The use of railways for transporting petroleum products is booming thanks to the backlash against pipelines such as keystone and gateway. Oil companies who are fearful of incurring public outrage due to pipeline spills are only too happy to hand tanker cars over to the care of railway workers. When statistically inevitable accidents happen the oil producers can escape the blame!
The Lac-Mégantic disaster shows why we should be building more pipelines. Pipelines spill less per unit of volume shipped and usually avoid populated centers to a much greater degree than railways. They're better for the environment and safer for humans. Fossil fuels can be nasty stuff, but we currently still need them and we require the ability to move them around safely. The next time you see environmentalists protesting pipeline construction, ask them why they're not chaining themselves to their local railway tracks instead. We should do our best to avoid rolling bomb's through beautiful towns like Lac-Mégantic on a daily basis.
That might be penny-wise and pound foolish. Pipelines cost billions to build and they manifest our reliance on oil, which in turn costs much more lifes simply through pollution than any number of railway accidents.
The point here is not absolute, it's a relative one. Of course we already rely on oil. But if a 7 billion pipeline makes us rely on oil for an extra year (simple economics since its cheaper to transport through a pipeline than on rail), the negative externalities caused by that extra year of fossil fuel would dwarf the fatalities of railway accidents any time.
Moving oil through the pipeline is bad, but it is less bad than moving by rail in light of the probabilities of human loss (though the spillage is likely to be bigger when there is an accident). At least there is an potential up of rail being freed up to move something else safer - like people.
It's not quite that simple. The truth is that we just don't know how to move oil safely. The sane thing to do would be to phase it out.
"The IEA (International Energy Agency) found the risk of a rail spill is six times as high as the risk of a pipeline spill, but pipelines simply spill more when they rupture."
And replace it with what? You can't phase something out until you have a replacement. (Or you could send everyone back to a 19th century standard of living.)
While oil usage is globally still growing [0], so contrary to some replies, we are not already in a phase-out situation, some countries have taken steps to do just that, and I doubt they are reverting back to 19th century lifestyle.
Sweden aims to drastically reduce its dependency to oil by 2020 [1], replacing it with renewable energies. Of course the "how" part of the phase-out will vary depending on the region of the world. But this is doable, not science fiction.
I guess my point is that positions like "face it, we need oil so let's build more pipelines" are the ones that are holding us back from a better world.
>>And replace it with what? You can't phase something out until you have a replacement. (Or you could send everyone back to a 19th century standard of living.)
This is what came to mind while reading OP's and your comment:
One of the worst possible consequences arising from global warming is destabilization of agriculture. As you surely know, large-scale agriculture relies on the known climate for a particular region. This includes water supplies, knowing what to plant, and what pests to watch out for. The problem with climate change is exactly that: the climate for regions could change, adding many more unknowns/uncertainties to an already complex system. Some change is expected, but what I don't know is what tolerance we can handle.
My (perhaps unfounded) fear is that these disruptions could push us back to pre-18th century standard of living.
You use many assumptions too: take all of your questions and take the negative, you can't show them either. I am a practicing scientist, I work in alternative energy and develop semiconductors. I am not a climatologist, and it is not likely you are either. Expert-level knowledge matters, unless you've yet to master anything.
The climate is a very complex system. Small perturbations can have unexpected results, see the butterfly effect. We do not know the whole picture, but neither do you. Caution and conservation would suggest we want things to remain the same, such as CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
Producing carbon dioxide by thermal combustion is old technology. Ultimately fossil fuels are solar energy, the overall solar-to-electricity efficiency for fossil fuels is very low, <<1%. We can make PV with >40% using evidence-based principles developed using the scientific method. Scientific methods and principles are used in climate research. Cherry picking is not what I do when it comes to the scientific majority. If they are wrong and they later determine this, great, it is science. If they are right, great, it is science. If you ignore the scientific conclusion, you are not practicing science unless you are a researcher working to show why other experts are mistaken.
Experts have concluded that anthropogenic CO2 is a real and potentially serious problem. I have to trust them because my time is better spent developing potential solutions rather than rehashing their work. We advance by building off the shoulders of our predecessors.
The costs of being wrong about anthropogenic climate change and doing something are negligible especially if we make progress while doing so, but the costs of being right and doing nothing are potentially dangerous if we destabilize systems which require predictability such as agriculture.
Furthermore, you inferred my position on the matter simply by me pointing out your assumptions. I could too want a better world less dependent on fossil fuels for all you know.
My position is in line with the scientific majority. This is not new by any stretch of the imagination.
Taking issue with the assumptions used in this already established finding could suggest you either (1) don't know much about subject, (2) you have biases not from your own scientific inquiry, (3) you have drawn conclusions from your own research. There are large and well-funded disinformation campaigns, which work hard online to inject doubt into this discussion. Most certainly you aren't involved with this in any way, but it's possible you're influenced by it.
It is unreasonable for every post to be completely exhaustive, otherwise few would or could say anything. Perhaps you point out every discussion's assumptions, but if you do not then it might lead one to wonder what your deal is with this one.
In responding to this, I'm assuming your comment isn't politically motivated. That assumption might be wrong, in which case the following points will be for naught:
> 1st assumption: It is within human reach to change the climate.
There is nothing in principle to prevent us from affecting any kind of change on any kind of scale. The planet is a system that doesn't care who is affecting the variables, it's not as if there is some kind of cosmic firewall making sure we humans don't overstep our boundaries. We already affected the planet in a myriad ways, so it's difficult to make a rational argument that we can't. If your objection to this is on supernatural grounds, there is not a lot I can do to address that. But if it's not, just look at the true scale at which we're doing things here.
> 2nd: Current climate variations are created by human activities.
That is a good point worth looking into. The way to examine this is to look at known factors that influence the global climate. The best-known one are greenhouse gases. It's no question that a lot of them are produced naturally and that there are (even extreme) natural cycles to these things. On the other hand, however, we can estimate our own output reasonably well, so it becomes a matter of math. The rational consensus is that a non-trivial amount of greenhouse gases is emitted by human activities.
> 3rd: A human induced climate change will make the planet warmer.
The planet doesn't care who induced what. Overall, the planet will get warmer, yes. Because it's a complex system, that means in some regions it's going to get a lot colder than today.
> 4th: A warmer planet is bad. (If you look at a world map, you'll see huge surface of land in the temperate and frigid zones.)
I think a huge misunderstanding here is that people think it's bad for the planet. Again, the planet doesn't care, and the ecosystem has certainly seen worse changes historically. The planet and life as a whole are going to be just fine! Humans, on the other hand, not so much.
Here are some examples of things that are going to hurt us, and each of these drags behind it a long tail of consequences. Most equatorial regions will become warmer, dramatically increasing the deserts (and in some places creating new ones). A lot of people live in these zones. Other regions will see drastically more powerful storms and floods. The oceans will rise and make many sea-adjacent cities untenable. You mentioned temperate and frigid zones, I live in one of them. Where I live, the gulf stream will cease to transport heat into my climate zone, causing an ice age. It's going to get very uncomfortable for a lot of people, and by uncomfortable I mean deadly.
You question a lot whether human can and do influence climate change. Of course they do, but on the whole that's only partially relevant. The only reason why were interested in finding out our role in the change is so we have more options in counteracting the phenomenon.
I never said any of those were implausible; only that somehow, they were all taken for granted in the current discussion.
Position 1:
"We would be better off with pipelines..."
Position 2:
"No! (assumptions 1 ---> 2 ----> 3 ---> 3 ---> 4) fossil fuel is bad, so we shouldn't build a more expansive fossil fuel infrastructure, even if it costs some human lives."
Excuse me, but that's a pretty big quantum leap in argumentation.
> they were all taken for granted in the current discussion.
That's because, as best as we know today, it's what's actually happening. This doesn't mean Position 2 is reasonable. We're already in the process of moving away from oil, but at the same time it's clear that we're going to be needing it for a long time to come. Of course it makes sense to put an infrastructure for that in place.
As far as environmental aspects are concerned, it's not about dialing back the hand of time to the agrarian age just to minimize our impact. It's about managing our impact sensibly and counteracting it where it makes sense.
> Excuse me, but that's a pretty big quantum leap in argumentation.
Well, the way those points were presented is pretty loaded. I think the big leap comes instead right between "fossil fuel is bad" and "so we shouldn't build a more expansive fossil fuel infrastructure, even if it costs some human lives", that's where the non-sequitur happens.
The reason why "fossil fuel is bad" holds true is that we're doing it on such a massive scale that it actually changes our environment in a way that is detrimental to our future. And I'm a technocrat saying this, not what you might call a tree hugger.
It's a really beautiful little town in a gorgeous setting and this was a really shocking tragedy that shows how easily disasters can happen in an increasing scale industrial world.
The Lac-Mégantic disaster shows why we should be building more pipelines. Pipelines spill less per unit of volume shipped and usually avoid populated centers to a much greater degree than railways. They're better for the environment and safer for humans. Fossil fuels can be nasty stuff, but we currently still need them and we require the ability to move them around safely. The next time you see environmentalists protesting pipeline construction, ask them why they're not chaining themselves to their local railway tracks instead. We should do our best to avoid rolling bomb's through beautiful towns like Lac-Mégantic on a daily basis.