Midwestern Wheat Left Rotting as Oil Trains Roll By

[atreides1]

Source: Common Dreams

U.S. grain shipments are being held up as trains carrying huge quantities of Bakken oil chug through the region, the New York Times reported Tuesday, illustrating how the booming business of moving oil by rail has negative consequences beyond safety risks.

According to the Times:

Railroads have long been the backbone of North Dakota’s transportation system and the most dependable way for farmers to move crops — to ports in Portland, Ore., Seattle and Vancouver, from which the bulk of the grain is shipped across the Pacific to Asia; and to East Coast ports like Albany, from which it is shipped to Europe.

But reports the railroads filed with the federal government show that for the week that ended Aug. 22, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway — North Dakota’s largest railroad, owned by the billionaire Warren E. Buffett — had a backlog of 1,336 rail cars waiting to ship grain and other products. Another railroad, Canadian Pacific, had a backlog of nearly 1,000 cars.



Read more: http://commondreams.org/news/2014/08/26/midwestern-wheat-left-rotting-oil-trains-roll

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Oil over food...talk about a f**ked up choice!!!

[TwilightGardener]

1. BNSF should make a deal with Union Pacific to share trackage to haul this stuff.

They already share tracks in other parts of the country.

[elleng]

3. Those trackage rights agreements are not easy to come by,

many of them were imposed by the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Surface Transportation Board as conditions for merger approvals.

Any such deals now would, I expect, have to be imposed by the government, and I doubt that's on the horizon. I could be wrong; hope I am. Oil vs Grain industries.

[Brickbat]

2. All over Canada, too.

They started talking reregulation on some points up there. Made CN mighty nervous.

[elleng]

4. We could use it here,

and would surely make the carriers somewhat nervous, but carriers know they have a lot of clout.

[True Blue Door]

5. The Spice Must Flow.

Even if it drowns the world and everyone in it.

Modern global capitalism is some Lovecraftian madness.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

6. They've had similar problems with the apple crop in Washington State

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2014/08/07/coal-trains-kill-cold-trains-fruit-delivery.html?ana=e_du_pub&s=article_du&ed=2014-08-07&u=ColXVN5SPzQtLHFP87ho2w07857290&t=1407455111

[Fred Sanders]

9. The days of the oil and land barons is making a return, lack of regulation is the symptom,

systemic political corruption is the root cause.

May I interest you in the Robert McConnell trial as a current example of many?

[olddad56]

7. if we get hungry we'll drink the oil, what is the big deal?

[Agony]

8. Buffet has been fucking over ordinary working people for a long time

Bright and shiny on the outside, rotting grain on the inside...
http://www.courierherald.com/opinion/245859161.html

"The consumer experiences rising prices and reduced buying power while the superrich like Buffett and other plutocrats get even richer. Buffett’s giving away of part of his wealth to noble causes conceals the money-grubbing plutocrat he really is. We are truly living in a second Gilded Age – bright and shiny gold on the outside, but of low quality on the inside."

If you want to know more about his anticompetitive anticapitalist behavior read chapter 3 in David Cay Johnston's book "The Fine Print"

also see Johnston's comments about Buffet in this Moyer's interview from 2008
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01182008/transcript.html

[Psephos]

10. This sounds like an argument for pipelines.

It's a certainty the oil is going flow.

Politics aside, using rail to transport oil is an inefficient allocation of transportation assets, and more prone to accidents.

This is not an argument for Keystone, just a general observation.

[Spider Jerusalem]

12. Yep, although whether it needs to be Keystone is another question

the shortest pipeline route would be to the nearest refinery and/or port where the oil could go by tanker to Long Beach or Galveston Bay or any number of other destinations by sea, rather than overland.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

11. Energy always wins, energy always flows

150 years ago you could have written the same article about coal, if you obstruct pipelines oil will just intrude on other surface modes of transport.

[NickB79]

13. Choice: food or oil