at the heart of the problem to begin with can easily absorb this cost. The cost of the testing can be spread over thousands of units, Mom & Pop making a handful of homemade toys in their basement cannot absorb these costs. If they only made a few of each product the cost per product is hundreds of dollars. This legislation will effectively drives any small toy maker out of business.