The correct approach would be to make fees and penalties for environmental impact higher (carbon tax, EPA able to levy big fines for oil spills, etc.) and then let the market figure it out rather than fight like crazy over specific cases.
Now, as to the subject of the pipeline running through native american territory because white people were (justifiably) worried about their drinking water if it ran through their watershed -- that's a whole different issue.
Your last argument suggests you are conflating aspects of the Dakota Access Pipeline (which is for domestic shale oil from a particular field) with the Keystone XL pipeline (which is for Canadian oil sands oil).
The environmental argument about Dakota access is that the pipeline, which was rerouted from its original route because of an unacceptable threat to a mostly White community that it would have crossed just upstream of the water supply of, and it's been rerouted to run just upstream of the water supply of the Standing Rock reservation.
Which is why the protesters style themselves "Water Protectors".
> Now, as to the subject of the pipeline running through native american territory because white people were (justifiably) worried about their drinking water if it ran through their watershed -- that's a whole different issue.
No, it's actually the whole issue with Dakota Access. Keystone XL is a whole different pipeline.
"This pipeline was moved because local communities feared the risk to the water supply. So the company felt it was appropriate to move it into the tribal community area."
"Water risk to white people? No no no. Water risk to Native communities? Well, we can live with that."
I don't think the Army Corps is that corrupt. I'm guessing it went more like "Water risk to 50,000 people or water risk to 5,000 people?"
This history of the US government relations with native people makes any object assessment suspect though.
I'm not sure the Army Corps was involved until after the reroute, and, in any case, it had publicly announced that it would not approve the easement on the current route because of the issues raised relating to Standing Rock and was conducting environmental impact reviews of alternative routes prior to the Trump executive order directing approval of the current route, so, yes, I'll agree that the Army Corps of Engineers itself is not indicated to be the source of the problem.
I think you are totally correct, except that the `correct approach` only works if you have a functioning and independent (of the regulated) regulatory system able to assess the impact, and levy taxes, fees, and fines to price in all the externalities.
Defunding / freezing these agencies certainly doesn't help their ability to function, and funding the campaigns of (or challengers in the primaries of if need be) the regulators as well as having sympathetic people placed at the top of the regulatory enforcement agencies destroys independence.
The stated motivation for this banning of research is because these studies are not "repeatable". This seems like a pretty blatant attack on the potential for the entities which benefited from the activity that led to the accident to be held accountable.
With a rule like this on the horizon, there's no way I'd be willing to allow any oil company to pursue any construction with any risk of an ecological effect anywhere near my back yard.
Maybe they can provide some concrete analysis of tainted water supplies.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#Switching_t...
nothing? ok.
as to the subject of the pipeline running through native american territory... that's a whole different issue.
Power. It's about power. And power is tied to race. It's morally disgusting, and a lot of this talk is just misdirection, avoiding the real, valid source of anger and rebellion.
The pipeline runs close to, not "through tribal lands" [1]. The environmental concern is fair. If my neighbor builds a 300 dB speaker on their property, I have a reasonable claim to damages.
The "sacred lands" and threat to "way of life" claims, however, seem disingenuous. It amounts to laying claims based on hypotheticals on someone else's property.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline#Tribal_...
So this is symbolism. Standing in front of a bulldozer and saying "NO" is all they have left.
I would be more amenable to the tribes if they were honest and upfront about what they're doing: a form of collective bargaining to maximize compensation from the government.
Look at this map:
https://www.eia.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publica...
Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana must have no drinking water by now, right?
The protest has garnered the support that it has mostly because it's a Native American community (and I for one do support them - they've been screwed over too many times in the past).
The "symbolism" is - if you're poor or under-represented you will be poisoned. Why did we even create reservations if we can poison them at will for the profits of the greedy?
You can't block supply while demand is there, because the demand will be filled by someone, only this time by someone with less oversight [from you].
You want to make a difference add more "good" supply, or reduce demand.
Bad supply will automatically go down if you do this, with no extra effort.
The is currently enough oil supply for everyone. Reducing/removing an oil source just means the oil comes from somewhere else, but it does NOT reduce oil consumption.
So if you want to make a difference, yes, limiting the supply is one way to do it by not extracting it in the first place.
Which are still oil, just from elsewhere. The Saudis are quite happy to sell you as much oil as you want.
> limiting the supply is one way to do it by not extracting it in the first place.
I covered that - all that would happen is people would get the oil from elsewhere.
You can only induce people to pump less oil by increasing supply of other forms of energy, or by reducing demand.
If you are going to pump oil at least do it where people actually care about the environment - don't make things so hard you just push production to places with less oversight.
If the pipeline is safe, prove it. If the trains and trucks are safe, prove it. If neither, then leave the oil in the ground.
Nothing is ever perfectly safe. Nothing you do ever has no impact. Everything in life is about tradeoffs, and the right thing to do is pick the best one. NOT wait for the perfect one!
Said no poor person ever. You can't just bury your head in the sand and pretend your policies/idea don't impact anyone.
If you understand that and choose to do so anyway because you feel it's better, fine, at least you understand that you are making a tradeoff. But just pretending there is no harm is disingenuous.
...said no politician, ever. This proposition may even be true, but it's a terrible argument.
Are you going to be the person who tells families around the country that their grandmother had to freeze to death this winter for the greater good?
How about the young couple that just had a kid and is suffering from stagnant wages. Are you going to come around and tell them to "tough it out" to prevent a catastrophic event a century or two from now?
All the while the smokestacks in the 3rd world just keep growing, and thanks to the lack of demand in the US they can consume even more petroleum products (and in a far less efficient manner) due to the lower cost globally.
(Also, premature decommissioning for political reasons, (e.g. Rancho Seco)
What are you suggesting, exactly? That each locality can block whatever transport goes through it? Maybe put up a tollbooth?
Coal isn't safe either, nor nuclear, hell even with solar someone might fall off a roof during maintenance or installation and the panels can be toxic. What perfectly safe energy source do you propose?
Comparing rail to pipelines, with the same amount of oil moved the same distance, trains cost 2x more and use more energy. Most years trains spill less per oil moved than pipelines, which is their one win.
Unfortunately, when trains have accidents, they tend to be both in towns and have fire. 45 people died in a single Canadain oil train accident in 2013.
Pipelines have great record in terms of human safety.
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/13/nation/la-na-nn-nort...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/north-dakota-town-evacuated-afte...
[1]: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/research/safety-transportati...
But on the other hand pipelines are more cost effective than other means of transport. That means the oil gets to market more cheaply and that will tend to decrease the price of oil, meaning more is used, meaning more CO2 in the air. Raising the price by taxing oil would mean that we would get the double benefit of less oil use and government money to pay down the debt or whatever but that's harder to do politically than just block pipelines.
Also higher prices mean more oil is exctracted - and sometimes more is used to do the extraction (IE, more marginal EROEI projects are undertaken)
You have a point about transport CO2 use but I'd expect that would use a small amount proportionally.
There are well known ocean seeps that have been ongoing for tens or hundreds of thousands of years[1]:
>Researchers have found that natural offshore seeps near Goleta, California, alone have leaked up to 25 tons of oil each day – for the last several hundred thousand years.
The problem is that when you build this infrastructure, it comes along with long-term financial contracts. Which is to say, if you build it, you're gonna use it.
As a result, it discourages investments in other energy infrastructure projects. Once the pipeline is in, we are stuck with it until it ages out of usefulness or if green energy radically undercuts the profitability of fossil fuels such that the pipeline is abandoned. But because of those long-term financial contracts, the likelihood of the pipeline being abandoned is far less than it would have been if trucks were used instead.
Small short-to-medium-term risk, larger long-term risk.
Also, remember the article from yesterday about how utilities are building solar plants to insulate themselves from swings in the price of oil and natural gas. The current round of pipeline building and the current round of solar-building are complementary; both are about moving away from coal.
Wind has arrived, solar is arriving, and geothermal and pumped hydro are probably next. The future of the world's energy supply looks pretty bright, and it looks likely that the Saudis were right back in the 1970s when they predicted that the oil age wouldn't end when we ran out of oil, just as how the stone age didn't end when we ran out of stones.
What does it mean to be safer in this context? Pipelines have fewer spills than trucks, but a truck spill is generally limited to one truck's worth of oil whereas a pipe can spill a huge amount.
Safer by what measure? Pipelines have fewer spills than trucks, but a truck spill is generally limited to one truck's worth of oil whereas a pipe can spill a huge amount. (I'm not sure where trains fit in. A train carries more oil than a truck, but train accidents won't always break every car).
The recent leak in ND was a little worse than normal because it was during a rough blizzard which made it rather difficult to respond quickly.
http://globalnews.ca/news/2117570/alberta-oil-spill-when-fai... (2015)
Notice how many failure reports are not the sensor, but are due to humans checking up on the pipeline. The conditions these pipelines are installed in can be pretty hostile to equipment and monitoring. Going by those numbers, I'd say sensor systems have a ways to go.
The debate that usually goes around is that pipelines fail less often, but their failures tend to spill more oil, in more sensitive areas.
The other dimension, that isn't often talked about, is which transport system has the best chance to improve. Despite their current shortcomings, I think that a system that is dedicated to one job (moving dangerous fluids) has a better safety ceiling than shared systems, like trains and roads.
I agree with the rest of your comments.
source(s)?
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/research/safety-transportati...
we're in the midgame of climate change... better to take radical action to prevent the worst possible end case.
This project really doesn't have many positive externalities for its host nation. For an administration that's "America First" they're been very quiet about who actually benefits. Some few Americans do.
Eventually there's going to be less reliance on the USA for refined petrol as more nations move towards renewable energy sources, so the market will eventually correct itself I suppose - but I don't see any reason to help the oil companies make one last push to milk it for all they can before the money dries up.
In essence, pipelines spill more across fewer locations while trains spill less across more locations:
Our calculation implies 0.09 incidents and 26 barrels released per 1 billion barrel-miles of crude oil transported by pipeline during a 2004-12 period. Comparing that with figures for rail, we quantify the risk of a train incident to be 6-times higher than that of a pipeline, while pipelines spill 3-times more per 1 billion barrel-miles of crude oil transported, over the 2004-12 period.
[1] http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...
One reason existing pipelines have a lot of problems today is because a lot of them are very old, which makes them much more dangerous than any pipeline built today. This is a good article about that: http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/01/half-century-old-pipeline...
A brand new pipeline would be less dangerous than the existing pipeline infrastructure we use today.