Dakota Access Pipeline: The Rest of the Story

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 28 Nov 2016 14:59:50 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Shawn McCoy at the Orlando Sentinel - What those Dakota Access Pipeline protesters dont tell you - Apparently, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the company funding the Dakota Access Pipeline, spent lots of time and attempted to have lots of meetings with native American tribes concerning the pipeline. The tribes mostly refused comment and didn't show up at the meetings.

But that Orlando Sentinel op-ed has no background information. I noticed that underneath Shawn McCoy's byline it said InsideSources.com. So I went there, and found his original article.

The Orlando Sentinel article is a copy of this one but with the two outgoing links removed. He links "record shows" in the third paragraph to another InsideSources article, which has no outgoing links. In other words, no record at all.

But he also links from "the federal court system" in the second to last paragraph, to a PDF of a court document providing a 58-page denial, by United States District Judge James E. Boasberg, dated September 9, 2016, of a preliminary injunction request by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. It contains a huge amount of background material, and is likely the source of most of Mr. McCoy's article. That background material's references are in a form that would require a lot of work, and likely access to a legal library, to find (no web links).

The PDF is on the web site of the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now, a pro-pipeline organization, so I suppose it could be fake, but Google finds a lot of other copies, including this one at Earth Justice. I saved my own copy here.

I skimmed it, enough to see that it likely supports Mr. McCoy's claims, but not enough to convince all the skeptics in the audience. If you're still skeptical, I urge you to chase the references from Judge Boasberg's ruling.

I don't really care about Standing Rock. It's a protest by a small group in the middle of nowhere concerning a pipeline that crosses rivers a half a mile from their land. Yes, those pipes may break, and polute the waters. More likely, though, they'll just provide lots of oil to fuel the cars of millions of Americans, including the protesters, for many years to come.

I also noticed that the project is already 3/4 done with $3 billion spent. It's no wonder that ETP wants to get on with it. They have thousands of highly-paid workers standing idle, waiting to resume work on a project for which ETP spent years getting all the necessary approvals.

Add comment Edit post Add post