4 ms·
And yet there are lots of excellent reasons why. There's nothing safe about pipelines. In Canada alone there over a hundred pipeline leaks or explosions every y
by lvs 7y ago
And yet there are lots of excellent reasons why. There's nothing safe about pipelines. In Canada alone there over a hundred pipeline leaks or explosions every year [1,2].
[1] https://equiterre.org/en/news/new-report-oil-pipeline-safety-failures-in-canada https://equiterre.org/en/news/new-report-oil-pipeline-safety...
[2] https://apps2.neb-one.gc.ca/pipeline-incidents/ https://apps2.neb-one.gc.ca/pipeline-incidents/
- jessriedel 7y agoHow many do you think is the appropriate number? Surely not zero, since this can only be approached in the limit of infinite expenditures. So what principle would you use to tell?
- 420codebro 7y agoHe has no principle. Just politics wrapped in environmentalism. Don’t dig too deep - there isn’t much to find.
- Karrot_Kream 7y ago> Surely not zero, since this can only be approached in the limit of infinite expenditures. What proof do you have of the lower bound here?
- viraptor 7y agoThere's no physical device with zero failures over an unbounded time. Whether it's human errors or material degradation, things will fail at some point. Materials also have production faults which can make them break on the first usage. Everything has a non-zero chance of failing. The "infinite expenditures" part comes in because you can introduce redundancies and fail-safes, but those introduce complexity / more work / more materials, which have extra costs. Then you need to spend time/money making sure the whole system works together / testing failure modes. But that may also fail, etc.
- SECProto 7y agoThere's at least one (idealistic) method to reduce the number of pipelines leaks and explosions to zero. This will also eliminate the risk of another Lac Megantic disaster, and reduce emissions to zero! It's just not an immediate-term proposition.
- mannykannot 7y agoThis issue is too theoretical to contribute to deciding what should be acceptable. I will open the bidding by suggesting that Canada's frequency of dangerous pipeline failures should not exceed its frequency of airliner crashes.
- viraptor 7y agoI assumed the parent referred to the zero lower bound. A realistic lower bound discussion is more complex/interesting of course.
- Karrot_Kream 7y agoI meant to segue into a realistic lower bound, not a zero bound, though I definitely wasn't clear about it.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> There's nothing safe about pipelines They're safer than trains. The problem is new pipelines usually enable new extraction. If we could decouple those two, i.e. shift transport of existing extraction from trains to pipelines without creating lots of new extraction, that would be a net benefit to all.
- throwaway3627 7y agoPipelines are different than trains. - They can leak much more in an unit time than trains... hundreds of thousands of gallons, and regulatory enforcement on leaks in the US is very weak because of corporate capture. - They are built usually by legally-stealing land (easements, eminent domain) from people along the way. - If they leak on people's land, they don't have much recourse. - All the safety tech and building codes in the world don't matter if the operators don't really care about leaks because the risks of fines and lawsuits is so comparatively small. There are hundreds of oil leaks per year, and they can be absolutely huge, but because they're usually in the middle of "nowhere," they rarely make the mainstream news.