“Logic and good judgment will always yield to fear, superstition, or local politics, in the interest of avoiding pain!” – Allan J. McDonald
On January 28, 1986, seven astronauts died when the Challenger exploded on takeoff. A few individuals ignored Allan McDonald’s engineering team warnings of known risks from rubber seal failures. NASA said all is safe. Astronauts paid the price.
More of the same
Diamond is not needed, there are pipelines from the Bakken to the Gulf Coast. The Oklahoma coalition joins Arkansas Rising and Water Guardians. The legal challenge team will start as soon as donations come for the $25,000 retainer. Direct action is spreading all over the nation, joined by clergy, businesswomen and men – a struggle for survival, life, and water.
If Diamond is not needed, why build it? Greedy people invest in pipelines to get tax-free distributions. Like all bulk remote transmission lines, Diamond takes private property as perpetual easements, under duress. Easements are the best land deal, exempt from taxes, insurance and liability, with unrestricted access and commercial use. Diamond targets low-income states without environmental regulations, abusing obsolete laws. Diamond is a low-cost design project, indifferent to spills; they don’t care for people.
Arkansas Royalty looks the other way
With a few exceptions, our Governor, Attorney General, Congressional Delegation and State Representatives, like the NASA launch team, knowing the risks of spills, ignore the people to avoid political pain.
What have USACE and APSC done?
The Army Corps of Engineers are not pipeline experts. The Arkansas Public Service Commissioin gave Diamond a free pass. The two agencies responsible for river-crossing permits decided Diamond spills would not impact our rivers.
After getting approval, to make nice with Arkansas Royalty, Diamond chose low-cost, low-quality welded Welspun pipes. If Welspun sold toilet paper, no one would shake your hand. Pipes, component type, number, location, specifications and the structural design are provided for review by all pipelines, except Diamond.
Ignoring the alarming record of spills and without engineering documentation, why did the Corps decide Diamond is safe? Because Diamond said, “it is committed to designing, constructing, operating and maintaining the line in a safe and reliable …”
Old and New Oil
When the first oil well was discovered, back in 1859, a water well hand pump was used to extract oil from 70 feet deep. The amount of energy used to pump the oil was less than the energy stored in the fossil fuel.
Oil was hard to find but easy to extract, and the crude oil was high quality, making a fortune for lucky wildcatters. New technology for pumping oil from the ground allowed for thousands of small, marginally producing oil wells. There are almost half a million wells in the United States that produce fewer than 15 barrels of oil per day.
Oil wells eventually run dry. From the beginning, some people worried about running out of oil. Texas old oil production has declined since peaking in 1972.
Unlike the good old oil, the new oil from tar sands and fracking shale formations is a completely different commodity. A great deal of energy must be spent strip mining or using hydraulic fracturing to release the oil. This is not like pumping liquid crude. Fracking is an expensive, inefficient, and wasteful process, outlawed in civilized societies. Fracking uses millions of gallons of clean water and a secret soup of chemicals injected at high pressure using electric power to drive industrial pumps, hoping to stay away from aquifers or contaminating drinking water. It’s one of the worst technologies known to man. The old fear of running out of oil and the meaningless notion of energy independence are driving the fracking boom. New bulk high-pressure pipelines are built to export shale oil at a loss. Fracking the earth, we will run out of money and water, with a glut of oil in storage.
The water used for fracking flows out of the wells, and is then hidden in deep injection wells. Oklahoma earthquakes near Cushing are the direct result of highly toxic wastewater from Arkansas, Texas, and other states. Oklahoma is the hazardous waste dump of the South, the home of many proud Native American Nations, an environmental injustice for caring people who love Mother Earth.
The fear and superstition used to make immoral and absurd economic and ecological decisions are unacceptable. People say: Diamond is going down.
Dr. Luis Contreras
Is Diamond keeping Secrets?
find out next week!
Valero is not only an old refinery in Memphis, they have many gas stations. Valero is the hidden investor, with 50 percent of the cost of the Diamond line. Valero is well known in Corpus Christy, TX, for polluting their tap water: bottled water is the only choice.
Try another gas station and let Valero know how you feel. Thanks