Municipal contractors punctured the dump’s clay lining multiple times. Chemical waste seeped into the ground, contaminated the groundwater and made a gooey mess of the area. The situation went from bad to full panic when, in 1978, the president of the local homeowners association claimed the situation was sickening local children.

Though no health effects ever were linked with the leaking waste, Love Canal became synonymous with "disaster," prompting the Superfund law, a national program to identify and clean up hazardous wastes sites across the country.

Hundreds of locations across the country were designated as "hazardous waste sites" — not because anyone’s health or the environment necessarily was at risk, but so that every state could share in the federal dollars porked out for clean-ups. Political science, rather than conventional science, often steered the Superfund program.

Superfund itself soon became a disaster, in large part because of its imposition of "retroactive liability" — the punishment of past, but at the time, entirely legal, conduct.

If a site was deemed by the EPA to pose a risk to human health — say, by divining as little as a 0.01 percent increase in the risk of cancer to a hypothetical person who, however implausibly, might one day subsist on a site’s most contaminated soil and groundwater — then the owners and users of the site could be held liable for the typically exorbitant, EPA-determined clean-up costs. This was regardless of whether the wastes were disposed of properly according to the law at the time of disposal.

By the mid-1990s, retroactive liability fueled an explosion of costly and time-consuming Superfund litigation. Only the lawyers cleaned up. Little progress was made on actual site remediation.

Despite that heritage, the EPA apparently is now figuring out how to throw CO2 (and its emitters) under the Superfund train.

This most likely will be a problem for coal-fired power plants — generators of about half of America’s electricity — and other large industrial facilities (to the extent that any still exist in the U.S.) that may be forced by future greenhouse gas regulation to capture and sequester emissions.

Carbon capture and storage advocates imagine that CO2 emissions will be transported from facilities by pipeline to underground geological formations where they hope the gas will be permanently stored.

But as recently reported in this column, a report from the Congressional Research Service spotlighted the many problems with underground CO2 sequestration, including leaking, which could harm groundwater by acidifying it. Groundwater clean-up can be extremely difficult and often was a key driver of expensive Superfund cleanups.