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I think one of the bigger issues in general with the US is that our infrastructure is older. This is a natural effect of being first movers on a range of technologies.

For example, I remember travelling to Europe and South America and having better mobile phone services and features than the US. The reason at the time is that we were stuck with a massive investment that was made in the early days of cell phones. Other parts of the world, where deployment was what I might call phase 2, had the ability to take advantage of next generation ideas and technology.

I would imagine the same is true of oil pipeline technology. I don't know any more about oil transportation than you do. Yet, I think I might be correct in making the assumption that older (50+ years?) pipelines exist in the US and it it these that might lead to the conclusion that we don't build them well. The facts, however, could be precisely the opposite to this conclusion: We built them very well. They survived 50+ years without issues. And now they are starting to show their age and need extensive repairs or replacement.

This is where I think politics might get in the way. I think you actually want brand new, high tech pipelines. They are likely far better for the environment across a range of criteria.

By turning oil and energy into a political mess we can't make the right decisions, which might very well be to build new high-tech pipelines and replace the old ones.

The oil economy isn't going away for a long time, 100+ years. Transportation fuel is only one variable in the vast array of benefits we derive from fuel. Look around your house, everything you own depends of oil. It would be hard to identify items in modern life that would be possible without oil and oil derivatives.

Here's the fallacy committed by those equating oil with bad things for humanity or the planet. We would literally have to go back to pre-industrial revolution humanity in order to be able to truly get to a post-oil society. Now imagine the damage eight billion people would do to the environment if we could not rely on oil and derivatives. We would burn down every forest on the planet. We would deplete every single farmable patch of soil of nutrients. We would destroy ecosystems at an unimaginable rate. A post-oil society cannot support eight billion people on this planet without doing unimaginable damage all ecosystems we touch.

We need to do all we can to make cleaner use of oil and derivatives. It isn't going away. And having a war against the very infrastructure that makes it safer is truly not intelligent.




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