'Pay to pollute' plan? Montanans have been there, done that • Daily Montanan

Ever since Congress enacted the Superfund law nearly half a century ago, the phrase “polluter pays” has meant that individuals corporations, or entities responsible for polluting the environment will be held liable for the costs to clean up their toxic disasters.  

But comes now president-elect Donald Trump’s promise that “polluter pays” has an entirely different meaning — and one that’s fraught with creating foreseeable and avoidable environmental disasters primarily by excluding the public from agency permits and approvals. 

As he posted to Truth Social this week:  “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.  GET READY TO ROCK!!!”

That choice of words is pretty ironic given the largest Superfund site in the nation is located right here in good old Butte, Montana — and the toxic pollution that not only plagues the town, but 100 miles of the Clark Fork River, came from mining rock and spewing the resulting poisons on the land, air and water.

Equally ironic and tragic is the fact that since Superfund’s enactment Butte, Anaconda, and the 100 miles of the Upper Clark Fork River have seen hundreds of millions of dollars spent trying to remediate (not clean up and reclaim) the vast scope of the pollution.

How did it happen?  Almost exactly like Trump’s incredibly ignorant offer that if you pay enough, you can buy government approval to pollute at will.  Only here, it happened because the Copper Kings “paid to pollute” through buying, bribing, threatening, and controlling the legislature, judges, sheriffs, and local and state government officials.

The old Butte joke at the legislature back then was to ask new legislators if “they got their envelope?” 

Of course, they’d ask, “What envelope?” 

And the old legislators would say “the one with the money from The Company” – because in fact, the Anaconda Company used to toss envelopes full of cash through the transom windows of the hotel rooms where legislators stayed in downtown Helena.  

No problem with pesky laws when you pay to pollute.  The Copper Kings got the gold, but Butte and Montana got the shaft and pit and poisoned river.  They fled with their fortunes, but here we are, 40+ years into Superfund activities with a projected “end” of — get this — 2038!  

I doubt Trump has ever been to Butte to admire the Berkeley Pit’s 50 billion gallons of toxic water — which will never be “cleaned up.”  He likely hasn’t seen the Opportunity Ponds, either, where millions of tons of toxic sediment removed from behind the failing Milltown Dam are now stored in the floodplain with groundwater only a foot (if that) below the surface. 

Nor, I suspect, has he ever been to Love Canal where unsuspecting residents were poisoned by buried chemical wastes in an incident so horrific it gave birth to the Superfund law because the culprits thought they could get away with scraping some dirt over the deadly toxins and selling it as a subdivision. 

There’s much wisdom in the old saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  And indeed, in Montana, the idea of “pay to pollute” is all too familiar and the “cure” remains both incredibly expensive and illusive. 

Before Trump goes through with his incredibly ill-conceived and shortsighted plan, maybe he ought to take a trip to Butte and see the results of “pay to pollute” — because here in Montana, we’ve been there and done that.