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Keystone XL Down the Line
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 13, 2013
Comprehensive and anecdotal both, this Kindle Single is great starter and/or updater as to where the project(s) involved in the Keystone and Bakken pursuits are currently. There isn't much coverage beyond cursory acknowledgements of spills around the region, in Canada and the US, however, and the choice to highlight individual cases of people who either work in/around the oil industry, or are against pipeline efforts, seemed somewhat wasteful. Less educational and more emotional, is what I came away with. Mufson and company should've spent less time interviewing the holdouts, who are obviously in the minority, and will lose to broader interests ultimately, and explain more about what technical challenges exist, in terms of pipe dimensions, thickness, strength, resilience, seal quality, shutoff precautions, depth of the digs, timeline, average recompence to landowners willing and unwilling to agree to property manipulation, and risk of tampering and how rigorous (if at all) test-run emergency management protocols are. There's too much fatalism ("if Keystone stands, we're doomed") and too little feet-to-the-fire-ism. Oil companies are like banks now. Too big to fail, etc. The only way to keep them in check is that, when a disaster occurs, and they do, rather regularly (we just don't hear of every one), it's citizens' job and government's interest to rake them. BP is already pissed about extra fines levied around the Gulf. That's good. When you fuck up, you get fucked up. TransCanada should have to agree to onerous penalties preemptively. Otherwise it's just pesky harrassment from individual opposers, and that leads nowhere. That's why this book gets three stars. Could've done so much more. Excellent pictures, though.
April 27, 2013
This Kindle Single is a like a nonfiction novella, and it feels like the perfect length/format for this book--which explores the Keystone XL issue through excellent reporting as Steven Mufson travels from the tar sands of Canada to the entire length of the planned Keystone XL pipeline to Port Arthur in Texas. In the process it explores the economic, environmental and human impacts of the pipeline--much of it told through the eyes of various people along the way. Worth reading.
October 1, 2013
addressed adroitly key issues surrounding the Keystone Pipeline XL project and the tar sands. Factual, with enough statistics to have understand the repercussions of this on the environment. Good parallels made with competing oil supplies. Must read.
June 27, 2013
Nice, short overview of a complicated issue.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews