pipeline safety

White House stays quiet after police confrontation at Standing Rock

Law enforcement blasted protesters with water, pepper spray, and rubber bullets Sunday night.

Congress passes the wrong pipeline bill

It turns out Republicans and Democrats truly can work together to craft a bipartisan pipeline safety bill that satisfies both parties! And then they can accidentally pass the old version instead. The bill, which laid out new penalties for pipeline safety violations following a deadly explosion last year, was laboriously hashed out in a bipartisan […]

Hey, other tar-sands pipelines also suck!

Lest you get too caught up in Keystone XL and forget that tar-sands oil is super-destructive in general, NRDC has a new report about how a completely different pipeline will also lead to ecological disaster. The Northern Gateway pipeline, which would run from Alberta to British Columbia, has the potential to be just as destructive […]

State Department picked less-than-objective company to review Keystone XL impact

Sometimes you wish government bureaucrats would just stop and think. It's been clear for a while now that the State Department favors the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. But one would think that they'd like to at least preserve the appearance that they were conducting a thorough and unbiased review of the pipeline’s environmental impacts.

Apparently that wasn't a particular concern, because the department allowed TransCanada, the pipeline operator, to participate in the selection of the company conducting the environmental review. Perhaps less than surprisingly, Transcanada recommended Cardno Entrix, which considers TransCanada a "major client," to do the job.

Keystone XL could be a terrorist target — and more from my post in the N.Y. Times

The Keystone XL pipeline could be a tempting target for terrorists. That's one of the points I make in a new "Room for Debate" post on the New York Times website.

Hundreds of miles of new pipelines to carry Pennsylvania gas

How big is natural gas in Pennsylvania? This big, according to the Associated Press:

More than half of the interstate natural-gas pipeline projects proposed to federal energy regulators since the beginning of 2010 involve Pennsylvania — at a cost estimated at more than $2 billion.