By Hook Or By Crook... Oops, I Mean By Rail Or By Pipe, That Oil Will Be Moved [View all]

[cali]

Objections to the Keystone XL Pipeline are that spills would be devastating to the environment and that extraction of tar sands oil would significantly raise greenhouse gases. Well, forget the latter because that's happening and it won't stop or slow down whether or not Keystone is approved. It'll just get moved by rail- as it already is.

Objections to rail transport are the dangers it poses to human life as well as environmental damage. Rail spills are more common but pipeline spills are 3x greater in quantity spilled. Rail now carries half the oil extracted in the U.S. and Canada, a stratospheric increase in the past 5 years. It's easy to build new terminals and it takes far less time to move the oil even if it's costs 1/2 again as much to move it.

So let's just move oil by rail, right? Well, except for these facts: Most of the tanker cars used are manifestly unsafe, prone to punctures and crash dangers and replacing them with safe tanker cars ain't so easy: Only one company manufactures them and there's a two year plus wait for those cars. The rail infrastructure, particularly in the Northeast where a lot of this product is bound, is abysmal. The routes for these trains, particularly in the Northeast and South, go right thru towns, past homes, schools, hospitals, etc. (a minimum of 50 people perished in Lac Megantic) Oh, I almost forgot to add regulatory laxness.

What do they call this again? A catch-22?

I know links are a deadly bore, but there's some awfully good info contained in these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Keystone_XL_controversies
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/world/americas/deadly-derailment-in-quebec-underlines-oil-debate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/07/08/f-lac-megantic-oil-rail.html
http://www.pembina.org/blog/732
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-13/amid-u-dot-s-dot-oil-boom-railroads-are-beating-pipelines-in-crude-transport
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/14/pipeline-oil-spills-rail-spills_n_3273725.html
http://www.treehugger.com/energy-disasters/canadian-train-explosion-rekindles-oil-pipeline-versus-train-debate.html
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/national_world&id=9166064