Pipelines Will Leak

On Thursday there was a pipeline leak.To date it has leaked about 3000 barrels.

Containers leak and that is a fact.. It doesn't matter how well they are made or maintained; over time the likely hood, that what is inside a container, will eventually be outside rises to a virtual certainty. Oil Tankers and pipelines are just fancy containers and they are going to leak. We need to deal with this because we depend on oil and the infrastructure that transports it.

That it happens "rarely" is irrelevant. Ask any one or any community that has ever experienced a minor or major leak event. The damage to the local environment from an oil spill is heavy, it reverberates outward like affecting neighbouring regions. Just like the fracture lines radiating outward from a windshield impact, weakening the whole structure. Recovery, is slow, and in all likely hood the area is never the same.

What we know, is that we need oil both for economic and practical reasons(for now), that it will leak and that leaking will causes damage. To all appearances the policy regarding Oil and its Transportation can write itself, and it is sort of. The Conservatives are making changes to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. What Peter Kent Minister of the Environment said about changes. The minster talks about more money for enforcement and higher penalties for violators, that's good. He mentions creating a more efficient permitting process. It seems like all good news.

Here is what Minister Kent may have left out in his presentation. This short assessment on changes to the Canada's environmental act is from GreenBlog. Taken in the whole the changes to Canada's environmental law seem to have an economic focus. Review by government agency is shorter and can be overturned at Cabinet level. Satellite agencies and independent advisory bodies are diminished in power or cut out entirely. Other Ministries face similar changes, redirection/redefinition of priorities towards economic ends. It's not just greater cooperation with industry, which isn't bad in and of itself, but submission to its interests. In general life is going to get easier for the resource extraction and transportation sector.

The Oil Transportation sector will benefit from so many of the changes you would think they helped write the legislation. The pipeline industry has faced a great deal of opposition when it proposes Oil Transportation routes. Unsurprisingly people don't want pipelines in their backyard. A diverse group of citizens a oppose pipelines, for a host of reasons. From the specific, building pipelines to carry Tar-sands Oil  south through the keystones pipeline system promotes Tar-sands Exploitation. Or the northern gateway pipeline proposal. So if you oppose bitumen mining, preventing pipelines is a good way to go. To the general reasoning, Pipelines leak and people don't want them.

For the Pro pipeline sites there is Northern Gateway and Keystone Xl. (A note it seems fair to include the Pro pipeline sites if only to give any potential reader a contrasting perspective. Study each site and you quickly get an idea what is being offered.)

The Harper government has created legislation that will make pipelines easier to build, by reducing regulatory requirements. Conservative policy changes address the need we have for oil both economic and practical by ignoring or reducing the idea of potential for harm that oil transportation involves.

Making "ease of economic" activity the primary focus of environmental law is at a minimum ignorant, at its most extreme very stupid. This isn't an ideological issue, or it shouldn't be. We all drink the same water, breathe the same air and live by what our lands produce. We live in the environment not apart from it.