Railhead: Fantasy worlds and rail transportation. . . limiting conveyance by rail

Fantasy worlds and rail transportation. . . limiting conveyance by rail.

Of our various blogs, this one has been, by far, the least likely to see a commentary post.  Indeed, this appears to be the very first one.  But as this one involves rail transportation, I'm going to post it here.

Readers of the blog where I typically post commentary, Lex Anteinternet, know that I've posted a lot of comments on the hard times in the petroleum and coal industries, particularly in Wyoming.  As part of those, I've categorically rejected the popular thesis in Wyoming that the Federal government is engaged in a "war" on the energy industry, or that there's some gigantic conspiracy to do the energy industries in.  In this post, however, I will comment on a type of "not in my backyard" effort that's really shortsighted, and which give credence to those who feel ignored and oppressed in this area.

Recently there was a big derailment in Mosier, Oregon. That occurrence has lead to an effort, centered in the Pacific Northwest but focused nationally, to ban the transportation of petroleum oil by rail.

Sometimes, things go wrong.  Derailed train, Minnesota, 1986.

That's just flat out absurd.

I guess its obvious that I'm a railroad fan, why else, after all, would a person have a blog dedicated to railroad features, so perhaps I'm partisan.  But campaigns of this type strike me as very ill informed in some ways. The concept seems to be that, because all of the cars are on a single train, a train purposes a unique danger that other  means of transportation do not.  That's simply not correct.  The other means are truck and pipeline.  The hundreds of trucks that replace a single train pose a danger as well, and arguably a much greater one as the risk would have be assessed for each single truck, not just one as if it were a train.  Pipelines are probably safer, although pipeline spills do occur, and the are basically permanent. Rail lines have other uses for other types of trains.

I suspect that much of this movement doesn't even directly relate to safety, but rather is part of an environmental movement on the Pacific Coast that has been pretty successful in shutting down the loading of coal by sea.  Given the current economics of coal, I'm not nearly as convinced, however, that this has been that detrimental to coal.  It's the low price and declining use that has been.  But I suspect there's a poorly thought out concept that if the shipping of oil by rail is stopped, people quit using it.

Not hardly.

This view, I'd note, is supported by some comments from a Pacific Coast environmental activists, who is quoted as saying in a newspaper as follows:

On the evening of June 6, more than a hundred climate activists met at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland to discuss their response to the oil train derailment in the Columbia River Gorge three days earlier, said 350PDX director Adriana Voss-Andreae. 

“The call for a temporary moratorium on oil trains is a call for a shred of decency for the Mosier community, but it does nothing to meet the magnitude of the problem,” she said. “If the government won’t stop the bomb trains, then we must do so ourselves. There will be a mass direct action in the coming two weeks. We encourage all to join.”

Climate activists claiming its a "bomb train"?  Well, I'm skeptical. Either they simply oppose the shipping of all fossil fuels by any means, or their activism is unfocused.

Well, whatever a person might think about climate change, pretending that preventing shipping by rail is going to have some impact on the use of fossil fuels is just fooling yourself.  And, ironically, trains are by far the most efficient, and hence the most "green", of any means of transportation we have.  Putting the same oil on the road in trucks is at least as dangerous and a lot dirtier.  And that's probably what would happen if the oil wasn't shipped by rail.