Contributors

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Keystone Should Happen, But Only If America Benefits

President Obama has vetoed the Keystone pipeline bill, but it won't be the last we hear of it. I think that eventually he will sign some kind of bill. But it should be one that benefits Americans, not foreign oil companies. In the original House bill, the particularly nasty crude coming through the pipeline would have been exempt from the oil spill tax!

The current method of transporting oil via trains is unacceptable because of the constant derailings and explosions of oil cars (now forecast at 10 a year). A pipeline is much safer in principle: it has fewer moving parts, it's out of the way under ground (or can be), it's not as prone to collisions, and so on.

The problem is that pipelines have a history of poor maintenance and there's a tendency to route them through areas that are the cheapest for the pipeline company, disregarding local ecological concerns and property owners' rights.

Giant corporations always spin off the subsidiaries that build such risky and large projects as separate companies so that they can declare bankruptcy when it blows up figuratively in their faces, and literally in American backyards. All too often these companies leave the local people and local and federal governments holding the bag for their disasters.
It's even worse in this case because the company building the pipeline is foreign, which means the guys responsible aren't even Americans and don't give a damn if an oil spill in the Ogallala Aquifer poisons all the wells in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas and north Texas. They're treating the American Great Plains like it's some third world country where they can do anything they damn well please.

The real question isn't whether the pipeline should be built, but where and how to build it to be safe enough. We also have to ensure that the company that builds it will be held responsible for the damage it will inevitably cause when it leaks. Because it will leak, and they know it. The people responsible for it shouldn't just be able to skate away and not pay for the destruction they will have wrought.

It's not clear that the people building the pipeline really understand how corrosive this Canadian crude is. It's not clear that they're willing to spend the money necessary to build an adequate pipeline and will monitor and repair it adequately for next 20 years. And then pay to have it decommissioned 30 years from now when the tar sands and the Bakken oil field are depleted, and we've got a thousand miles of filthy, leaky pipeline cutting through the middle of the country.

If some foreign company wants to pump a zillion barrels of oil in a pipeline through the heart of America to the Gulf of Mexico so that it can be shipped off to China, then the United States should be profiting from that.

Will this foreign company be paying American taxes? Or will it siphon off all profits to some Cayman Islands bank account, putting all the risk on American property owners and taxpayers while keeping all the profit?

If we're going to be building something like this through America, then Americans should benefit.

1 comment:

juris imprudent said...

I think Americans do benefit, by Canada being a larger exporter of petroleum.

You prefer to keep the world dependent on 3rd world kleptocrats?