A young woman--one Sarah Mceuen of Maysville, Missouri who also happens to be a "helper" from UA Pipeliners Local Union 798 in Missouri wrote in an op/ed piece in the Star this week that "For jobs and energy, Keystone pipeline must be built."
To which I and a great deal of us across the nation say nonsense.
There is every reason in the world to not build this environmental nightmare in waiting and precious few good, positive reasons for doing so.
More than anything, this pipeline is merely for transporting Canadian oil from Canada, through the US, through our country, down to the Gulf of Mexico so it can be exported to other world markets--likely China--so the TransCanada oil company can make more money.
All America would get out of it is some temporary construction jobs and then far fewer maintenance jobs, once it was up and running.
Along with it, we would get the inevitability of oil pipeline spills, time and again, repeatedly, over time, which would further ruin our environment and which would cost untold amounts to clean up.
Want proof?
Here you go.
Here's the first one, from 2010:
Pipeline leak pollutes major Michigan river
More than 800,000 gallons of oil flow into Kalamazoo River, coating birds and fish
Here's a second, more recent one, from Canada itself:
This 2nd rupture happened at the beginning of June, this year, only weeks ago.
Don't say it can't happen here or that it won't. They've already been happening and there can be no guarantees they won't happen in the future.
Here's yet another reason the Keystone XL pipeline shouldn't be built: the American people don't want it. They--we--don't want it on our land, on our soil. Americans from the Northern border of the country, down to Texas are saying they don't want to sell their land to Transcanada for the pipeline.
So have you seen or heard what's happening instead?
Transcanada is getting with our national and state governments to have the land seized by eminent domain. Here is just one article on it:
Texas farmer fights Keystone XL route
A Texas farmer is back in court today in her continuing challenge of Calgary-based TransCanada’s right to expropriate a part of her farm to build the Keystone XL pipeline.
Julia Trigg Crawford’s hearing before a county court judge in Paris, Texas, is the beginning of a process to challenge TransCanada’s claim to be a common carrier, which in Texas gives it what lawyers call the power of eminent domain, or the right to seize property.
Canada's crude oil pipelines Charting TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipelineThe $12-billion, 36-inch diameter pipeline would carry up to 1.1 million barrels of oilsands crude a day more than 2,700 kilometers from Alberta to refineries in south Texas, crossing six states, including Crawford’s farm in northeast Texas. The farm has been in her family for 64 years.
The farm has been in her family for 64 years yet some young woman in Missouri or someone else in a corporation in Canada or some union or some government is going to tell this woman in Texas, this farmer, this citizen that she must sell her land for an oil company's pipeline?
No.
No, this Keystone XL pipeline should NOT be built and it shouldn't be strung across the country.
There are too many reasons we shouldn't, not the least of which is the fact that oil is a dirty, polluting, carbon-emitting "fossil fuel" of the past that we need to wean ourselves from and the profits from this would go out of the country anyway.
It would not only be a short-sighted idea but a wrong one, too, in far too many ways.
Link: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/07/3748769/as-i-see-it-the-urgency-of-keystone.html#storylink=rss
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38435210/ns/us_news-environment/t/pipeline-leak-pollutes-major-michigan-river/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/08/10/transcanada-keystone-texas-hearing.html
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