In honor of the late Ted Stevens, I’d like to take a brief moment to discuss something the man truly loved. No, not the Internet, but actual tubes: the ones that carry Alaska’s contribution to our modern world, and also the kind that can keep society moving once those become obsolete.
While St. Peter may have dropped his charges against Stevens after prosecutorial misconduct, another type of charges, the explosive kind, might have been dropped by Environmentalists in order to invent a problem with another series of tubes in Michigan, at least if you believe Rush Limbaugh’s likely take on events. In any case, thanks to production declines from its fields and yet another aging pipeline, it looks like Alaska is getting a run for its money as a prime oil supplier from another place you can see from your house if you live there: Canada. The conventional wisdom tells us that Canada, as a friendly neighbor to the north that doesn’t want us to, as Jim Kunstler so eloquently put it, “eat shit and die” like most of the other places that sell us oil, will be more than happy to hand over all the tar we could possibly want, that is once they get done toasting the remainder of their natural gas supply and more than a few gallons of water in order to separate it from all that sand and get it into a less amorphous-solid-like form that can actually be pumped through tubes.
Look at all the beautiful land still left to wreck.
That is, of course, all assuming that everything goes swimmingly, unlike in Lake Pontchartrain. It’s looking more and more like the Keystone XL pipeline, an expansion of an existing pipeline system from the tar sands that would extend all the way to Texas and Louisiana and a segment of tube with the potential to monumentally increase America’s use of the dirtiest and most inefficient mode of transportation in existence, won’t ever swim at all. Even if it does get built, this time around there actually are a whole lot of environmentalists already angry enough about the project that they just might sabotage the pipeline for real this time. After the Michigan pipeline tear last month dumped a million gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River watershed in what is believed to be the Midwest’s largest-ever oil spill (it’s been a good year for biggest-ever spills, hasn’t it?), the public’s opinion turned just a little sour on the risks of adding yet more pipelines to the vast network that spans the nation already. And for those who missed it, crude was already not exactly the sweetest thing on the public’s mind these days.
Even assuming the pipeline is completed, that doesn’t mean our tubular troubles are over. Before the synthetic crude from tar sands, or any other crude, can be burned up taking the kids to soccer practice, it must first be refined, then pumped through another series of smaller tubes to get it to your local Circle K. OK, our pipelines may be crumbling, but our refineries are still doing OK, right? No strange things afoot there?
Turns out there was yet another headline that graced Page 22 of your newspaper this week showing that the Deepwater Horizon and the Trans-Alaska pipeline aren’t the only leaky liabilities and ticking time bombs in BP’s portfolio: on April 7, a compressor at BP’s Texas City refinery (yes, that one again) caught fire, resulting of the illegal release of 17,000 pounds of benzene and over 500,000 pounds of undisclosed “other pollutants” into the neighborhood over the next two months. An investigation by the Texas Attorney General’s office revealed a lack of maintenance as the likely cause of the fire. You’d think after such an event, BP would have the wisdom to shut down the refining units running off the faulty equipment, right? Well, it turns out they actually knew about the problem and chose to keep those units running so as to avoid any loss in productivity. I know, truly shocking for a company with such an outstanding reputation for safety and excellent performance. Call it yet another notch in the company’s belt and add it to the fifteen from the 2005 explosion at the refinery and the shift supervisor who died in another accident at the plant three years later, along with the eleven from the Deepwater Horizon. Hey, if we can reduce Afghan and Iraqi casualties to mere numbers, why not oil workers as well? It’s not like they amount to a hill of beans to the company for which they once worked and which treated their lives as just another cost of doing business.
By the way, if you’re not such a big fan of wind turbines or trash-to-energy plants, I’m curious: how might you feel about having one of these monstrosities in your backyard?
Trouble in Texas City: The Intertubular Processing and Storage Node
But suppose the oil makes it through all the tubes without a hitch, all the way to the pumps and ultimately into your vehicle. Happy motoring, right?
Bill McKibben and a few others have continually pointed out that the disasters that make headlines and business-as-usual habits are, in the end, more or less equally disastrous for the health of our environment and our economy. A headline from today’s issue of The Onion, in the tradition of the media outlet known for its role as one of the few able to comment seriously on matters of importance, told it like it is: “Millions of Barrels of Oil Safely Reach Port in Major Environmental Catastrophe.” It is telling that the only psychological method we have to seriously confront our oil crisis is humor: such is the mark of truly intractable problems, like the jokes that emerged from the Jewish ghettos of Europe through centuries of segregation and persecution. So what are we going to do once, or hopefully before, this party ends, as it surely will (and more likely sooner rather than later)?
The terminal: in the end, the Internet and everything else will all go down the tubes if we don’t figure out something, and fast.
By jove, I think I might just have the answer! Unfortunately, it takes a bit of foresight, some dollars, and, if you want it to be sustainable, a simultaneous commitment to renewable energy, all resources that seem to be in short supply right now at all levels of government here in these United States.
Maybe soon we can start talking about trillion-dollar-scale electrified rail projects instead of just a few billion dollars in occasional stimulus money even as ten times as much goes to keep the auto industry on life support. It takes more than just a little seed money to build an industry capable of making a dent in levels of oil consumption that remain mammoth even during periods of chilled demand, like today. It also takes comprehensive, top-level planning for the long term from visionaries at the highest levels of government. And that, in turn, requires our political leaders to square their positions with scientific principles and the goal of moving the country forward rather than merely the principle of profitable petroleum for what proportionally is just pennies of campaign funds. Can anyone doubt that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R – CLIMATE ENEMY NUMBER ONE) will do as much as she can to continue Alaska’s legacy as the fossil state holding back the rest of the country from finally making serious attempts to get beyond oil, and how sad is it that she is willing to sell herself for so little?
We urgently need mass transit and other forms of low-impact transportation not to supplement our driving habits, but to actually replace them at levels that matter. We should be generating as much as possible of the funds needed to build a transportation network we won’t be embarassed to call our own in the future through taxation of gasoline and other fossil motor fuels, including fair and non-zero valuation of their externalities such as congestion, smog, and climate pollution. Public transportation infrastructure in this country is crumbling at the same time that we face other key turning points in the history of human energy use: the first stages of a permanent worldwide decline in crude oil supplies and changes in the planetary climate system too obvious for even the most vigorously stubborn Conservapedia readers to deny any longer. If we don’t do something about fixing our fixation on oil-centric transport, we face serious problems not even just over the horizon but already, as America’s families and its ecosystems come under ever more strain from the rising costs of energy and transportation.
If we do manage to somehow break through the inertia of politics and get it right, our tubes will serve us in the coming world for a long time. There may even be something already happening in Washington, DC that can give us hope…
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Tubes done right: if we fix our transportation system, there may be a place in the world for the Internet after all, and all the other wonderful things we call “civilization.”
