What the Bluegrass Pipeline Has In Store For Kentucky

Fossil fuel is dead.  But before we finally dispose of its rotting corpse, it's going to spread death and destruction further than any of us dare imagine.

Charles Pierce:

Steve Jensen's land is dead now. His farm in North Dakota is a dead zone because an oil pipeline run by a company called Tesoro ruptured somehow and blessed Jensen's land with 26,000 barrels of crude that has bubbled to the surface, and now, from the air, Jensen's farm looks like the Talladega Speedway. Because it is a pipeline, and pipelines burst, this one burst. And because it is an oil company, and oil companies lie, especially about their pipelines, which burst, Tesoro immediately broke the glass on the bullshit-alibi alarm that hangs on the wall of its company cafeteria.

That company won't pay a fucking dime in compensation. Neither will Williams Co. when - not it - their toxic fracking waste pipeline through the heart of the Bluegrass bursts and destroys Central Kentucky's economy.

Because it is run by greedy fools, North Dakota is a state that has sold its soul to the oil companies, which lie, especially about their pipelines, which burst, and it also appears that North Dakota, and the greedy fools who run it, may have set a land-speed rcord for ass-covering.

SNIP

Frankly, I have no reason to believe "officials" when they say the leak has been stopped. I don't have any reason to believe that this gunk hasn't gotten into the groundwater until somebody from outside North Dakota, which pretty plainly is terrified of pissing off the extraction industries that now run the state, tells me that's the case. ("A thick band of clay"? OK, trust but verify.) Frankly, given what we know about pipelines, and the people who build them, and the people who operate them, and how they are the property of an entire industry that poisons the land and then lies about, the fact that we even deliberating building our old pal, the Keystone XL pipeline, is completely mad.