Federal Lands Cleanup Likely to Cost $150 Billion

American taxpayers face an enormous bill--$150 billion or more--to clean up environmental contamination of federal lands caused by government agencies and private companies, a congressional study concluded Thursday.

The study, by the staff of the House Committee on Natural Resources, is the first attempt to calculate potential U.S. government liability for federal cleanups. It showed that contamination of public lands continues despite the tremendous costs of eventual cleanup, according to Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who is chairman of the committee.

“It extends to our national parks, forests, deserts and rivers,” Miller said. “It has been caused in large measure by government policies that subsidized the exploitation of our natural resources at a time when we lacked the knowledge that we have today about the negative impact of those subsidies.”

Tens of thousands of mining sites fail to meet environmental standards, the report said, while unexploded bombs and bullets litter 2 million acres of federal lands that were once used for military tests.

In addition, irrigation damage from U.S. government reclamation projects has contaminated at least nine wildlife areas, and hundreds of abandoned oil and gas wells on federal territory may contain oil and drilling waste, the study found. The report said that cleanup problems of lands under jurisdiction of the Interior Department are concentrated in Western states.

“As a result of inadequate laws and decades of neglect, the American taxpayer will be saddled with billions of dollars in cleanup costs,” Miller said. “This report is a warning to the Administration and to the Congress: Ignoring environmental damages does not make them disappear.

“What is truly frightening is that, despite our knowledge, we continue to subsidize activities without regard to their devastating environmental--and economic--impacts,” Miller concluded.

The report urged a comprehensive effort by the Administration to assess the extent of contamination on federal lands as a first step toward finding a way to pay to clean them up.

“The multibillion-dollar size of this unfunded debt to the environment has not previously been addressed in the federal budget,” the report said. “It would be imprudent to continue to ignore the outstanding debt as environmental impacts and cleanup costs mount higher.”

Cleanup of contaminated public lands will be required under laws already on the books dealing with clean water, disposal of hazardous waste and other environmental safeguards. Congress would have to approve funds to pay for the cleanup or seek compensation from private companies that drilled for oil or searched for minerals on U.S. territory and could be held accountable for contamination.

The report said that it was not possible to precisely estimate cleanup costs because federal agencies still have not accurately assessed the damage.

But, the study said, if the U.S. government’s total liability for environmental damage is calculated, the final bill would rival federal outlays for the savings and loan crisis, now estimated at $200 billion or more.