Using "safety" to break a nation

Lulling Americans into believing that government can provide a safety net for everything from stocking a pantry and providing healthcare, to preventing administrative offices from "shutting-down," boosting the stock market and de-stressing the environment through regulating virtually every activity, results in an opposite effect... It destabilizes the economy.

As President Obama declared climate change to be the ultimate threat to national security, incidents stemming from the oil boom in North Dakota have increased in both occurrence and media coverage. Asserting that transporting necessary product to power the nation is dangerous has created a cover for vetoing Keystone and ramping-up superfluous methane emission and endless other environmental rules. Replacing factual news coverage with propaganda predicting disasters that could plunge the nation into a financial or environmental crisis, the media helps orchestrate contrived hysteria. It encourages a paralyzing 'safety syndrome.' This is the strategy that drives the base argument for the debt ceiling, government shut-down debate. Fueling this 'safety syndrome' is the recent spate of spontaneous explosions of tankers carrying crude oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota. Chalk it up to a suspicious nature (and having researched and written a fact-based novel about eco-terrorism, Energy Barons), but the continuous bad-mouthing by liberal media, pols and environmentalists of the American oil industry and the subsequent rash of train derailments and tanker fires is anything but accidental. How does an oil tanker spontaneously explode in sub-freezing weather? Answer: it doesn't.

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Nothing but undisguised prejudice against energy producers, other than government subsidized solar or wind fantasizers, has filled the airwaves and ether claiming willful destruction of the earth just to satisfy our insatiable energy appetite. All that the rhetoric (palatable term for BS) lacks coming from anti-Keystone XL, anti-fracking, anti-drilling, anti-progress "progressives" is actual evidence for the claims that these activities cause environment devastation. Conveniently, one accident after another involving oil carriers from North Dakota or the Canadian shale fields has been grabbing headlines across both the U.S. and Canada. All in time to finally kibosh the Keystone pipeline bill, passed but expectedly vetoed by the president and then not overridden by the Senate, giving Congress an "out" with the environmental lobby. There is, however, a bit of a problem in reconciling the multiple incidents with the explosive results of these mishaps. Crude oil, while flammable, does not spontaneously combust. The definition of flammable is "capable of being set on fire and of burning quickly," which does not mean explode of its own accord. It must have an assist. Read any number of Material Safety Data Sheets for the details.The obvious explanation of explosions occurring in sub-freezing weather for the West Virginia tanker fire February 16, 2015 and the Galena, Illinois incident March 5, 2015 (13° at the time), and the fact that both trains were traveling far below speed, 33 mph and 23 mph respectively, is, to apply the definition of flammable, "being set on fire." Studies show that Bakken oil may have a somewhat higher flashpoint, but fire point (sustained flame) isn't the same. "For transportation purposes, the definition of a flammable substance is a substance that has a flashpoint of less than 37.8°C (100°F)." Further, "The flash point of a liquid is the lowest temperature, corrected to a barometric pressure... at which the application of an ignition source causes the vapors of a specimen of the sample to ignite under a specified set of conditions."Note that there has been no investigation update in the news about the West Virginia derailment investigation, or the Vandergrift, Pennsylvania accident February 13, 2015. The report on the July 2013 derailment and explosion in Lac-Megantic, Quebec has been released where it noted, among other determinations, that a "small fire" had been spotted on one of the tanker cars before the incident. Follow-up on facts isn't the media's strong suit, due to the fact that no one cares to know what were the actual causes of the derailments. The only interest of the media is, and has been, to report any horrendous environmental damage to instigate anti-oil sentiment. That there was a terrible loss of life in the Quebec derailment is just considered more fodder for the critics. It's an old tactic to sway public opinion, and the fact that four of the five mentioned incidents (one regarding tanker trucks in North Dakota) resulted in explosions and burning oil that went on for days should give anyone pause to consider the incidents' origins.If the incidents were engineered, one can assume that the Pennsylvania derailment was something of a setback in its failure to result in a scorching blaze with flames licking skyward. Despite that, the media used the leakage from the few tankers in an attempt to substantiate the theory that transporting any oil by rail, truck or pipeline is too hazardous to allow. The agenda is a simple one, while President Obama called climate change a greater threat to America than ISIS, the unending supply of accidents continues to keep the assumed peril in the news. Until there is independently corroborated evidence forthcoming from the investigations into all of these derailments and explosions, a large number of Americans and no few Canadians will consider the causes to be suspect. Nor will they submit to the 'safety syndrome.'