What no one seems to comprehend about any pipeline is their safety. The only major 'moving part' of a pipeline is whatever you pump through it! Whereas a railroad with hundreds of trains pulling thousands of tank cars over hundreds of thousands of miles of track spiked to wooden ties, has millions of moving parts from the roof of the locomotives down to the gravel in the roadbeds. Statistics show volume of spillage from pipelines is miniscule compared to the numerous spills, fires and exploding tank cars from, track separations other incidents that we experience every year; and I'm not even taking into account the human operating factors.
When you see a map of just how many pipelines crisscross Canada, America and its Great Plains, you have to wonder what all the heartburn is about over one more built with the most recent 21st century technology, compared to railroads running on 19th century rail beds. In Alaska, wildlife thrives all along the pipeline which generates radiated warmth from friction in the pipe, that all the animals and birds love and use to keep from freezing to death in the worst winters. The larger animals even lean against it!
America's president graduated Harvard Law, but has no grasp of oil's value in the marketplace, as he never bothered to wander across the Yard and 'ghost' a class or two in economics at the Business School. Our nations fought and won WWII in less time than it's taking Barack Obama to make up his mind to lay a lousy fifteen hundred miles of pipe! No matter if it is Canadian oil and it merely transits the USA on its way overseas, our two nation's expediting it into the market reduces the world price. Cheaper oil will get North America moving again to knock down our debts faster. We depress oil to below $73 dollars a barrel, we will run OPEC, the whole Middle East can go back to eating sand and Putin won't have any money to finance invasions of his neighbors.
But President Obama is also ever-mindful that many of his major political financiers like Warren Buffet and George Soros have big stockholdings in those northern railroads and their rolling stock. They pile up outrageous profits moving northern oil to market with their choo-choo's. America opens that spigot on KEYSTONE XL for our cousins up in The Great White and liberal fat cats stand to lose a fortune.
Most folks seem to forget -- or were never taught -- it was John D. Rockefeller who did more to save the whales than all the environmental organizations past and present on the planet, when he figured out how to produce and deliver kerosene to us North Americans, and the rest of the world, far less cheaper than the whale oil we all used in our lanterns and stoves. He did it cheaper and made his billions because he could sell his product to a greater number of people who could now afford to buy it.
Many years ago,
The Economist ran a cover featuring a drawing of Popeye the Sailor squeezing a barrel of oil and chuggin' it down, over the caption "Cheap oil makes ya strong!" Were they ever right.
K.J. Dolney
Columbia, SC
