Arkansas pipeline leak no reason to block Keystone XL

Environmental pressure groups responded predictably to a Mar. 29 pipeline accident in Arkansas. "With stakes this high," the Sierra Club said after crude oil leaked into a neighborhood near Little Rock, "there is no excuse for the White House to approve Keystone XL."

So where were the Sierra Club and other like-minded groups when the Carnival Triumph cruise ship blew off its moorings in high winds and hit another vessel in Mobile, Ala., the following week?

The Triumph is the ship that drifted for 5 days in the Gulf of Mexico after an engine-room fire on Feb. 10 shut down power and other systems, forcing 4,200 people aboard to make the best of conditions described as generally miserable and in many cases unsanitary. It was undergoing repairs when the second dose of high-profile misfortune hit on Apr. 3.

For the Triumph, one accident followed another. Yet no one is calling for a ban on the construction of cruise ships.

Accidents happen in any industry. They provide reasons for all industries to work with extreme care, to clean up their messes and make appropriate reparations for lives disrupted, and to answer to whatever infractions of law, regulation, or standards might have contributed to the mishaps. They do not represent reasons to hobble essential work.

Using an accident in one place as a reason to foreclose kindred projects elsewhere is to assert a zero-risk standard no industry can meet. What's more, applying an impossible standard to one industry but not others betrays fundamental hypocrisy.

For environmental groups, pipeline safety is just a shill issue, anyway. As the Sierra Club made clear in its pitch to disallow Keystone XL because of the Arkansas leak from ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline, a more controversial goal is in play.

"It's impossible to fight climate change while simultaneously investing in one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fossil fuels on the planet," it said.

Exaggeration thus conspires with exploitation in resistance to a project promising secure supply of cheap and not-so-dirty energy. The regretful guess here is that, in the strained politics of Keystone XL, the strategy will prevail.