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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

For those opposing pipelines, you're fighting the wrong battle. It will just go onto trains and trucks which burn oil to move oil, and are much less safe.

Some would argue we shouldn't be using oil in the first place now that we know the true cost. And those people are right. But when it comes to disincentivizing oil, I'd much rather see the externalities priced into fossil fuels through carbon taxes, ramped up incrementally over ten years. Let the market work its magic once the true cost is accounted for. People will switch so fast to greener alternatives it will make your head spin.

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Agreed, but keep in mind that shipping via vehicles raises the cost which potentially lowers consumption and or production. Nothing inconsistent about both fighting for a tax and fighting to keep costs higher at the same time given uncertainty about the success of a tax.

Using vehicles is also much more risky. They've done studies before and accidents like the Lac Megantic disaster that blew up a town show that pipelines are safer compared to alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

It's not "the wrong battle":

1. It's not as trivial as that for a Canadian tar sands operation to send oil by truck into the US to some port. 2. There are alternative routes for pipelines. Some areas struggled against pipelines and they were rerouted in a way which doesn't threaten their area. Of course this can threaten some other place, but not every piece of land is the same. 3. Instead of trucks, the pipeline-laying entity may consider safer dual-pipe solutions which will, effectively, not leak. 4. You're only saying that there's another parallel struggle, which is preventing regular oil transport by truck because it's unsafe. Well, possibly. 5. Prices are not set according to what we believe they should be set, but according to various relations of power in society (including but not limited to supply, demand, ability to pressure the state etc.); this is doubly the case for strategic resources like oil, where there's a literal international body for price-fixing...

”It will just go onto trains and trucks which burn oil to move oil”

“burn _more_ oil”. It also takes energy to move oil through pipelines, but given that we want to move lots and lots of oil between two fixed locations, building a pipeline and pumping the oil through it is cheaper than building rail tracks or roads and using trains or trucks (I would hope and expect it also uses less energy, but that isn’t necessarily true; having to pay train/truck drivers may be the deciding factor)

Pipelines are far more energy efficient. A cost comparison isn't that interesting to me. Pipelines are usually cheaper over time, but I don't care about bringing costs down for fossil fuel production.

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