Big Oil’s explosive week: Two disasters reveal the dangers of America’s energy boom. The fossil fuel industry continues to prioritize profits over safety — and regulations aren’t keeping up
Recovery Diva
Long-Term Recovery from Disasters
Big Oil’s explosive week: Two disasters reveal the dangers of America’s energy boom. The fossil fuel industry continues to prioritize profits over safety — and regulations aren’t keeping up
Recovery Diva 
Another example of why the President’s ill-considered opposition to the Keystone pipeline needs to be reversed. Pipelines have proven to be much safer than trains.
Rail shipment will never begin to replace pipelines for tar sands crude. Moving it by train simply isn’t economically very feasible. While pipelines certainly seem to be “safer” in the abstract than rail transport of crude, that depends, first, on how one measures “safe” (in terms of lives lost, or amount of crude spilled) – and perhaps more directly, whether its measured in short-term loss of life and damage to the environment, or the more long-term effects of the far greater amount of spillage that pipelines result in (and the more lasting environmental damage as well as more slow-motion but possibly much greater loss of life that this damage also causes, esp. when tar sands crude is involved).
Either way, what’s most ill-conceived to me is allowing the desperate greed driving the massive extraction of what is by far the dirtiest, costliest and most environmentally inaccessible and destructive fuel imaginable to be allowed to flourish unchecked – rather than focusing on the long, long overdue work of moving beyond fossil fuels. Extracting and burning it is like throwing a highly efficient accelerant onto global warming, but even if it wasn’t, oil prices have to go and stay very high for it to be economically feasible at all.
As a result, several other significant similar projects or project expansions have recently been cancelled – and I think the Keystone Pipeline is basically dead at this point…… unless NAFTA’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism is invoked, which apparently the head of TransCanada has made some noise about possibly doing. I’m betting that, in the end, he won’t – but who knows…..