Pipeline sabotage has become a terrorist "weapon of choice," wrote Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, in Pipeline & Gas Journal in 2005. In the post-9/11 world, he wrote, "terrorist groups have identified the world's energy system, 'the provision line and the feeding to the artery of the life of the crusader nation,' in the words of al Qaeda, as the Achilles heel of the West." Luft was warning about sabotage in Iraq and other international hotspots, but we'd be wise to consider the dangers within our own borders as well. As the Checks and Balances Project wrote recently, "It's hard to think of a larger target for our enemies to take aim at than a 1,661-mile pipeline measuring 36 inches thick and filled with flammable crude oil."
In its latest "Room for Debate" forum, the Times asks whether oil pipelines are safer than they used to be -- safe enough that we should feel fine about going forward with the Keystone XL.
Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist, which she cofounded back in the day. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+. She writes on politics, population, and other green issues. She coined the acronym GINK (green inclinations, no kids) and won a 2010 Population Institute Global Media Award for her writing on the childfree choice. If you're like-minded, become a fan of GINK on Facebook. If you're not, no hard feelings.Forget the tree huggers. Even many red-blooded red-staters don't trust that the Keystone XL pipeline would be safe and leak-free.
Husker football fans booed a TransCanada-sponsored video at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Memorial Stadium on Sept. 10, spurring the school's athletic department to drop a sponsorship deal. Nebraska's Republican governor, Dave Heineman, is calling on the Obama administration to deny a permit for the project; the state's senators, one Republican and one Democrat, oppose it, too. And in a State Department hearing in Lincoln, Neb., on Sept. 27, about 80 percent of the 1,000-plus citizens in attendance were opposed to the pipeline -- despite the fact that pipeline boosters bused in sympathetic crowds from other states.
A big worry is that the pipeline's proposed route through Nebraska would cross about 250 miles of the Ogallala Aquifer, the nation's largest underground source for drinking water and crop irrigation. Nebraskans don't buy the assurances from TransCanada and the U.S. State Department that the pipeline poses no serious risks to their water, land and livelihoods; farmers and ranchers in other Great Plains states don't either.
Just look at TransCanada's Keystone I, a smaller pipeline from Alberta to Illinois that began operation in June 2010. In just over a year, this pipeline has leaked at least 14 times, including a spill of about 21,000 gallons in North Dakota -- even though TransCanada predicted that spills of 2,100 gallons or more should be expected to happen only once every seven years.
The tar-sands bitumen that Keystone XL would carry is thick, corrosive, unstable, and hard to clean up. Plains Justice, a nonprofit organization, has documented how ill-equipped the sparsely populated northern Plains states are to respond to an oil spill. The Keystone XL could even be a terrorist target.
Too risky? Absolutely -- and that's even before you get into the grave threat that tar sands oil poses to our global climate.
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