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Eco123 Revista da Economia e Ecologia
Keystone XL Pipeline, High Pressure Oil Pipeline
Almost 800,000 litres of oil have flowed from a leak in the Keystone XL pipeline in the USA. This information was provided by the operating company Trans-Canada on Thursday, 16th November. According to the environmental authority the oil had leaked out underground in the state of South Dakota…
This report was published the day after the environmental disaster by the New York Times, the Portuguese paper Público, the British paper The Guardian and the German FAZ, among others. It is one of around 2,000 daily reports that made it onto the news pages. How much does it mean to the reader?
In retrospect. The disastrous destruction caused by Hurricanes Irma and Harvey is still fresh in our memories. Just the insured extent of the damage from both storms has been estimated by the specialist service Air Worldwide at a total of 285 billion dollars (180 and 105 billion dollars). These figures say nothing about the suffering of those people who survived, but lost everything and were left with nothing. And in what state is nature itself after such a heavy storm? Increasingly powerful hurricanes are attributed to the climate change caused by humans and their consumption habits through the burning of fossil fuels such as oil (petrol, diesel, etc.) Given this knowledge, why is the issuing of licences for the extraction of crude oil not being stopped and consumption switched to regenerative energy sources, asks ECO123? When they publish news reports, the press, radio and television often conceal important interrelationships.
This report attaches great importance to informing readers that the preservation of their ground water is sacred to the original inhabitants of America. At a time of climate change, the Sioux and other indigenous peoples have been protesting for years on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota (USA) about the exploitation of their homeland for oil through fracking and other environmentally harmful methods. They are opposed to the extraction and transportation of the raw shale oil from their land by the Keystone XL Pipeline and its operating company Trans-Canada. Incidentally, this is not the first spill from a pipeline. In recent years, there have been others in Montana (Yellowstone River) and in Michigan (Kalamazoo River) …
What’s missing? The connection with Portugal. Shouldn’t crude oil and gas also be extracted on our own doorstep, both off the coast and inland? And in order to report on the situation in Standing Rock, South Dakota (USA), Lee Plenty Wolf, the leader of the Lakota Sioux, visited Portugal and the Freixo-do-Meio farm near Montemor-O-Novo (Alentejo). Together with organic farmer Alfredo Cunhal Sendim and a group of interested activists from all over Portugal, they undertook a walk to a two-thousand- year-old olive tree. They sat down under the tree and exchanged information about the situations in the two countries. Afterwards, there was singing and prayers for rain, and possible solutions were discussed.
