Publisher's Synopsis
How much is actually spent cleaning up the nation's toxic waste sites? And who bears the costs associated with the federal government's Superfund programme? A corporate environmental tax, along with taxes on chemical and petroleum feedstocks, generates about one billion dollars annually for the Superfund trust fund. While the broad outline of total programme costs has been known for some time, researchers are only now beginning to understand how much potentially responsible parties and their insurers spend on transaction costs and onsite cleanups.;The authors of "Footing the Bill for Superfund Cleanups" develop information, on a site-by-site basis, on who is likely to pay the cost of the current Superfund programme. They explore the short-term financial implications of changes in liability and taxes on five key sectors affected by Superfund: chemical, oil, mining, wood preserving, and commercial property-casualty insurers. They analyze the incidence of different taxing mechanisms and liability schemes and compare the financial effects on specific industries of the current Superfund programme and of several alternative liability and tax-based funding mechanisms available.;The alternative liability approaches examined in the book include scenarios in which liability is eliminated for all sites created before Superfund was enacted and in which parties are released from liability at sites where municipal and industrial wastes were codisposed. The authors also assess the economic implications of a variety of taxes that could be used to finance the creation of a larger trust fund for site cleanups.
