This is not just another pipeline. It is a tar sands climate bomb; if completed, it will facilitate the production of crude oil for decades to come. Tar sands are among the most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet. The state’s environmental impact assessment of the project found the pipeline’s carbon output could be 193 million tons per year. That’s the equivalent of 50 coal-fired power plants or 38 million vehicles on our roads, according to Jim Doyle, a physicist at Macalester College who helped write a report from the climate action organization MN350 about the pipeline. He observed that the pipeline’s greenhouse gas emissions are greater than the yearly output of the entire state. If the pipeline is built, Minnesotans could turn off everything in the state, stop traveling and still not come close to meeting the state’s emission reduction goals. The impact assessment also states that the potential social cost of this pipeline is $287 billion over 30 years.
Carbon footprint aside, the extraction process for oil sands is deeply destructive. Mining the sands often requires scraping off the life-giving boreal forest growing over Alberta’s oil fields. Photographs of Alberta’s oil sands sites show a vast moonscape impossible to reclaim. The water used in processing is left in toxic holding ponds that cumulatively could fill 500,000 Olympic swimming pools, as one National Geographic article puts it.
And if the pipelines were to leak, the sludgy mixture is almost impossible to clean up. The state’s environmental impact statement notes that the pipeline will run through two watersheds that drain into Lake Superior. Any spill in the vicinity of the Great Lakes, which contain 84 percent of North America’s available freshwater, is an existential threat to our water supply. The climate action group 350Kishwaukee compiled data from Enbridge websites and found at least 1,000 spills by Enbridge pipelines between 1996 and 2014, including a disastrous spill into the Kalamazoo River, which flows into Lake Michigan. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2013 that in spite of an extensive effort, just over 160,000 gallons of oil would remain in the river.
Source: Opinion | Not Just Another Pipeline – The New York Times
Erin Brockovich said she was “really taken aback that anybody like Michael McCabe would be part of the (Joe Biden) transition team. McCabe worked with DuPont specifically on a communications strategy to make sure they didn’t have to clean up PFOA or follow regulations in Parkersburg, W.Va.”
