This pipe is a poster child for everything we hate about fossil fuels. Thing is that oil will be mined. It will be moved, it will be used. We know this right?

“The draft Supplemental EIS concludes that approval or denial of the proposed Project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands,” it says, “or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area.”

So what is the safest way to move the oil? Pipe? Train? Ship?

Not easy to discover.

What’s The Safest Way To Transport Oil? US Transportation And State Departments Won’t Say

Train vs. pipeline: What’s the safest way to transport oil?
The public debate about the trade-offs between rail and pipeline transportation is relatively new, Johnston writes, but most evidence thus far has found that pipelines are safer but have a higher leak-rate than rail.

The environmental impact of trains must be higher than a pipeline. Fuel burned by the trains, accidents, building and maintaining track and associated hardware.

Thing is the Keystone pipeline is dominated by politics. politics that apparently prevent a fair assessment of risks.