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from the Put-that-in-your-pipe[line]-and-smoke-it dept.
In his ruling, Judge Brian Morris said “the Trump administration completely disregarded the climate effects of building the Keystone pipeline,” according to Vermont law professor Pat Parenteau.
“The Trump administration dismissed, with barely a paragraph in the decision document they issued, the whole idea that the pipeline would be contributing to climate change and the judge said that's not good enough,” Parenteau explains. “[He said], ‘You really do have to take into account the growing body of science that we all know and you have to explain why it makes sense, given that, to authorize yet another major piece of fossil fuel infrastructure that will take 40 years to pay off.’”
Morris is a former justice on the Montana Supreme Court and is considered a “very moderate judge,” Parenteau adds. “He’s hardly a radical environmentalist. There are some judges on the federal bench who are more pro-environment ..., but Judge Morris isn’t in that same category.”
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 17 2018, @02:10PM (7 children)
First thing I'd point out about the Keystone XL pipeline is that it was championed and pushed by the Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton as one of its main cheerleaders. TFA wants to use it as another club to beat on Trump by mentioning his name several times. That part of the story is stupid partisan nonsense.
That said, the more interesting questions remain, is the pipeline worth building? Is it better for the environment to have the pipeline, or not? Is it better for the economy to have the pipeline, or not?
They are taking a lot of oil out of the Bakken Formation. Right now they're doing it in tanker cars in trains and tanker trucks. It's slow and error prone. The chances of them derailing or crashing and spilling the oil they carry is higher than a pipeline. So the risk to the environment of an oil spill is lower with a pipeline than with trains and trucks. Building the pipeline itself will not harm the environment; the landscape of North Dakota is so incredibly tedious that there is almost nothing you could do to it that would not be an improvement.
Not building the pipeline will not stop them taking the oil out of the area. That's not on offer. So basically we're talking about not whether to take the oil out, but how.
Is it better for the economy to use that oil, or not? It's better. If the United States is now a net exporter of oil, that means a portion of the $365 billion we spend on oil every year is now staying here. That's good for people here. Also, it is for sure better for North Dakota, which has until recently been one of the poorest areas in the country, so worthless is its land. Now, it's thriving with the oil revenues.
As an environmentalist myself, I would like to see us move entirely to renewables as quickly as possible. I would rather see North Dakota get its coin via wind farms that harvest the incessant winds that howl across that flat expanse of nothing. I would love for fossil fuels to go the way of the dinosaurs. But I don't see the Keystone XL project as the hill for anyone to die on.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday December 17 2018, @03:16PM (2 children)
Pipelines leak. These leaks can go unnoticed for extended periods, leaking tremendous volumes of oil.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @06:44PM
i wonder how cheap it would be (or economical given the situation) to install sensors at every joint. i'm assuming they leak at the joints and not rust out in the middle of the pipe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @10:59PM
Bullshit. Detectors notice as soon as oil is missing. It's not like Hillary's email server where the leaks can go unnoticed for extended periods.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Monday December 17 2018, @07:21PM
The key difference being that the Obama administration performed it's legally required due diligence.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @07:26PM (1 child)
So what you're saying is that Drumpf will scuttle the project anyway, regardless of this ruling?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @09:33PM
What if Trump supported the judge's green inclination? Now he only needs to obey the official decision.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:07AM
Follow the money of who does not want it. You will find at the end of it 2 billionaires that own railroads.