This evening as I was preparing the food for the ferals my home phone rang. It doesn’t ring often because it is the landline that I’m required to have to obtain DSL. The voice said they were conducting a short survey, so I listened. It was a commercial for the Keystone XL pipeline.

All of the standard lies were there. Helping Canadian oil companies move their product to Gulf Coast refineries does nothing for US ‘energy independence’. The price of oil will not come down because of this pipeline, and a number of studies indicate that the price will actually rise in the Midwestern states as the pipeline reduces an oil over-supply in that area. There aren’t going to be 47,000 US jobs created. Oil sands are an environmental disaster from start to finish, and exacerbate global climate change.

The Arkansas pipeline spill also involves oil sand being sent to Gulf Coast refineries and it will be much harder to clean up than crude oil. It sinks, it doesn’t float on water like crude oil.

Charley Pierce notes that Everything’s Worked Fine Since The Last Catastrophe.

Understand what is going to be moving through this pipeline – oil sand. That is sand, as in sand paper and sand blasting, suspended in a tar-like substance. To get it to flow, it has to be diluted, heated, and moved under pressure. IOW, a hot pressurized fluid with abrasives in it moving through a metal pipe, the sort of systems that some metal shops use to cut thick steel plate. What could possibly go wrong? 😈

To paraphrase Cicero, as others have done, the oil companies believe that:
Pollution in pursuit of profit is no vice, and caution to avoid disasters is no virtue.

These are corporations whose very existence is predicated on two things – maximizing profits and limiting liability. They are creations of the government, not the market, and violate the most fundamental principle of capitalism that the risk justifies the reward. If the risk is limited, so too, should be the reward.