Energy

If environmentalists were the praying kind, they would say the Arkansas leak was an answer to their prayers. They think it ends the debate over the Keystone pipeline. One green lobbyist says “this should be the nail in the coffin of the Keystone pipeline.” They’re eager to pressure President Obama to veto Keystone.

The Arkansas pipeline, called the Pegasus, was laid down and buried two feet under in 1947, and runs from Patooka, Ill., where it connects to pipelines from western Canada, to refineries in Nederland, Texas. It sprang the leak March 29 at tiny Mayflower, Ark., a bedroom suburb of Little Rock, and spilled up to 5,000 barrels of tar-sands crude through ditches and across lawns of tidy middle-class brick houses, and was stopped just short of the shore of Lake Conway, popular with fishermen. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen.

ExxonMobil, operators of the pipeline, moved quickly when a drop in pressure signaled a leak. Valves 18 miles apart were closed within 16 minutes, shutting off movement of the sluggish crude. About 20 families were required to leave their homes and were put up at nearby hotels by ExxonMobil. Exxon dispatched 120 workmen and 15 vacuum trucks with 33 storage tanks to collect the 12,000 barrels of the oil and water mixture from streets, ditches and lawns. This week they’re steam-cleaning the streets.

To the Luddite environmentalists, life is just one endless tragedy, brought to you by fat Republicans, self-righteous Christians and greedy capitalists who keep inventing evil contraptions like electric lights, indoor plumbing, automobiles, computers and 10-speed blenders. Even bicycles are suspect. They all soak up energy. The Arkansas spill, unless you’re someone on a quiet Mayflower street with oil in the petunia patch, is not insignificant, but not a tragedy.

Mayflower, says one breathless commentator at The Atlantic Wire website, is “a scene straight out of the beginning of a post-apocalyptic movie – thick, black oil running down a suburban street . . . even more dangerous than it looks.”

Most of the people who live in Mayflower are working-class folk, who aren’t happy to see their lawns turned black by oil and are eager to get back into their houses, but they typically understand that “life happens.” Allen Dodson, the county judge (corresponding to county supervisor or manager in other places) says his constituents are mostly concerned about getting home. The oil fumes have “died down,” he says, “and to the untrained nose, it has greatly improved. It smells better than if you were just paving a road.” (Of course, unpaved streets don’t smell at all, if you can keep dogs, horses and pigs away from the dirt.)

Most Mayflower residents, like most Americans elsewhere, are unaware of the thousands of miles of pipeline that run under houses, shopping centers and even schools and hospitals, buried several feet below ground. No one was killed or even hurt at Mayflower, and moving oil in a pipeline is far safer than moving it by train or truck. The difference between a pipeline spill and a train-wreck spill, as the Wall Street Journal observes, is “a lesson in political opportunism.”

Such opportunism is what really smells. The Sierra Club, which never met an endangered slug or snake it wouldn’t embrace, says the Mayflower spill proves that “it’s not a matter of ‘if’ spills will occur on dangerous pipelines like Keystone XL, but rather ‘when’.”

Some oil spills are more fashionable in the compliant media than others. Last week, a Canadian Pacific Railway oil train derailed in Minnesota, spilling 15,000 barrels of crude. This was more than three times the oil spilled at Mayflower, but it went largely unremarked. The implications on safety are profound. As pipelines reach carrying capacity, the volume of oil carried on rail increases – up from 9,000 carloads five years ago to 233,000 carloads last year.

The environmentalists should embrace Keystone if they’e really interested in public safety and pristine countryside. Keystone, with abundant new failsafe technology, will replace pipelines like the Pegasus line through Arkansas. When the 36-inch Pegasus was built right after World War II, few safety requirements were in place, and pipelines, like other parts of the infrastructure, were thrown across the landscape in a hurry, the better to sate pent-up demand for oil and all the things oil makes possible. The mantra was familiar: “Build it and they won’t have to come, because they’re already here.”

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Global warming, which was mostly a scam invented by researchers looking for government grants, is over. The great warming phenomenon, which was supposed to have sent polar bears to vacation in Miami Beach by now, ended in 1997.

Britain's Met Office, which tracks weather and makes forecasts, and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the source of much global warming research (some of it faked, some of it not), agree, according to the London Daily Mail, that Planet Earth could even be heading for an icy patch "to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the [frozen-over] Thames in the 17th century." They call this Cycle 25.

These specialists in shakedown "science," who speak only in hyperbole, are calling the weather of 2011 the worst in history, or at least in memory, or maybe a decade, and say they could have found useful links between disasters and global-warming "science" by now if only they could shake down tightwad taxpayers for a few more millions.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made a little list of a dozen weather disasters of the year now swiftly passing into history -- wildfires in Texas, floods on the Mississippi and tornadoes in Tornado Alley. Unfortunately for global-warming "scientists" ever on the scout for handouts, there were no bad hurricanes to report this year. Nevertheless, the speakers of hyperbole are making the best of the scant material at hand.

Some of our politicians who know better are limbering up to attempt to lead a stampede away from nuclear power in reaction to the once-in-a-millennium earthquake, followed by the 500-year tsunami in Japan. Logically, next up should be a shutdown of trains and ships since several of those were lost in the storm, too.

Expecting the runaway media to put away hysteria is as futile as expecting dogs to quit chasing cars, so there's the usual rush to wrong-headed judgment. The media's longed-for worst case scenario continues to elude the Japanese government, busy with evacuations and trying to cool overheated fuel rods. The worst elements of the media are left with only speculation about what could happen. This is even more fun than setting off a supermarket run on bread and toilet paper on the eve of a light snowfall. The radiation damage in Japan so far, though epic, has been limited and contained to the nuclear plants. "In simple human terms," observes the Wall Street Journal, "the natural destruction of earth and sea have far surpassed any errors committed by man."

The banging and clanging of public debate, particularly over President Obama’s attempt to impose a welfare state with the gassy bloat held so dear on the Continent, makes European teeth itch. And not just the Europeans actually in Europe.

It’s the way Americans make free with free speech – rich, robust and occasionally over the top – as if they were armed with a Constitution that guarantees them the right to say whatever pops into their heads, nice or not.

The global-warming caravan has moved on, bound for a destination in oblivion. The United Nations is hanging the usual lamb chop in the window this week in Mexico for the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, but the Washington guests are staying home. Nobody wants to get the smell of the corpse on their clothes.

Everybody who imagined himself anybody raced to Copenhagen last year for the global-warming summit, renamed "climate change" when the globe began to cool, as it does from time to time. Some 45,000 delegates, "activists," business representatives and the usual retinue of journalists registered for the party in Copenhagen. This year, only 1,234 journalists registered for the Cancun beach party. The only story there is that there's no story there. The U.N. organizers glumly concede that Cancun won't amount to anything, even by U.N. standards.

Just as soon as we bury the last of the millions of men, women and children who died after eating a cocktail of Gulf shrimp poisoned by the BP oil well, exposure to the burning of surface oil or from a fatal fall tripping over a tar ball on a blackened beach, we must get on with new frights and alarums.

Or maybe not. The feds, who manufactured much of the oil spill hysteria (in connivance with press and tube), now concede that Chicken Little was misinformed. The Food and Drug Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (who knew that the oceans and the atmosphere require federal administration?) say that seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is safe to eat.

Prince Charles, like his "progressive" counterparts here, would even deprive a man of a good soak, unless we're talking about taxes. He wants British families to "snub the tub" and take shorter showers to protect the environment. "If everybody in a four-person family replaced one bath a week with a five-minute shower you could save 5 to 15 pounds [sterling] per year off your energy bill." That's $8 to $23 in real money.

Sheryl Crow, the environmentally enhanced pop singer, is jeered in the pulpwood mills for her campaign to save toilet paper, with no applause for her songs sung sadly. She famously proposed "a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting." She thinks one per sitting will do it. Karl Rove was scolded for lack of gallantry when he avoided shaking Miss Crow's hand as she walked up to berate him for being Karl at a dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association. He didn't want to be a boor but he knew where her hand might have been with that one square of two-ply quilted.

The situation is so dire that thesaurus publishers sent out emergency appeals to distinguished wordsmiths for new synonyms for "rant" and "ruin." We exhausted the synonyms we've got. The doomcriers, if not necessarily the Gulf of Mexico, have clearly been having a bad hair day.

But now dawns the recognition, as nearly always happens in the wake of disasters, calamities, catastrophes, etc., that maybe the politicians and the mainstream media have been guilty of a little contagious hyperbole. Exaggeration has been the order of the day. But maybe the end has not been so nigh as we were confidently told it was. Some unexpected media voices are (gulp) saying so.

There’s no shortage of invitees to the dance. The beloved British Petroleum, or BP as British Petroleum prefers to be called, can furnish an entire cast of hangees. So can the federal government, whose bureaucrats long ago perfected the art of bungling. Even the White House, where Barack Obama fiddled with his Teleprompter and his putter for 70 days before he allowed the first oil skimmers to Louisiana, has an abundant array of criminal incompetents. The president kept the skimmers out of the Gulf at the behest of the maritime unions, but he did, it must be said, shed a few presidential tears for the pelicans.

The good news about the oil cap was received in Washington, and in the media, with reluctant one-handed applause. Pounding on BP was fun for one and all, all the more fun because the poundees deserved a lick upside the head and a kick in the backside. Lost in the fun, however, was the fact that only BP and the oil companies knew how to do anything about the runaway well, and the prospective hangees were the only people who could fix it. When the well was finally capped it was hard to give up the fun. The heroes – and heroes they are – are the engineers and drillers who devised the remarkable exercise in technology and made it work. One day, when the passions of the mob cool, these heroes will be recognized for the miracle wrought by remote control at the bottom of the sea.