You need to check the news: with the holiday weekend, and the plane crash, most people have missed the train derailment in Quebec.
About 40 people are still missing, and presumed incinerated.
Somehow, 73 tanker cars carrying oil broke loose from a parked train, in the middle of the night, rolled downhill for 7 miles, derailed in the center of a town, and started exploding one by one (5 exploded and they are still worried about the others). The explosions and fire leveled about thirty buildings, including a bar/club that was open at that hour.
If I can hazard being as a**hole, this is what happens when you choose not to build oil pipelines.
This oil came from the boom in the Bakken Shale of North Dakota. It was on its way to a refinery, by rail, because there is no pipeline that can ship the volume of oil that this field is producing.
For perspective, rail shipments of oil in Canada are 280 times what they were 5 years ago. You read that correctly: tanker car shipments have been going up an average of 12% per month for the last few years.
Wayde Schafer, a North Dakota spokesman for the Sierra Club, has predicted such a catastrophe ever since crude began leaving the North Dakota by rail in 2008.
“I think anybody could have foreseen this,” said Schafer, whose downtown Bismarck office is just two blocks from a rail line that carries several mile-long oil trains daily through the heart of the North Dakota’s capital city. “It seemed like a disaster waiting to happen and it happened.”
I am not laying blame for this with Obama (and his decisions that have stalled the Keystone pipeline).
But, I am very clearly laying blame with everyone who is against pipelines, but refuses to acknowledge that choices like that have consequences.
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