If you believe the TransCanada pipeline is good for us...well, there's a name for that, but we'll refrain.
We've read three articles on it today, by far the best being Fort Worth Weekly. No surprise there.
Eminent domain, unsafe practices and does the word export ring any bells?
The first article talks about the New York Times reporters that were detained for trying to report on the protesters that have been in the tree tops (literally) since September 24th, and the tactics used by the Keystone cops to stop them.
The next was in the Star-Telegram where no reporter bothered to find out WHY...
WHAT do they pay you people for?
TransCanada shut down the 2,100-mile pipeline Wednesday after tests showed possible safety issues. Company spokesman Shawn Howard said Friday that no leaks have been detected but declined to provide more specifics until the pipeline is inspected.
And the Weekly, tells you the scoop. Be sure and check out the text message from Judge Bill Harris.
But the blockade group includes Texas ranchers, property owners, business owners, and environmentalists — some of whom have endured pepper spray, dangerous Taser jolts, and chokeholds administered by local law enforcement officers in attempts to remove them from the path of the pipeline construction.
The oil extracted from those sands won’t be used to lower gasoline prices in this country because, the blockaders charge, it’s all going to be shipped overseas. The pipeline’s intended southern terminus is Port Arthur, a designated foreign trade zone where the oil products can be loaded onto oceangoing tankers.
Most importantly, the protesters say, TransCanada has already shown itself to have a terrible record on pipeline safety, as have other tar sands pipelines already in operation. The blockaders say it adds up to a Canadian company seeking to transport the most dangerous and difficult-to-clean-up oilfield product across thousands of acres of land, much of it being taken by eminent domain or the threat of eminent domain, with almost no benefit being derived by the U.S.
However, that reassurance was quickly undermined in the first Keystone line’s initial year of operation. The pipeline had 35 spills in the U.S. and Canada, a figure that Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute put at “100 times higher than TransCanada forecast.”
“The reality is that the Keystone XL is a pipeline through the U.S., not to it. We will simply be allowing the transport of the dirtiest source of oil on the planet for a foreign company, a product with environmental risks that don’t exist with conventional crude.”
TransCanada had the right to acquire land by eminent domain only if the company could prove that its pipeline was a “common carrier,” which means the company would sell capacity on the line to other companies to carry their petroleum as well as TransCanada’s own. If TransCanada was a private carrier, carrying only its own petroleum products, it wouldn’t have the right to take land through eminent domain in Texas.
The decision meant the judge was taking TransCanada’s word that the Keystone XL pipeline would be a common carrier, although the company had presented no evidence to back up that assertion.
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