Surely They Wouldn’t Lie
How would you like to head out to your field to harvest your wheat crop and find this: Massive oil pipeline break under North Dakota farmer’s wheat field.
Another one of those safe and secure, well-build pipelines that you will never know is even on your land. Now the farmer has huge block of his farm that can’t be used for anything, and if it isn’t cleaned up, the damage will spread.
Fortunately this break wasn’t near any waterways or known aquifers, but there is no way in hell you can run the Keystone XL pipeline that won’t involve crossing both as it runs from Alberta to Texas.
The CBC reports that David Suzuki tells U.S. not to trust Harper’s Keystone XL promises.
Americans who watch PBS will be familiar with Dr Suzuki as the host of the series, The Nature of Things. He is a well-known and respected Canadian environmentalist, and a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
His basic complaint is that the government of Mr Harper has prevented scientists who work for the government from publishing their opinions, and has failed to base climate and environmental decisions on the best available science.
I look at it this way – British Columbia is the province to the west of Alberta, and they don’t want a tar sands pipeline to run through their territory down to their refineries on the Pacific. When the people behind the XL Pipeline can’t convince a neighbor to allow them to lay a pipeline a few hundred miles to the Pacific, why would the US want to let them run it a couple of thousand miles to the Gulf Coast?
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As one who notices cities for such natural beauty as they can manage to offer, Victoria, BC is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. It ranks right up there with Salzburg. I’ve heard Vancouver isn’t bad, either, though I’ve never managed to go there. It would be a crying shame to spoil any of BC with tar sands.
I don’t really want the tar people in my part of the
woodsprairie, either.Looking at the basis for the government of British Columbia’s complaints about the various proposed pipelines it boils down to ‘you lowlifes have lied to us every time we allowed you to do anything, so we know better than to trust you now.”
The Harper government is playing to its base, which is the extraction industries.
There is no way of bringing that pipeline south that won’t cross the Missouri-Mississippi watershed multiple times. It is just too dangerous to do this to help Canadians sell petroleum products to Asia. There are existing refineries in BC that do ship to Asia, but they don’t want the ‘diluted bitumen’. The stuff will leave the pollution in Texas and send the refined product to China. I don’t see how this is good for the United States.
Note that the farmer *did* know that an oil pipeline ran beneath his land, because he got paid market price for that pipeline right-of-way. Not that he had any choice but to sell to the pipeline company. In virtually every state a pipeline company can use eminent domain to get right-of-way, though usually they try to work a deal because eminent domain requires filing a lawsuit in court and a lengthy delay and extra expense.
Saying this as a farmer who has a pipeline right-of-way going across his field… which I got paid good money for (market rate for agricultural land), *and* am still allowed to farm on the right-of-way as long as I don’t interfere with pipeline operations. I looked into options to stop it but finally came to the conclusion that the law was on their side, and I might as well get top dollar. It isn’t as if I’m using that land for anything anyhow…
Well, somebody who owned the land at the time the pipeline was installed got paid and knew it was there, and that may or may not have been the farmer who found the oil, but the land over the pipeline definitely can’t be farmed now, and if it isn’t stopped, land that wasn’t paid for won’t be usable either. This is the basic problem of pipelines – if nothing happens they are annoying in the short term and may provide some needed cash [farmers are always cash poor], but if they leak, you may be out of business.
Farming is risky business at best, so taking on another risk, no matter how small, is not something they want to do willingly. Other people may feel free to deny climate change, but farmers know it is happening and they are having to adjust to it. With the additional risks associated with climate change, asking farmers to accept another risk so the Canadian oil industry can make increased profits is not moral or rational.
I can assure you that the pipeline right-of-way is recorded and will pop up like a big red flag on any title search when a farmer is aiming to buy land. And yes, the oil company is going to be paying that farmer market value for his land and any crops ruined by the oil…
Note that one reason for sending the oil south to Texas is that it should be significantly cheaper to build the pipeline that direction because the land is relatively flat compared to the heart of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a PITA to build *anything* in mountainous territory. That said, it’s doable, and frankly as a Californian I’d prefer them to run it west anyhow because that means our own oil refineries here in California have easy access to that oil.
None of the oil is for US consumption, it will all be shipped to Asia. That decision has already been made. As a matter of fact, on of the things the Keystone XL will do, is remove what is considered an ‘excess’ of crude available to refineries in the MidWest that have made their prices lower than other areas of the country. Asia pays more, so they get the product.
Running a pipeline across the Columbia River watershed is one of the reasons BC doesn’t like it even a little bit.
I assumed that it was in the paperwork somewhere, but there have been a lot of people surprised when there were leaks in Arkansas and Missouri. That was probably a result of subdividing the original property.
Or it could be inherited property and they never did a title search when they transferred the title and grandpa forgot to tell them about the right-of-way. A lot of that happens in rural areas, a lot of the land that’s not attractive to big agri-business farmers has been passed down from generation to generation for a hundred years.
The subdivide thing though shouldn’t matter. One thing that’s supposed to happen when land is subdivided is that any right-of-ways are recorded against all the new titles. Of course what’s supposed to happen, and what actually happens, may be two different things…
There is a piece of prime waterfront property next to the town hall that no one will go near because the banks have played such games with mortgages and titles, that the local title insurance companies won’t even talk about it, much less insure the title on it. The ‘official’ title says it is one piece and belongs to one partnership, but everyone knows that can’t possibly be right because three different groups have started to do something, and then backed out.
The back of the property is on the end of a small branch of the bayou, and the building area is 10 to 12 feet above high tide with no fill added, so it isn’t subject to flooding. A lot of the locals with the money to pay cash for the property have looked at it, but no one is going spend $500K without being sure that they own it.
In North Dakota land probably changes more often as a result of inheritance and marriage, than by actual purchase, which is how it works in upstate New York dairy farming. Lots of assets, but not much of it is in actual cash.
Yah, and sometimes the section lines don’t match up with property lines. I have that problem with my own property, my property extends roughly 100 yards past the section line according to the recorded title description but whenever anybody looks up my property on the property maps they see the section line and think that’s where my property ends. I had to have the oil company send me an official survey to make sure that they were properly accounting for the width of my property because the plat map they sent showed, ba da dum, the *section* line as my property line. All because when my grandfather bought that part of the land from my great-grandfather, he looked at the bottom section and decided it was too muddy in the spring to build a house on, and needed 100 yards above it on the road frontage for building the house. Rather than try to carve out a 1 acre square of road frontage, they just extended the property description to carve out 100 yards above the section line from the upper section. Which confuses people to no end when they see the property map and think the section line is where my property ends…
I know the feeling. There is no right-of-way on the side of the street I live on, and a 20-foot right-of-way on the other side. They needed the 20-foot to install a storm sewer section, so the shifted the road 10 feet to my side of the street. People assume that there is a 10-foot right-of-way on both sides of the road, like every other street in town.
Making assumptions about property lines is a really good way to end up in court or the cemetery. When Robert Frost wrote ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ you know he has never tried to build a fence in Florida. 😉