User:Blueskynoise/sandbox
In this section I intend to lay out the reparations resulted from the Trail Smelter arbitration. I will discuss the Tribunal's decision regarding economic compensation and transboundary environmental monitoring. I'm a little lost because it seems that Kelsey and I are doing very similar things, perhaps we should combine them.
Reparations
[edit]The consequences of the arbitration came in two parts; one being economic compensation for the local farmers of Steven's County, Washington and two effecting laws for transboundary air pollution issues. Transboundary issues meaning those that stretch between states and nations.
COMINCO initially agreed to pay $350,000 in compensation to the local farmers for all damages before January 1, 1932.[1] However, this offer was rejected by the local residents and farmers, and the Washington government thus resulting in the arbitration. The arbiters final decisions were based on evidence for visible injury to the farmers livelihood, the US' case was poorly presented thus the tribunal's final decision in 1941 granted an additional $78,000 to the farmers and also imposed COMINCO's duty of regulating the smoke output.[2]
The arbitration successfully imposed state responsibility for transnational air pollution. This set precedence for no states being able to use their territories in such a way that would cause harm by air pollution to another territory.[3] It was COMINCO's responsibility to regulate and control the pollution their smelting industries created. As a result, the state enforced regulatory rules on corporations to limit damaging emissions. For COMINCO, their company being subject to emission standards meant potentially limiting the output of their smelter. For the better part of twenty years the company fought every attempt to impose any sort of regulatory regime aimed at production levels.[4] Only after they learned that they could recycle sulfur dioxide to make fertilizer did they finally consent to emission standards.[5]
The arbitration was significant because it defined the limits of environmentally permissible conduct between international boundaries: nations must not perpetrate significant harm to other nations through pollution.
- ^ Allum, James R., "An Outcrop of Hell: History, Environment, and the Politics of the Trail Smelter Dispute" ed. Rebecca Bratspies and Russell Miller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 16, 13-26.
- ^ Allum, James., "An Outcrop of Hell," 16.; Wirth, John D., “The Trail Smelter Dispute: Canadians and Americans Confront Transboundary Pollution, 1927-41,” Environmental History, Vol.1, No.2 (April 1996), 34.51.
- ^ Read, John E., "The Trail Smelter Dispute," 1 Canadian Yearbook of International Law 213, 213-29 (1963).
- ^ Allum, 17.
- ^ Kaijser, Arne. “The Trail from Trail: New Challenges for Historians of Technology”. Presidential Address for the Society for the History of Technology (2011): 133-134.