Tag Archives: Dilbit

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Has Keystone XL Fight Rebooted the Environmental Movement?

The Keystone XL pipeline is a very real threat to the environment. If burned, the Canadian tar sand oil the pipeline is meant to carry will pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, increasing the devastation of climate change. Pipeline leaks of dilbit (diluted bitumen) could contaminate the vast and vital Ogallala aquifer. (Read the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning series on a dilbit leak in Michigan to get a sense of what’s at stake.)

Dilbit pipeline leak in Arkansas forces evacuation, March 2013 (Photo credit: EPA)

The fight against Keystone XL also has a symbolic component, Bryan Farrell argues over at Slate.

The greatest environmental threat of our era, global climate change, has lacked the kind of focus and specificity that allows organizers to, well, organize. The problems are so varied. Rising ocean levels, forest fires, flooding, the death of coral reefs from acidification. Paradoxically, climate change is hard to fight in part because the threat is so large and multifaceted. Overwhelmed, many people simply throw up their hands and give up.

That, says Farrell (editor at the excellent site Waging Nonviolence), is where the movement against the Keystone XL comes in.

[The anti-Keystone movement] was never about just a pipeline. [Bill] McKibben and a handful of others had another, less talked about goal—to remake the environmental movement into something far more active, creative, and formidable for years to come. The gap that once existed between mainstream environmental groups and grass-roots activists has now largely dissolved, resulting in widespread action that has not been seen in the United States for decades—perhaps even since the first Earth Day in April 1970.On that day, mainstream environmental groups with roots going back to the conservation movement of the early 20th century united with grass-roots activists for a day of teach-ins, influenced by the burgeoning student anti-war movement. Amid the thousands of demonstrations that took place across the nation, there was at least one major act of civil disobedience, in which 15 people were arrested for holding a mock funeral inside Boston’s Logan Airport. Interestingly enough, it was a sort of proto-climate protest against a supersonic plane and its accompanying release of water vapor—a major greenhouse gas.

via Bill McKibben’s fight against Keystone XL: The movement against the pipeline was always an attempt to bridge the divide between mainstream environmental groups and grass-roots activists. - Slate Magazine.

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ExxonMobile Threatens Reporter With Arrest at Arkansas Oil Spill Site

An ExxonMobile official threatened reporter Lisa Song (InsideClimate News) with arrest at the site of an Arkansas oil spill on Wednesday. Song is co-author of The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard Of. The expose of the July 2010 oil spill of more than a million gallons of dilbit — diluted bitumen, the same substance that spilled in Arkansas — into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, was a finalist for the 2012 Scripps Howard Award for Environmental Writing.

The ExxonMobile Pegasus pipeline that ruptured in Mayflower, Arkansas, on March 29 is at about sixty-five years old and was not originally designed to carry dilbit, a mixture of Canadian oil and chemicals that is heavier and more corrosive than normal crude oil. ExxonMobile has said the 800-plus mile pipeline that runs from south-central Illinois to Texas was upgraded to double its capacity two years ago.

“I have been reminded by Exxon’s representatives that this is a relatively small spill and cleanup is going just great,” Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel told NPR on Wednesday when he was inspecting the site. “I hope that they realize that to the homeowners in this area, it is not small — it is catastrophic.”

News of the threat follows reports of other attempts by ExxonMobil to limit public access to information about the 80,000 gallon spill. (For example, here and here.)

Here’s a clip from today’s InsideClimate News about the incident:

Song had tried to enter the command compound on Tuesday, but was turned away by a security guard. On Wednesday, however, a different guard was on duty and he waved her through the gate. Inside, a second person directed her to the warehouse that houses the command center.

Inside the building, Song went to a table with a sign that said “public affairs,” where she was given the name and contact information for Austin Vela, the EPA spokesman at the site. Before she could get the name of a DOT representative, however, Exxon spokeswoman Kim Jordan spotted Song and told her to leave. A second person arrived and said, “You’ve been asked by security to leave. If you don’t you’ll be arrested for criminal trespass.”

via InsideClimate News Reporter Threatened With Arrest at Ark. Oil Spill Site | InsideClimate News.

(Disclosure: While I’ve never met Song, the news organization she works for published a series of articles I wrote in 2012.)

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Video: Fracking on “collision course” with National Parks

As Ronald Reagan so famously put it: “There you go again.”

When he uttered that phrase, Reagan was attacking Jimmy Carter. Today, the observation applies equally to another historical dust-up, between Theodore Roosevelt’s old nemesis — Big Oil and Gas — and the home of TR’s legacy: Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP).

As TR’s great-great-grandson, Winthrop Roosevelt, says in a new video, “Unchecked development [of fracking] is on a collision course with one of America’s truly special places” — the grassland park in North Dakota that bears the name of the America’s greatest environmental president.

A Boom With No Boundaries, produced by the Center for American Progress, shows how a slew of new fracking wells — with many more planned — threatens the integrity of TRNP. The 110-square mile park is home to bison, pronghorn antelope, elk, prairie dogs and other distinctive and rare flora and fauna of the American Badlands.

Roosevelt’s “Ethical Movement” Against Big Oil

There is obvious irony in that the threatened park is named for the nation’s “Wilderness Warrior” (the title of Douglas Brinkley’s compelling TR biography). There’s an added layer of irony. One of TR’s biggest and longest-standing enemies was the Standard Oil Company. When Roosevelt became president in 1901, Standard Oil was Big Oil.

Punch Magazine, 1906.

Even before that, in his last formal address to the New York legislature as that state’s governor, Roosevelt warned that without government regulation and oversight, industrial giants would destroy the environment.

“Unrestrained greed,” Roosevelt said, “means the ruin of the great woods and the drying up of the sources of the rivers.”

TR was at least as concerned about the broader, anti-democratic tendencies of concentrations of great wealth and power. To prevent such abuses, President Roosevelt helped create the Bureau of Corporations, a federal body with unprecedented (but still limited) power to investigate and regulate giant corporations like Standard Oil.

The fight, said Roosevelt, was “fundamentally an ethical movement” targeting “the most dangerous members of the criminal class — the criminals of great wealth.”

Roosevelt had his attorney general sue several companies under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act for price-fixing and other illegal practices. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the umbrella organization for dozens of interconnected companies, was one of Roosevelt’s primary targets.

The foes duked it out in court for years. Although he was no longer president, Roosevelt was vindicated in 1911 when the Supreme Court ordered Standard Oil of New Jersey to spin off some 33 separate companies.

The More Things Change…

…the more they remain the same. Today, Standard Oil’s direct descendent, ExxonMobil, is the world’s largest publicly-held company. The corporation has used its wealth to manipulate public opinion about climate change, and directs millions to political campaigns to support friends and defeat foes.

The “unrestrained greed” that TR warned about a century ago continues to destroy land, both public and private.

On March 30, an ExxonMobil pipeline carrying a particularly corrosive form of tarsand oil called dilbit, ruptured, spilling 80,000 gallons of oil in a Little Rock, Arkansas suburb.

That same week, the media reported on a new study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, linking sand used in fracking to lung disease in workers.

In a press release accompanying the new CAP video, Andrew Satter and Jessica Goad call on the Obama administration to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s example.

The story of the assault on Theodore Roosevelt National Park is only one example of how energy development and land conservation are out of balance on our public lands. Over the past four years, the Obama administration has leased two-and-a-half times more acres of public lands to oil and gas companies than it has permanently protected. It’s time for the administration to put policies that protect and conserve our public lands and national parks for future generations on equal ground with policies that promote more oil and gas drilling.