Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc and the footprint of the trains themselves operating.
There's a reason pipelines exist, and that is in their simplicity of transporting the product efficiently. Sure they can't transport anything else, but I don't think too many rocket boosters would be traveling to remote areas in Canada.
In the context of a discussion about what method of delivering oil is more efficient, wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits. From a society point of view, if the goal is to deliver oil, then it is a societal loss to do it inefficiently just to pay more people.
If the goal is to pay people, then just pay people, no need to do it in a roundabout way of forcing an inefficiency into the system.
> wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits
Agreed, but that assumes perfect knowledge by business owners of what is most efficient.
I think business owners often lean much too far toward seeing labor as a commodity and an expense, to be minimized. Another approach is to see humans as the most powerful parts of the organization, and to invest in and empower them.
I'm speaking in the abstract; of course it's not always the case that more investment in labor is better. But there is a history of it: For example (and this is more a legend than something I have details on), back in the 1980s American auto companies had long treated workers as commodities. Toyota was far more successful by empowering them; famously, any worker could stop the assembly line.
Then lets pay everyone well to dig holes in their backyard and fill them in.
Employing people is great gain only if they do something productive. If you can employ less people that is greater gain because those others can do something else useful.
Paying people well is very negative for the environment.
A poorly paid person will have a smaller car, smaller house, use less electricity and gas, and throw away far less trash.
In fact, wealth is very strongly correlated to environmental impact. Sure, rich people might be buying electric cars and recyclable coffee cups, but it nowhere near offsets the bigger house with A/C...
Used nuclear material is not capable of killing everyone in an accident, nowhere close. More people have died drilling for and refining oil than have died in nuclear accidents, and that’s before we consider the existential risk that global warming poses.
Studies from a New Mexico mine ending in the 1970s estimated an extra 62.4 deaths per 100,000 miners. That’s a lot, but it doesn’t even hold a candle to coal mining in the same era. In 1970 the coal mining fatality rate in the US was 960 per 100,000 (1,388 fatalities for 144,480 miners).
Secondly, most uranium is leeched from the ground, not strip mined. This is far safer for the worker, although it does pose other safety considerations for the community.
Third, we can change these things. Coal mining has gone from ~900 per 100,000 workers to ~24 per 100,000 workers. Workplace health and safety standards are a choice we can make as a society. If we can make coal mining safer, there’s no reason we can’t make uranium mining safer.
The estimate is that nuclear kills 0.04 people per TWh produced. This includes mining, refining, and the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Natural gas kills about 4 people per TWh produced, making it far more lethal than nuclear all considered.
Fascinating in a grim way, rooftop solar is actually more lethal than nuclear, at 0.44 per TWh. Quite literally more people have died falling off roofs installing solar panels than died at Chernobyl. With rooftop being such a minuscule percentage of global production, expect that number to change.
By and far the most lethal is coal. The world average is 161 per TWh. But that average is hiding a lot of nastiness, because the true range is between 15 (US) and 278 (China). Quite literally millions of people die each year due to pollution, most of them because of coal.
This is a classic case of how people don’t calculate risk correctly. Nuclear accidents are scary, rare things and so people focus in on them. But in trying to get rid of nuclear we’ve ended up shifting primarily to coal and natural gas, energy sources that kill multiple orders of magnitude more people than nuclear does. But because these people die one at a time in hospitals, we end up missing the scale of the tragedy as a society.
> But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil.
Sure, but will we see rail transportation of oil blocked in a similar manner? Otherwise we might just be making our current uses of oil less safe and efficient for nothing.
I think this needs to be achieved some other way, like through carbon taxes, not by blocking pipelines.
> But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil
> Sure, but will we see rail transportation of oil blocked in a similar manner? Otherwise we might just be making our current uses of oil less safe and efficient for nothing.
No, we won’t see our rail transit of oil blocked because it should not exist. The oil should be left in the ground.
I don't understand what you are proposing here. In terms of actions that we take to curb the use of oil, I am saying those actions should not unfairly discriminate against pipelines vs less safe transports like trains. If we take steps to block pipelines, we should take steps to block oil trains too.
Obviously if we could just snap our fingers and eliminate all dependence on oil, that would be fine since it would eliminate pipelines and oil trains together. But in lieu of that, we need to make choices about how to maximize the efficiency and safety of the oil we do use. Pipelines in some cases might actually be a good way to do that.
It's not possible to both maximize the safety and efficacy of using oil while externalizing the long term economic and environmental impact of using oil. The proposed efficiency and safety are entirety predicated on the externalized impact of pollution, climate change, and oil sand fracking.
What's the problem with keeping the more effective technology (pipelines) and instead using taxes to disincentivize the externalities? Wouldn't that be better for everyone?
I am not saying we should make oil cheaper. That is the point of the taxes. We should be raising the price through taxes, not by blocking the state of the art technologies.
> But in lieu of that, we need to make choices about how to maximize the efficiency and safety of the oil we do use. Pipelines in some cases might actually be a good way to do that.
Pipelines make oil cheaper and safer, which is the exact opposite of what we need as a species. This both delays transition to cleaner technologies, and it causes even more consumption among those who already use it. People’s consumption of oil is primarily limited by their financial ability; making oil cheaper usually results in them spending the same amount to consume more.
If I had my druthers, I’d fight any expansion of oil exploration, drilling, and transit tooth and nail. At this point drilling for more of it is like continually ordering pizza and swearing that the diet starts tomorrow.
It would not delay transition to cleaner technologies if you take action to price in the externalities through taxes. Then, we could have both safe and efficient oil, and it wouldn't increase consumption. That is the best outcome for everyone.
Blocking new technologies is a bad solution because it only achieves the second part, limiting increases in consumption. It doesn't allow us to take advantage of safety/efficiency improvements, unlike with carbon taxes where we could have both.
As it stands today, using local action and control to make new oil infrastructure painful and expensive to build is the best way for activists to raise the cost of oil and trim its consumption. This comes with obvious tradeoffs, rail transit is less safe, but it’s an available avenue given that the legislature is hopelessly corrupt and unwilling to do anything to curb oil consumption directly.
Stop using oil, yeah sure. This will just transfer consumption from the most ethical and environmentally sound jurisdiction in the world to the worst.
Ask the town in Quebec that had many people burned alive from a oil train derailment how safe it is.
The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster occurred in the town of Lac-Mégantic, in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Canada, at approximately 01:15 EDT,[1][2] on July 6, 2013, when an unattended 73-car freight train carrying Bakken Formation crude oil rolled down a 1.2% grade from Nantes and derailed downtown, resulting in the fire and explosion of multiple tank cars. Forty-seven people were killed.[3] More than 30 buildings in the town's centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed,[2][4] and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining downtown buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite.[5] Initial newspaper reports described a 1-kilometre (0.6 mi) blast radius.[6]
~ Wikipedia
1. Consumption is not moveable like that; you’re describing a process more akin to how manufacturing moves.
The world’s poorest people won’t suddenly be able to afford all this oil infrastructure if the richer nations stop consuming it. Especially if doing so reduces economies of scale.
2. From a global warming perspective, there is no such thing as an ethical jurisdiction to emit carbon from. Carbon is carbon, and it affects us all whether or not it comes with other forms of pollution.
I should have worded that better. I meant production, if you read it carefully I think it still implies that but I should have been more clear.
By ethical I mean human rights abuse, treatment of women and minorities. Why would you reward Saudi Arabia, Iran and so on and punish a place like Western Canada?
The issue is that there is a fixed supply of oil, and every drop that we pull out brings our species closer to extinction. I’d rather not reward Saudi, but I’d much more prefer to halt production of oil ASAP.
What are you basing this off of? Climate models that can't pass back testing with historical data when they are started 5,10,20,30 years ago. Sea level rise the last 150 years has been between 1-3mm a year and rising since the end of the last ice age (24k years). Food production continues to rise, the planet is greener. Extreme weather events are not increasing. The winters in North America have slightly warmed the past 30 years. Less area burned every year. Humans will adapt just fine. I'll source all this later if you really want?
Much of the opposition to pipelines is their propensity to fail. There are many, many pipelines in various states of neglect and failure. With no plans or resources to fix them. We don't even monitor most of them.
We should be decommissioning pipelines, not building new ones.
