7 ms·

What about safety and natural disasters from rail and cost?

dugditches 5y ago
Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc and the footprint of the trains themselves operating. There's a reason pipelines exist, and that is in their simplicity of transporting the product efficiently. Sure they can't transport anything else, but I don't think too many rocket boosters would be traveling to remote areas in Canada.
- megablast 5y ago
  Good. Anything that makes oil more expensive is good for the planet and everyone who lives on it.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Burning oil for non productive reasons will make it more expensive, but it wont save the planet.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc Nitpicking to make a point: Employing people and paying them well is not just an expense; it has some enormous benefits.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    In the context of a discussion about what method of delivering oil is more efficient, wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits. From a society point of view, if the goal is to deliver oil, then it is a societal loss to do it inefficiently just to pay more people. If the goal is to pay people, then just pay people, no need to do it in a roundabout way of forcing an inefficiency into the system.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits Agreed, but that assumes perfect knowledge by business owners of what is most efficient. I think business owners often lean much too far toward seeing labor as a commodity and an expense, to be minimized. Another approach is to see humans as the most powerful parts of the organization, and to invest in and empower them. I'm speaking in the abstract; of course it's not always the case that more investment in labor is better. But there is a history of it: For example (and this is more a legend than something I have details on), back in the 1980s American auto companies had long treated workers as commodities. Toyota was far more successful by empowering them; famously, any worker could stop the assembly line.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Labor isn't ecologically inefficient. People are alive regardless of if they work.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Paying people well is very negative for the environment. A poorly paid person will have a smaller car, smaller house, use less electricity and gas, and throw away far less trash. In fact, wealth is very strongly correlated to environmental impact. Sure, rich people might be buying electric cars and recyclable coffee cups, but it nowhere near offsets the bigger house with A/C...
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Then lets pay everyone well to dig holes in their backyard and fill them in. Employing people is great gain only if they do something productive. If you can employ less people that is greater gain because those others can do something else useful.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Labor time is a expiring and renewing natural resource. It's OK to use some of it.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        Great points, this and the other comment.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  But what if the product they’re transporting will kill us all?
  - koolba 5y ago
    No that’s transported by rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      Used nuclear material is not capable of killing everyone in an accident, nowhere close. More people have died drilling for and refining oil than have died in nuclear accidents, and that’s before we consider the existential risk that global warming poses.
      - brorfred 5y ago
        And how many people have died in the strip mining of uranium?
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        Probably not as many as you think. Studies from a New Mexico mine ending in the 1970s estimated an extra 62.4 deaths per 100,000 miners. That’s a lot, but it doesn’t even hold a candle to coal mining in the same era. In 1970 the coal mining fatality rate in the US was 960 per 100,000 (1,388 fatalities for 144,480 miners). Secondly, most uranium is leeched from the ground, not strip mined. This is far safer for the worker, although it does pose other safety considerations for the community. Third, we can change these things. Coal mining has gone from ~900 per 100,000 workers to ~24 per 100,000 workers. Workplace health and safety standards are a choice we can make as a society. If we can make coal mining safer, there’s no reason we can’t make uranium mining safer.
      - lupire 5y ago
        Is that true per joule?
ashtonkem 5y ago
Rail is very, very safe. In some areas taking the train is safer than walking. Now to be fair, oil pipelines are usually safer still. But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil.
- swader999 5y ago
  Stop using oil, yeah sure. This will just transfer consumption from the most ethical and environmentally sound jurisdiction in the world to the worst. Ask the town in Quebec that had many people burned alive from a oil train derailment how safe it is. The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster occurred in the town of Lac-Mégantic, in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Canada, at approximately 01:15 EDT,[1][2] on July 6, 2013, when an unattended 73-car freight train carrying Bakken Formation crude oil rolled down a 1.2% grade from Nantes and derailed downtown, resulting in the fire and explosion of multiple tank cars. Forty-seven people were killed.[3] More than 30 buildings in the town's centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed,[2][4] and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining downtown buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite.[5] Initial newspaper reports described a 1-kilometre (0.6 mi) blast radius.[6] ~ Wikipedia
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    1. Consumption is not moveable like that; you’re describing a process more akin to how manufacturing moves. The world’s poorest people won’t suddenly be able to afford all this oil infrastructure if the richer nations stop consuming it. Especially if doing so reduces economies of scale. 2. From a global warming perspective, there is no such thing as an ethical jurisdiction to emit carbon from. Carbon is carbon, and it affects us all whether or not it comes with other forms of pollution.
    - swader999 5y ago
      I should have worded that better. I meant production, if you read it carefully I think it still implies that but I should have been more clear. By ethical I mean human rights abuse, treatment of women and minorities. Why would you reward Saudi Arabia, Iran and so on and punish a place like Western Canada?
specialist 5y ago
Much of the opposition to pipelines is their propensity to fail. There are many, many pipelines in various states of neglect and failure. With no plans or resources to fix them. We don't even monitor most of them. We should be decommissioning pipelines, not building new ones.

Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc and the footprint of the trains themselves operating. There's a reason pipelines exist, and that is in their simplicity of transporting the product efficiently. Sure they can't transport anything else, but I don't think too many rocket boosters would be traveling to remote areas in Canada.

megablast 5y ago
Good. Anything that makes oil more expensive is good for the planet and everyone who lives on it.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Burning oil for non productive reasons will make it more expensive, but it wont save the planet.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc Nitpicking to make a point: Employing people and paying them well is not just an expense; it has some enormous benefits.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  In the context of a discussion about what method of delivering oil is more efficient, wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits. From a society point of view, if the goal is to deliver oil, then it is a societal loss to do it inefficiently just to pay more people. If the goal is to pay people, then just pay people, no need to do it in a roundabout way of forcing an inefficiency into the system.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits Agreed, but that assumes perfect knowledge by business owners of what is most efficient. I think business owners often lean much too far toward seeing labor as a commodity and an expense, to be minimized. Another approach is to see humans as the most powerful parts of the organization, and to invest in and empower them. I'm speaking in the abstract; of course it's not always the case that more investment in labor is better. But there is a history of it: For example (and this is more a legend than something I have details on), back in the 1980s American auto companies had long treated workers as commodities. Toyota was far more successful by empowering them; famously, any worker could stop the assembly line.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Labor isn't ecologically inefficient. People are alive regardless of if they work.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Paying people well is very negative for the environment. A poorly paid person will have a smaller car, smaller house, use less electricity and gas, and throw away far less trash. In fact, wealth is very strongly correlated to environmental impact. Sure, rich people might be buying electric cars and recyclable coffee cups, but it nowhere near offsets the bigger house with A/C...
- bluGill 5y ago
  Then lets pay everyone well to dig holes in their backyard and fill them in. Employing people is great gain only if they do something productive. If you can employ less people that is greater gain because those others can do something else useful.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Labor time is a expiring and renewing natural resource. It's OK to use some of it.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      Great points, this and the other comment.
ashtonkem 5y ago
But what if the product they’re transporting will kill us all?
- koolba 5y ago
  No that’s transported by rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Used nuclear material is not capable of killing everyone in an accident, nowhere close. More people have died drilling for and refining oil than have died in nuclear accidents, and that’s before we consider the existential risk that global warming poses.
    - brorfred 5y ago
      And how many people have died in the strip mining of uranium?
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        Probably not as many as you think. Studies from a New Mexico mine ending in the 1970s estimated an extra 62.4 deaths per 100,000 miners. That’s a lot, but it doesn’t even hold a candle to coal mining in the same era. In 1970 the coal mining fatality rate in the US was 960 per 100,000 (1,388 fatalities for 144,480 miners). Secondly, most uranium is leeched from the ground, not strip mined. This is far safer for the worker, although it does pose other safety considerations for the community. Third, we can change these things. Coal mining has gone from ~900 per 100,000 workers to ~24 per 100,000 workers. Workplace health and safety standards are a choice we can make as a society. If we can make coal mining safer, there’s no reason we can’t make uranium mining safer.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Is that true per joule?

ashtonkem 5y ago

Rail is very, very safe. In some areas taking the train is safer than walking. Now to be fair, oil pipelines are usually safer still. But the solution here is obvious; stop using oil.

swader999 5y ago
Stop using oil, yeah sure. This will just transfer consumption from the most ethical and environmentally sound jurisdiction in the world to the worst. Ask the town in Quebec that had many people burned alive from a oil train derailment how safe it is. The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster occurred in the town of Lac-Mégantic, in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, Canada, at approximately 01:15 EDT,[1][2] on July 6, 2013, when an unattended 73-car freight train carrying Bakken Formation crude oil rolled down a 1.2% grade from Nantes and derailed downtown, resulting in the fire and explosion of multiple tank cars. Forty-seven people were killed.[3] More than 30 buildings in the town's centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed,[2][4] and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining downtown buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite.[5] Initial newspaper reports described a 1-kilometre (0.6 mi) blast radius.[6] ~ Wikipedia
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  1. Consumption is not moveable like that; you’re describing a process more akin to how manufacturing moves. The world’s poorest people won’t suddenly be able to afford all this oil infrastructure if the richer nations stop consuming it. Especially if doing so reduces economies of scale. 2. From a global warming perspective, there is no such thing as an ethical jurisdiction to emit carbon from. Carbon is carbon, and it affects us all whether or not it comes with other forms of pollution.
  - swader999 5y ago
    I should have worded that better. I meant production, if you read it carefully I think it still implies that but I should have been more clear. By ethical I mean human rights abuse, treatment of women and minorities. Why would you reward Saudi Arabia, Iran and so on and punish a place like Western Canada?

specialist 5y ago

Much of the opposition to pipelines is their propensity to fail. There are many, many pipelines in various states of neglect and failure. With no plans or resources to fix them. We don't even monitor most of them. We should be decommissioning pipelines, not building new ones.