[seanmcdirmid]

It doesn’t make sense. Anything can be punished by death in China, and laws are only selectively enforced anyways, so death penalty with the excuse of pollution would probably only occur for deeper political reasons.

China doesn’t really have superfund sites, in that they don’t have a specific category for expensive cleanup projects.

[H8crilA]

I meant: how many sites are already de facto so polluted that they require deep cleanup. May be decades before we find out.

[droopyEyelids]

To be more realistic, you'll never find out.

I'd challenge anyone who thinks we know all of them in the USA.

It doesn't even take the corruption that a big employer in a small town automatically creates to have a 'hidden' superfund site.

It only takes the lack of dedicated professionals testing everything all the time. Tracking sources and types of pollution is _not only_ difficult, highly technical work that requires a lot of infrastructure- but it also _requires its own R&D to keep up with new industrial chemicals_. This means it's fiercely expensive, manpower-limited, and that it takes a long, long time.

What country is going to dedicate that amount of resources to find problems that'll cost even more money to clean up (or possibly can't be cleaned up at all)? Maybe Norway. Maybe.

[throwaway2048]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_clusters

This always gives me pause, plenty don't have any known cause.

[freeflight]

> May be decades before we find out.

You mean just like in the US?

[H8crilA]

Yup. I mean London was covered in smog, just like Beijing is now. Not a big leap to expect a replay to some degree.

[mc32]

Except now we know the consequences and have the experience and moreover have alternatives (even in simple management, mitigation terms) which might not existed five decades ago.