Did you read the part of the article that stated that TransCanada, a related energy corporation on the board of which the CEO of Devon Energy sits, has been training US law enforcement and the FBI how to prosecute environmental protestors as terrorists?
You make an excellent point, and I agree with you. But I also believe that government departments who meet and collude with corporate interests are certainly doing wrong. And they need to be held accountable for engaging in behavior so contrary to democratic governance. Then, after theyâve been held accountable, they need to stop meeting with private interests (furren private interests at that) to receive instruction on how to police citizens and arrest them on spurious charges that carry extremely severe sentences.
Risk is not something that exists or doesnât, itâs something that needs to be minimized. Even when a pipeline is the only viable option, for instance, you might take pains not to route it through vulnerable areas and put in extra security measures to prevent and minimize leaks.
Those cost money to the company, though, rather than externalizing the damage to the public at large. In the first proposal of the Keystone XL they didnât so much as bother planning around aquifers, and still had the audacity to claim it had no real risks. As of June it was still not planned to use EPA-recommended leak detection systems, though that might have changed by now, given how much pressure environmental groups have put on them.
That might tell you something about where risk management sits on their priorities. Meanwhile there have been notable leaks that paint a very poor picture of how pipelines are managed in general. Of course leaks will happen, but they donât have to be so large or take so long to detect, stop, or report.
And we should be able to make decisions aware of the true costs. This year Alberta had its largest oil spill in decades; the extent was not reported for days, it was declared contained when it had only been stopped by beavers, and it was declared only coincidence that a nearby school was shut. There was a large leak in Arkansas, too, the extent of which was kept concealed while investigators were kept away from the area. It is easy to find more examples showing the level of environmental problems are being hidden.
So yeah, all in all there are lots of reasons to be concerned about Keystone XL, which is still planned to run through sensitive areas. And yet you have the gall to tell us the pipeline is not merely safe enough but environmentally neutral, and that there is really no practical way anything better could be done - to the point where we should all sympathize with the poor innocent company wanting to falsely arrest the odd protestor.
What can I say to that? I donât know what insult could match the level of sheer contempt such claims express for their audience. Did you think none of us had ever heard of a pipeline before, or what?
i mean, if youâre arguing that you like to breathe clean air, it seems like youâre just speaking from the heart, which i totally respect. but, you need to look at the other side of the coin, oil companies are people too. they need money like you need air. would you have them suffocate? :ââââ(
Itâs not just I who wants to breathe clean air and drink safe water. Itâs every living thing on the planet: humans, animals, birds, fish, trees, grasses, fungi, etc. The other side of the coin is just that and that alone: the coin(s). It is commonly acknowledged we, as a planet have reached peak oil output. At this point the oil companies are acting like buggy and wagon makers who refuse to see their time is over. oil companies are making as much profit as they can before even they have to admit the oil boom is bust. And I would argue that, no, oil companies are NOT people, my friend.
You got me! I just realized who you are and where youâre coming from. Damn my emotions!
The practical alternatives are doing dangerous things in places that will minimize the damage if things go wrong.
Running the pipeline across the primary aquifers in the US Midwest is much more risky than running it somewhere that a pipeline break wonât, for instance, contaminate the water supply that makes agriculture in most of Texas possible. Any route you pick for the pipeline is going to lead to a lot of contaminated tar-sands land in Alberta, because mining the stuff is a lot messier than drilling for oil or even fracking for natural gas, so the âenvironmentally neutralâ oil-biz talking points are bogus, but itâs possible to find much better or much worse routes.
Itâs one thing to call people terrorists for deliberately glitter-bombing somebody or someplace. Sure, itâs a blatant abuse of power to do so, and deserves to be thrown out of court with extreme prejudice, but it wouldnât be unfair to charge glitter-bombers with âlitterinâ, and creatinâ a disturbance.â
But this was just glitter falling off a badly painted banner, not even deliberate. The police ought to get sued for false arrest or at least stuck on desk jobs where they donât get to have any fun.
Tell me more! As someone whoâs spent his whole life trying to get âsupport, funding and publicityâ for protest groups, Iâd love to know your secret! Have you got a mailing list or something?
Seriously. The idea that groups of envrionmental protesters are the bullies, and that the oil companies are the poor victims does not make any sense, by any measure: total budget, influence in politics (as measured by number of meetings recorded in publicly available diaries of key legislators and regulators), total advertising spend⌠The oil companies are literally the most profitable companies in the entire world. The idea that theyâre playing David to Big Protestâs Goliath is just absurd.
