The Pipeline Sucks Oil

 

 

The Keystone Pipeline just doesn’t go away. Of course there’s a good reason. A huge Canadian company that makes billions a year wants the pipeline and is willing to spend plenty in lobbyist fees to get it. Not only are they willing to spend, they are also willing to lie, and cheat. Strangely, what they don’t seem to be willing to do is spend money to make their project safe. Maybe they don’t think they need to. Maybe they think the people of the United States are too dumb to see past their lies and phony commercials; their false figures and laughable promises.

 

Let’s take a look at a couple of those false promises and the facts that put the lie to them.

 

False Promise; The pipeline will create thousands of jobs.

Fact: The pipeline will create a only a couple of hundred US construction jobs because much of the work will be done by contract labor out of Canada or Canadians who already work for TransCanada. All of these jobs will be short term because running a pipeline is not labor intensive. How many people does it take to watch a pipe? Not many and when you work for Keystone it means almost none for maintenance.

 

False promise: The pipeline, due to the most modern technology is safe.

Fact: The real lie is in the safety of the process and it is being revealed, even as we argue over it, in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada where keystone workers are fighting to clean up over a quarter of a million gallons of the most toxic oil n the planet, the result of three spills over the last few months. The biggest spill occurred near Red Deer and Sundre in central Alberta, when 475,000 liters of oil leaked into the Red Deer River. The latest spill was in northwestern Alberta near Elk Point where Embridge confirmed a spill of 239,000 liters from its pumping station on the Athabasca pipeline. Embridge the tar sands giant was involved in an earlier spill when a pipeline in Marshall, Michigan  ruptured spilling 819,000 gallons.

 

This is happening at a time when the pipeline giants are trying desperately to put on a good face. Can you imagine what it will be like after they get the contracts and no longer have to worry about anything as mundane as poisoning the water of the Midwestern states?

 

TransCanada’s own analysis shows that the existing KeystoneXL pipeline would have “11 significant spills” over a 50 year period. Are you listening? The company itself expects 11 spills and that’s their best estimate. An independent study predicts at least 91 spills over the same period. This is more than supported by the fact that the first leg of the Keystone pipeline suffered 12 spills just in 2010, a record for a pipeline in the first year of operation. This isn’t because Keystone is sloppier than anybody else and maybe we should look to another company to put in this pipeline. It’s because you can’t pump oil without having leaks. A recent study found an average of 22 large spills every year between 2005 and 2009 by all companies. Oil spills are just part of doing business with oil companies.

 

Despite all this information, there are still American’s trying to get this disaster of a pipeline built right through The Oglala Aquifer, one of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the nation. These people are either insane or criminally greedy. They must be stopped at any cost.  Or are we really looking to poison the water of all the people and animals in the mid-west?

 

False Promise: The US will reap a cornucopia of benefits from the pipeline.

Fact: The US will gain nothing from the pipeline. The companies that are laying the pipe and pumping the oil are Canadian. Most of the workers on the project will be Canadian. The oil is Canadian. The beneficiary of the added oil will be China. What the hell do we have to gain except gushing pipeline breaks and poisoned wells?

 

Didn’t we learn anything from the Exxon Valdes, the BP Horizon or the thousand other oil disasters around the planet that haven’t gained their notoriety? Isn’t it obvious, to even the most brain dead among us, that if you pump oil you will have disasters?

 

Of course if you need the oil to run your country that’s one thing, but this oil is not going to run our country it’s going to run China. This oil cannot be refined into gasoline. It’s too tainted and too full of contaminants, so it will be used for heating and energy purposes. We are already busting with gas reserves that are much cleaner, and will take care of creating energy in our country for the foreseeable future, so even if we were going to get this oil, which we are not, we wouldn’t need it.

 

Environmentally this oil is conceded by all but the scientists on the Keystone payroll to be the most poisonous oil based contaminant that it’s possible for man to dig, transport or use. So why is anyone dealing with it? Greed. These guys don’t care who they poison, whose kids they kill, what water they pollute or who suffers from of their destructive treasure hunt. They just want more. Even in their own country there is huge environmental opposition to its digging and use and up there they aren’t threatening to pollute the aquifer that provides water to most of the Midwest.

 

It’s bad enough that we destroy our environment to fill the pockets of our own billionaires, do we have to do it to enrich foreign ones?

 

And while we’re on that subject;

I have always been a big Hillary fan ever since the Republicans went after her so viciously when Bill became president. I think she has done a great job as First Lady, as Senator and as Secretary of State and I look to her to be the frontrunner for the Democratic Party in 2016 but there’s a snake in the grass.

 

That snake is the XL-Pipeline, and if she doesn’t get off her current favorable view of it, it will surely poison her campaign as it threatens to poison our land. There is no reasonable argument for the existence of the pipeline. It will not help the US economy, it is an out bet to destroy any environment through which it passes and it will not create long-term jobs in any significant number.

 

The history of TransCanada and Keystone is rife with leaking pipelines and the environmentally worst oil ever extracted from the earth. The oil will be going across America so that it can be shipped to China but its journey will be through the Oglala aquifer, the largest in the country and if there is anything a sure as death and taxes it is that the damn thing will spring many leaks, it’s just the way pipelines, especially TransCanada pipelines work, or don’t.

 

So why is Hillary looking favorably at this environmental horror?

Maybe because TransCanada has hired her ex-deputy campaign manager as its chief lobbyist. Maybe it’s because TransCanada gave big lobbying contracts to a bunch of her other buddies. Is this all it takes to make Hillary sell out the country and the environment? If that’s true then she definitely isn’t presidential material she’s just another Washington phony.