The New Year came in on the heels of an explosion in the small prairie town of Casselton, North Dakota, when two BNSF Railway trains collided, one carrying crude oil. The residents of Casselton were told to evacuate as the thick clouds of black smoke filled the sky. The only comfort in this latest of crude oil transportation disasters was that no people lost their lives. That wasn’t the case in Lac-Megantic, Quebec where 47 people lost their lives when a Montreal Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd train carrying tar sand oil derailed and exploded. Small rural communities and First Nations lands have suffered the most from this steady flow of oil spills. When it isn’t train tankers careening off the tracks, it is crude oil pipeline leaks flowing out on to wheat fields and into rivers. When it isn’t crude oil, it is natural gas explosions such as the one in West, Texas last April, when a fertilizer plant blew up, killing 15 innocent people. Repeatedly, the oil and gas industry has shown criminal disregard for the lives and property of people and communities.
So, what can citizens do? We could and we must say that the nation’s infrastructure for oil and gas development is not up to the threat posed by the headlong drive to squeeze every last drop of petroleum out of the earth. We could and we must say that federal, state and local governments have failed to protect us, and have fallen far short of establishing and enforcing effective regulatory standards for the oil and gas industry. These measures are critical and it is up to us to hold our governments accountable.
But monitoring, regulating and preparing for disasters is not enough. All the spills, train derailments, explosions, and pollution, as horrific as they are, pale next to the disaster of climate chaos, caused in large part by the overuse of petroleum.
It is past time to stand up to this reckless and dangerous form of energy production. Citizens and communities must act to protect themselves. In Minnesota, the Public Utility Commission has agreed to hearings on the proposed expansion of the Alberta Clipper pipeline. It is time to join together and tell the PUC that we don’t need and we don’t want 800,000 barrels per day of tar sand oil traveling across northern Minnesota and approaching Lake Superior. In fact, we don’t want it to come out of the ground. Stopping the Alberta Clipper in 2014 is our New Year’s resolution.
