Shilling For Big Oil
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.
2 comments
Go to Google Images and search for “tar sands”. The pictures you see may discourage any inclination in your mind to support piping that stuff anywhere.
What is wrong with people, anyway? No one in his or her right mind would advocate transporting such gunk by any means, let alone pipelines made of segments already demonstrated to be full of flaws.
It is basically what was used for years to seal flat roofs around here. It is the standard road surfacing compound with sand instead of gravel mixed in. It is asphalt. You can see it at the La Brea Tar Pits if you want to see a form of the stuff.
Converting it to fuel requires massive amounts of energy, and if the price of oil falls it will lose money. It should be left in Alberta with all of its carbon intact, not shipped around and polluting the planet.
The basic point is that even if the pipeline were flawless, this stuff would erode it from the inside, with no warning or visible abnormally on the outside.