Warren Buffet exposed: the Oracle of Omaha and the Tar Sands
http://www.nationofchange.org/warren-buffett-exposed-oracle-omaha-and-tar-sands-1328539987On January 23, Bloomberg News reported Warren Buffett's Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), owned by his lucrative holding company Berkshire Hathaway, stands to benefit greatly from President Barack Obamas recent cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
If built, TransCanada's KeystoneXL (KXL) pipeline would carry tar sands crude, or bitumen (dilbit) from Alberta, B.C. down to Port Arthur, Texas, where it would be sold on the global export market.
If not built, as revealed recently by DeSmogBlog, the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side, and could include increased levels of ecologically hazardous gas flaring in the Bakken Shale, or else many other pipeline routes moving the prized dilbit to crucial global markets.
Rail is among the most important infrastructure options for ensuring tar sands crude still moves to key global markets, and the industry is pursuing rail actively. But transporting tar sands crude via rail is in many ways a dirtier alternative to the KXL pipeline. Railroads too present environmental issues. Moving crude on trains produces more global warming gases than a pipeline, explained Bloomberg.
Schema Thing
(10,283 posts)...than the already-in-place, very-efficient-compared-to-other-forms-of-transportation railroad?
My guess is that it would be many many years.
It's not as if you just pour a fluid into a pipe in Canada and it flows downhill to Texas.
TheWraith
(24,331 posts)And fuck NationOfChange for repeating asinine right-wing smears, that because a guy who owns virtually everything in the plains states owns a railroad that might benefit from something, clearly it's a big conspiracy to enrich Warren Buffett. Compare that to Boehner, who in the last year or so bought stock in SEVEN COMPANIES that are directly involved in either the tar sands or the pipeline.
Now, that said--yes, there ARE downsides to not building the pipeline too, most notably that one way or another the tar sands WILL still be developed. Whether the oil from them goes to the US, to China, somewhere else, etcetera, doesn't really matter in this case. As I said before this happened, killing the pipeline is a minor victory at best, because as long as there remains both a demand for oil, and the tar sands remain economically viable to use, they WILL be used. It's simply the reality of economics.
sharp_stick
(14,400 posts)or is it all just cut and paste drive-by BS?
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Credit where credit is due. Classy way of handling that my friend!