It doesn't seem cut and dried to me, because a lot of North Dakota oil passes by Chicago by railroad, and I think about Lac-Mégantic whenever I drive over one of those tracks.
1 wasn't meant to express full support for the pipeline, just that to me it doesn't automatically seem like a terrible idea. I do believe the protestors would get treated better if they were white and armed (no one would set dogs on them, for example).
Cosign 1 and 2 (without personally crossing railways in Chicago). Also the protesters aren't obviously right.
rejected an earlier route that would cut across the Missouri River upstream from Bismarck, North Dakota, [population 60 000] partly to avoid the risk of contaminating the state capital's water source. But it was remapped downstream to the present contested crossing, where the Standing Rock Sioux [population 8 000] says they'll be the ones who suffer in the event of a spill.
And
in Iowa, protesters have fumed over the state's use of eminent domain to force landowners to sell landseems pure nimbyism to me. A pipeline is obviously infrastructure as much as a road is. It's specialized infrastructure with no direct benefit to the public, so it needs to be demonstrated that it'll pay some minimum revenue, but this is what eminent domain is for. Of course all manner of devil in details I don't know.
[...]
Farmland cannot be seized through eminent domain in the state, attorneys said, unless it's for a project with a public benefit like a highway or sewer line
In that its their sovereign land in the first place and that the carbon based energy industry is rapidly going the way of cobblestones and buggy whips in the second, I'm failing to grasp the moral ambiguity.
And North American hydrocarbons bring the end of the Saudi theocracy steadily closer, which is, increasingly pressingly, in the best interests of effectively everyone.
If the risk of contaminating water sources is really so unavoidable that the only choice is between whose water to contaminate, maybe the whole thing isn't such a hot idea.
I find 3 pretty shocking. A community that has experienced displacement and genocide isn't 'in the wrong' just because it refuses to accept an outsized risk of harm in return for which it will derive no benefit whatsoever.
8: Outsized how? And how do the displacement and genocide make the lives in Standing Rock worth more than the lives in Bismarck?
7: I've no idea how avoidable contamination actually is. Given the entire planet is crisscrossed with pipelines and we aren't seeing nonstop catastrophes I'm guessing the risk to Standing Rock is actually pretty small.
9.1: Tribal sovereignty is an important part of the answer -- http://www.vox.com/2016/9/9/12851168/dakota-access-pipeline-protest?0p19G=c
Given the entire planet is crisscrossed with pipelines and we aren't seeing nonstop catastrophes I'm guessing the risk to Standing Rock is actually pretty small.
List of pipeline accidents in the United States in the 21st century
Since your lives are no more valuable than ours, how about we put the dangerous thing that benefits us, through your land.
It's not quite as clear-cut as some of the rhetoric around it suggests, but that permitting stuff sounds very sketchy. The Corps has a reputation for cutting corners on this stuff, but even so it's crazy that they wouldn't do an EIS for a project this size. Or make them get a 404 permit, which is the standard permit the Corps uses for basically everything, to the extent that it's often just called a "Corps permit."
Plus the environmental justice angle, of course.
I think the big thing on environmental justice is not just that they re-routed the pipeline to minimize risk to Bismarck, which is reasonable, but that they specifically routed it near Standing Rock when the vast majority of the state consists of low-density rural areas where the populations are overwhelmingly white.
11: Given length of pipeline in the US, that gives one accident per 58000 km of pipeline in 2013. Stats people wil have to educate me on the risk at given point over the expected lifetime of the pipeline, that strikes me as still in fact a pretty remote risk.
13 and 15 make lots of sense, and were not made clear at all by the OP link.
Yeah, the OP link relies heavily on taking the word of activist types on how bad this stuff is, so you do kind of need some background knowledge on how these things work to understand which parts of it are actually problematic. And it turns out the answer is "most of them," but you wouldn't necessarily know that just from the article.
One thing this situation definitely demonstrates is the weirdly fragmented nature of environmental regulation in the US.
On the tribal sovereignty issue
At the risk of sounding like a knee-jerk leftist, I didn't have to hear more than that the oil industry was on one side and representatives from scores of Native American tribes on the other to know where my loyalties were going to be. I realize that this isn't convincing to anyone who doesn't already share my sympathies, but it's not a bad heuristic.
If companies are going to build pipelines through communities, they need to budget sufficiently so that those communities can be compensated for risk.
It would be a different conversation if the pipeline company, rather than using eminent domain, said "We would like to build a pipeline though your land. Here is a heap of community development money to be administered by your local government and we have established a generous scholarship fund for your children. Now, let us negotiate on our annual payments...."
But companies building hydrocarbon pipelines don't budget for this because its stupid expensive. Which, you know, it should be.
http://www.charkoosta.com/2016/2016_10_06/CSKT_oil_pipeline_battle.html
no one would set dogs on them
It's shocking the number of factors here which in and of themselves would independently tell me on which side my loyalties should be. 20.2 gets at some. 20.1 gets at others. And the shameful violent treatment of the protestors, who by all accounts have been protesting peacefully, is another.
And not to turn this into an election thread (please!), but Clinton's response on this has been predictably disappointing.
I guess I'm pretty knee-jerk leftist on this one. While I'm willing to entertain "it's more complicated than you think" arguments, any easy-breezy dismissal of Native sovereignty claims leaves me cold, and decidedly unsympathetic to the argument and its proponents.
I can't believe any of you would side with Big Indian against a plucky upstart like the petroleum industry.
Can we just trade Bismarck for the reservation lands? Nobody I know is using Bismarck, plus it's named after a doughnut.
Nobody I know is using Bismarck
Is someone you know using the reservation lands?
I feel like counting the guy who trains attack dogs would work against me.
I just saw the Anthony Weiner email issue referred to as "Dikileaks". Which is on topic because pipe.
Dikileaks sounds like a euphemism for a thick southern drawl. Or the other way around.
It's already trademarked for an incontinence pad.
25 is why I can't help but love VW.
Also, this electoral cycle reminds me that Carlos Danger is an actual pseudonym on the internets. I'm not sure I can survive this one: I am suffering from election-induced anxiety disorder, for real and for true.
OT: Having the ashes mixed in with the rosin would
be more subtle.
The sovereignty claim has been the one I'm haziest on (freely admitting I haven't been arsed to read up on it), mostly because I sort of naively assumed that, if it was a clear-cut case of "Yes, these are Sioux lands by uncontested treaty," then they would have won the injunction they went after a few weeks ago.
So am I hopelessly naive, or is there in fact some ambiguity here?
Also, 21 is correct in every particular. The thing about more or less every fossil fuel is that the only reason they're profitable at all is that 95% of the costs are forced upon the dispossessed, whether those victimized by spills, the habitat damaged by drilling, the communities poisoned by coal ash reservoirs, or the asthma sufferers downwind of coal plants. And that's a short list, of course.
37.3: so wind farms offend your delicate aesthetic sensibilities but who cares about leveling the top of a mountain and polluting every stream around some hick town in Appalachia to strip out some coal? Those poor hicks don't appreciate pretty things anyway. Seriously, go fuck yourself. I can't even handle this today.
girl x, having done some reading about this, opined that the pipeline builders and cops were like the overly-bad bad guys in a poorly-written movie. this seems fair.
39: Steven Segal-level poorly written.
It would be a different conversation if the pipeline company, rather than using eminent domain, said "We would like to build a pipeline though your land. Here is a heap of community development money to be administered by your local government and we have established a generous scholarship fund for your children. Now, let us negotiate on our annual payments...."
Alternatively, "we would like to build a pipeline through one of these four counties. We'll offer community development money as compensation - whichever county asks for the least gets the pipeline and the cash. So let's see how low you can go, desperately impoverished people!"
girl x, having done some reading about this, opined that the pipeline builders and cops were like the overly-bad bad guys in a poorly-written movie.
Reality is, to be fair, crashingly unsubtle.
wait, what what? is urple btocked early? I guess I'm on west coast time in AZ, so it's (just barely) noon where he's at. carry on, my good man. in general, if anyone has the wherewithal to just stay drunk between now and november 9, I think they should do so.
My probably incorrect understanding--corrections appreciated--is that the land the pipeline goes through is not recognized as native land by the government; at least, it's not part of the reservation. However, it is in the reservation's watershed* and it passes very close to their water source. Furthermore, this land was traditionally part of the Sioux (Lakota? not sure why is more correct) lands, is still seen as morally theirs, and treaties were likely violated to expropriate it. Not sure what the current state of jurisprudence is towards correcting such clear-cut historical injustices.
* This is sort of a trivial statement in that the Missouri borders the reservation, so almost all of North Dakota is uphill of it. But the pipeline crosses the Missouri very close to the reservation.
Sorry, I think I initially misread 37.3. I'm angry (about everything) and primed for offense. 38 retracted, except with respect to anyone who actually thinks what I thought 37.3 was saying.
47 -- IIRC, the word "Sioux" comes from a slur used by neighboring peoples. This is a pretty common situation. In their own language, Lakota, Dakota, and other similar terms mean, essentially, "us." Looking at the 3 nations closest to hear, the names in English are Flathead, Nez Perce, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai. Only the last is even an attempt to match their own name.
Many Native nations use the English term when speaking or writing in English, especially with respect to proper nouns. It's all pretty complicated.
I think you're right about the title to the land in/over which the pipeline go.
Also to 47, I know the US Supreme Court found that the Balck Hills had been illegally taken from the Lakota, and decreed a money judgment. Decades ago. They still won't take the money, I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Sioux_Nation_of_Indians
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"How Great Our Lord" from Randy Newman's Faust remains great. James Taylor as a smug Jehovah is brilliant casting.
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I haven't been following this very closely, but my understanding is that 47 is correct. The pipeline is on private land that was originally part of the Sioux reservation in their first treaty with the US but was removed from it in a subsequent treaty. (Whether this was legitimate or not I don't know, but it's the letter of the law as it stands now.) The tribe's main concern is the risk to their water source, which I believe is the Missouri itself. Sovereignty mostly enters into it in the amount of consultation required and some of the permitting regarding cultural resources.
But companies building hydrocarbon pipelines don't budget for this because its stupid expensive.
Oh, but they do! I once worked* with a guy from a global security contractor whose job was doing exactly this. In parts of the world where pipeline infrastructure is vulnerable to sabotage or (more commonly) theft, the pipeline operators routinely pay off local chieftains to protect their assets. They'll come in, build a school or clinic, set up the chief with a modest stipend, and make it clear that if anything happens to the asset on their watch, the flow of funds will dry up. It's a delicate business, because the operators want to keep the payments from devolving into an out and out protection racket, which they resemble in the best of circumstances. Against that backdrop, the Lakota are making the right tactical play to make it seem like they might burn shit down even if they didn't mind the pipeline on their land (which, to be sure, I am not suggesting).
*It's a long story, but take my word for it.
49: That general pattern does seem common in North American English. Then I guess I'll prefer Lakota.
52: Thanks. I assumed they were traditional lands, not ones that had actually been part of the reservation. That makes it extra awful. Even so, I was trying to see how much intuition I could get just viewing this as a community environmental health issue, setting aside the thornier issues of Native rights. So I should be at least as much on the protesters' side as I would be if the pipeline were put upstream of the drinking reservoir of any suburb with 10k population.
And I think I could be okay with that if due diligence were done, and money were set aside in advance to deal with any issues, especially if the alternative is, as Todd said in 1, another Lac-Mégantic somewhere (I occasionally see fuel trains here and honestly they scare me). But I don't see any reason to believe that has or will ever be done.
I assumed they were traditional lands, not ones that had actually been part of the reservation.
Well, the original reservation covered like half of the state before they started whittling it down, so "traditional lands" versus "once part of the reservation" is kind of a distinction without a difference, I think. But it's not the main thing at issue.
I was trying to see how much intuition I could get just viewing this as a community environmental health issue, setting aside the thornier issues of Native rights. So I should be at least as much on the protesters' side as I would be if the pipeline were put upstream of the drinking reservoir of any suburb with 10k population.
Pretty much, yeah. It is primarily a community environmental health issue, though against a backdrop of racism and endemic poverty that makes the community particularly vulnerable. The part that is more related to Native rights is the cultural resources piece, which is typically more important to tribes than to most communities.
And I think I could be okay with that if due diligence were done, and money were set aside in advance to deal with any issues
Yeah, it's not that pipelines are always bad (although some environmental groups are seizing on it to make arguments like that), or even that this particular pipeline necessraily shouldn't take this route. It might actually be the best option, and the benefits might outweigh the risks. But they haven't really done the analysis necessary to make that determination.
another Lac-Mégantic somewhere (I occasionally see fuel trains here and honestly they scare me).
I feel like I read somewhere that the Lac-Mégantic accident was exacerbated by the use of shitty, obsolete tank cars for hauling oil. My understanding is there is much that can be done to reduce the risk of derailed tank cars leaking oil/exploding, and so oil companies shouldn't be allowed to point to their shitty rail transportation practices as a reason to build pipelines without actually making the investments needed to improve rail safety.
I have also read something along the lines of 56. Feds have worked up tanker regs and everything*, but railroads are of course being recalcitrant. Not sure where it currently stands (and yeah, I would probably not be killed by a tanker derailment, but I would be a refugee. A few hundred yards at most.
*IIRC, a big chunk of existing tanker stock meets current regs, but there's another big chunk that met the previous regs, plus some remnant of shitty old tankers