I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:
“Hungary’s Environmental Disaster”
In this post I summarized the unfolding environmental disaster in Hungary. Last Monday a containing wall at an aluminum plant gave way, releasing 700,000 cubic metres of “toxic red sludge”, probably a combination of compounds including cadmium oxides and cyanates. The disaster has claimed eight lives, has caused the evacuation of several villages, has polluted miles of land and waterway, and bids fair to pollute a vast part of southeastern Europe depending on its consequences for the Danube.
Why is it receiving so little attention here?
Public exhaustion, for one, plus the usual combination of American insularity and media navel-gazing. I know when I first heard of it my immediate thought was “Great, more bad news that I can’t do anything about.”