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Old Posted Oct 13, 2011, 4:25 PM
pesto pesto is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila View Post
I'm assuming this handful of projects is a trial balloon. If the environmental review can be managed successfully on these, then the President may direct that each project go through an expedited review.

I was thinking earlier today about how a project could do environmental-impact after the fact, by establishing a fund to deal with mitigation as part of the project budget, and then dealing with problems as they occur.

In the vast majority of cases, the huge impacts of a project can be predicted fairly easily and factored into the design. The small-scale impacts that affect only 4 or 5 properties can be mitigated after the bulk of construction.
This is a fair reply. The other replies are govt. thinking again: if you have money, spend it. In real life people learn not to spend on everything they want; if they do, they go broke or don't have funds when real needs come up. Same for govt.

Your comment on remediation smacks of libertarianism (which is to say, good economics). But if you decide to do it for rail projects, why not for large-scale polluters: let them pollute and pay-off local homeowners if that yields a better overal result. The problem is that the right to be left untroubled in your home runs deep in Americans, even when it is easily remediable.
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