Corporation Exploiting Major Loophole To Quickly Build 600-Mile Tar Sands Pipeline

[kristopher]

Corporation Exploiting Major Loophole To Quickly Build 600-Mile Tar Sands Pipeline
BY KATIE VALENTINE ON FEBRUARY 26, 2014 AT 9:35 AM

In the five years since TransCanada submitted its first application to build the Keystone XL pipeline, protesters have held marches and vigils, chained themselves to pipeline trucks, interrupted a presidential speech and gotten themselves purposefully arrested, all in the name of stopping the pipeline.

For Debra Michaud, director of Tar Sands Free Midwest, getting these activists to just take notice of the pipeline her group has been working to stop since early last year would be a victory.

“Nobody’s heard of it,” Michaud said. “People know Keystone, but nobody’s heard of Flanagan South.”

Unlike Keystone’s northern leg, which has been mired in court challenges and political skirmishes since 2008, Flanagan South is already in the works, after about two years of negotiating with landowners along the route and going through its permitting process. Once completed, it will pass over approximately 1,950 wetlands and waterways, including the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

This is really laying the groundwork for the way they’re going to take over this country with pipelines.

But it’s not the...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/26/3252291/flanagan-south-tar-sands/

[Joe Shlabotnik]

1. I've never heard about this one

And I go out of my way to read about this kind of stuff. Not at all surprising though.

[freshwest]

2. The Arkansas spill had bitumen flowing through it at high pressure in an old pipeline. Which could b

from neglect although maybe it was inevitable. Keystone is designed to replace it that lead but with different destination.

The Koch brothers have gone the backdoor to buy their way state by state. I've lived around these most of my life and they require a level of maintenance that some do not recieve. Neither do refineries.

It's take the profit and leave the people working at the plants and living along the routes to take the risk. Most don't even know they are there.

Once the easement is granted, the fuel can be changed, and IIRC it was done in Arkansas. in a rural town I lived in some years back, we argued against a gas pipeline that was turned over to jet fuel and lost. We just felt the jet fuel would cause a worse event when the inevitable came.

We were all pooh-poohed away and they went right on. Same thing with mining that wasted a lot of water and polluted.

In this country, the government once had the ability to stop or control some uses of private property for the public good. I don't feel that people support government enough and don't get involved enough to change the way it's going, particularly in situations like this.

The public is informed at the last minute when all the project plans and zoning is acquired. It was always this way with some things but now with less living space we come into conflict with this more.