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A New Act for Protecting and Restoring North and South America’s Bird Populations: The Migratory Bird Protection Act H.R. 5552

Strengthen Migratory Bird protections: Protect The Migratory Bird Treaty Act and support the bipartisan Migratory Bird Protection Act of 2020 H.R. 5552

Given the large declines in songbird populations (North America has lost 1 in 4 birds over the last 50 years according to several long-term studies), maintaining and strengthening legal protections for migratory bird is called for in this current moment. Migratory birds require the unified and coordinated efforts of nations, as well as federal, state, and local government to be maximally effective at protecting birds. Our avian migrants make their home in several geographies. The US has been, until very recently, a regional leader in this effort to protect migrating birds. The 102-year-old Migratory Bird Treaty Act has been a successful partnership between the US and several other nations. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act is an important pillar of global conservation. Abandoning it, or selectively interpreting it, has the potential to damage adherence by our global partners. It is important that we maintain the integrity of our part of this treaty. 

Chinmey Swiftts, Cheatura pelagica migrates across the
Gulf of Mexico twice a year.
Photo courtesy of AllAboutBirds.com

If sharing the planet ethically seems like some mere liberal philosophy, consider this: conservation also makes serious business and general economic sense. The conservation of wild places for hunting generates about 700,000 jobs nationwide and hunters spend nearly $22.1 billion in local economies annually (California Fish and Wildlife Service). Not all of that will be bird specific spending, but turkey, grouse, quail, and duck hunting clearly generate billions annually. Hunting generates jobs and revenue. Birdwatching is also a perhaps unexpected economic powerhouse. Bird watchers spend, annually $41 billion on trips and equipment, and local economies benefit from 14.9 billion dollars a year spent on food, lodging and transportation (US Fish and Wildlife Service). Furthermore, birds are also integral in the performance of ecosystem services (services rendered to humanity for free which we would otherwise have to pay for). Ecosystem services can fall into four basic categories, provisioning services (food, feathers etc.), regulating services (by acting as pollinators, pest control agents, or decomposers), cultural services (recreational, aesthetic or spiritual services), and supporting services (soil formation, nutrient cycling) according to “Why Birds Matter: Avian Ecological Function and Ecosystems Services.” The general economic benefits of conservation don’t accrue for only a few small narrow interests but flow outward into the broader economy. 

Windmills and Cell Phone Towers represent
only two dangers among many that night flying
migrating birds face.

 In addition to the clear economic advantages to adopting conservation minded policy, a strong majority of Americans support conservation as a principle. Rural Americans, Urban Americans, Democrats and Republican citizens also broadly support conservation and climate regulation. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, the majority of Americans want the government to do more to protect the environment. 62% of respondents said the government is doing too little on environmental issues. The majority of respondents prioritize the environment even if it limits economic growth. (Though there is no reason why economic growth and environmental regulation should be mutually exclusive endeavors.)

Given the economics and the public’s general attitudes and support of conservation/environmental protections, it is fair to ask why the interests and bottom lines of a handful companies should be privileged over the interests and economics of local communities? Relaxing the requirements to limit incidental killing and eliminating the need to do environmental assessment may save a company some money, but only at the potential expense of a much wider community. It is important, now more than perhaps any time since the enactment of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MTBA) in 1918, to strengthen, not weaken the act. We cannot allow reckless incidental take of this hemisphere’s birds. Incidental killing of birds account for at least a quarter of bird deaths, and represents the most avoidable source of mortality birds face. It is important to fight the Trump Administrations attempts to roll back the legislative teeth of the MTBA. One way we can do that is by supporting with our votes, H.R. 5552, The Migratory Bird Protection Act. This regulatory law will reinstate the proscriptions against incidental take by industry and require environmental assessments prior to major industrial projects. 

The Blackpoll Warbler, Setophaga striata, is a powerhouse
migrant. Some populations make a 90
hour flight across the Atlantic to winter in the
Andes in South America
Photo Courtesy of AllAboutBirds.com

Please contact your representatives, write letters to your local papers and voice your support of conservation. 

 Here is a link to help you find your representatives. 

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Thinking Quantitatively About the Costs of SARs-CoV-2/COVID-19

 SARs-CoV-2 and the cost of social distancing

Currently there is a vocal minority movement, supported by forces within the Conservative Party and fanned by news cycles that cannot help but be drawn to conflict, whose aim is to open the US economy quickly and with few restrictions. There is even a movement within this movement seriously protesting the wearing of masks in public. These protesters say the economic costs of social distancing measures to the US will kill more people than COVID-19. “It will kill the economy.” They may be right, but I have seen very few predictions of how this might come to pass, based on actual data, or even on reasonable economic models. While I have not seen any good data-based projections for how a four or five-month program of social distancing will result in lives lost due to economic depression (damage to businesses, job loss, reduced family incomes etc), I have some data-based projections for how lives lost from Covid-19 might translate to a monetary cost based on known death rates and economic valuations of human life.  I’ll be using Maine to draw example numbers from, and assuming a time frame of however long it would take for the disease to spike and fade without intervention or mitigation, which is basically what the “Open up Now” contingent is asking for.  

The Back of Maine’s Envelope. A tale of two fatality rates. (Case Fatality Rate will often be abbreviated CFR)

One of the data points used to make these calculations in the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), which is the number of people dying from COVID-19 divided by the number of people infected with COVID-19.  For the following exercise I’m going to produce two sets of numbers for Maine. I’m first going to use the South Korean case fatality rate of 2.368%.  In the second model, I’m going to use Maine’s numbers as they currently stand. While the South Korean numbers may tell us something important about how deadly the virus is in an environment with a robust response program, Maine hasn’t had that response, nor has the rest of the US as a whole. The Maine numbers, while they skew higher, may tell us something important about how Maine will fare with COVID-19.  

Using South Korea’s case fatality rate, what could the Pine Tree State expect from SARs-CoV-2? Assume just a third of Mainers get the novel coronavirus. That is probably on the low end. Angela Merkel suggested Germany might face 70% infected, rather than the 33% this model is using. I worry my model will be dismissed as alarmist if it assumes a larger percentage of infected people. Hence the 33%. It is important to remember, my model is not intended to predict actual disease trends or epidemiological outcomes. The purpose of this model is to demonstrate that lives lost to COVID-19 also have real economic costs. As my model will show, these economic costs can be quite daunting.

Maine has a population of 1,344,212 people. Assuming 1/3 of Maine gets infected, that would give the state 448,070 people with COVID-19. With a 2.368% CFR that gives us 10,610 dead. This would be the number expected if the disease only infected 1/3 of Mainers with the South Korean case fatality rate. No time frame, mitigation or further contagion is assumed.  At present and with mitigation, we have only lost 65 people and our actual documented cases are massively well below 448,070. I haven’t been able to find the hospitalization rate for South Korea, so we will leave that aside. What would 10,610 deaths cost the Maine economy? 

The US government values a US citizen’s life at $10,000,000 USD. With that in mind it is pretty simple to derive an estimate. 10,610 deaths would represent a $106,000,000,000 loss to the Maine economy (10,610x $10,000,000). Even with South Korea’s smaller case fatality rate, this cost would be quite significant. The Maine GDP last year was 59,255,000,000. The economic cost to Maine at the South Korean rate dwarfs our state’s GDP.

Maine’s case fatality rate is 4.9% (calculated on May 8). Maine’s COVID-19 hospitalization rate is 14.9%. Want to update with today’s data? If these numbers are closer to Maine’s case fatality rate, and hospitalization rates, how many deaths, and hospitalizations can Maine expect with 1/3 of the population infected? 

448,070 x .049 = 22,153.3 deaths. Economic cost to Maine = $221,530,000,000 

448,070 x .1443= 64,656.5 hospitalized. 

The economic cost to Maine’s economy of widespread hospitalization due to COVID-19 is harder to calculate, but lost productivity, lost discretionary spending would have to be enormous burdens on Maine’s local economies. 

These kinds of numbers are interesting but what do they mean when set against the Maine economy itself?  Maine GDP for 2019 was $59,275,000,000 dollars. Now that we have a couple of estimates of COVID-19 cost based on different case fatality rates, we can make some simple comparisons. 

South Korean CFR economic cost $106,000,000,000 > $59,275,000,000

Maine CFR economic cost $221,530,000,000>>$59,275,000,000

Even the current small number of Maine’s COVID-19 fatalities, (65 as of 13 May 2020) amount to a hefty $650,000,000 cost to Maine’s economy. 

These are two examples, of course, and with this template one can examine a wide range of consequences by adjusting the CFR. I encourage everyone to play with these ideas. This frame work can be used to think about any state. Personally, I would like to believe that the actual fatality rate for SARs-CoV-2 is much lower than any of the CFRs we have seen. We won’t know more until testing in the US becomes much more reliable and accessible. 

What is the actual case fatality rate of COVID-19? 

There is an argument about what the real CFR is.  So far, scientists don’t really know. Many people believe that SARs-CoV-2 is already wide-spread, not reflected in the confirmed cases’ because testing large swaths of the population hasn’t been possible. That would mean the actual pool of infected people (the denominator) is much larger, and thus the actual case fatality rate much lower than what is deduced from confirmed cases.  This hypothesis almost certainly has some truth to it. We know there are asymptomatic cases. Given that we don’t know the true depth of infected cases, how can we proceed? How should we proceed?

We should proceed cautiously and empirically. There are open questions to be sure, but the data we do have doesn’t give us a lot of reason to just assume COVID-19 (more specifically SARs-CoV-2) has a fatality rate below 1%, as many people posit. It may be. So far no one has been able to demonstrate that it is below 1%. I think, for the time being, we are stuck using the case fatality rates on offer, as wide ranging as they are.  Above, I chose to use the South Korean case fatality rate of 2.368%. I think their rate is going to be closer to the actual fatality rate of COVID-19. This is certainly an assumption, but my reasoning is as follows. The South Koreans tested aggressively, isolated infected people and did robust contact tracing. Their health care system was never overwhelmed, and never experienced the reductions in quality of care present in overwhelmed systems. From the outside looking in, South Korea was able to keep infections low, find and isolate enough cases to keep transmission down, and manage treatment of patients with the full force of an unburdened modern health care system. I also chose the South Korean numbers because, on the low end, they seem conservative. Using the South Korean numbers is not wildly optimistic (by which I mean it doesn’t assume incredibly low fatality rates that have yet to be demonstrated). The estimate also isn’t high like the numbers in the UK or Sweden, which seem to be outliers on the high end (14.327% and 11.148% respectively- as of 13 May 2020), given that so many other places have case fatality rates in the 3-5% range. 

I did not try to factor in effects of mitigation or the effects of overwhelmed healthcare systems on the numbers, in part because I don’t want to make more assumptions and in part because I have no idea how to credibly add such effects to my model. By demonstrating that lives lost also have significant costs, all I really want to offer  is an estimate of the economic cost of opening the economy too soon, causing more deaths than would otherwise happen, using a hopefully reasonable estimate of case fatality rate, and the empirically derived rate for Maine.  At the end I will offer a sketch of what I think the implications for the numbers would be with and without mitigation efforts. I’m not factoring in population demographics (and fatality rates really shift a lot depending on age, economic status, and health related risk factors, so bear that in mind). This model is also uncomplicated.  I hope, though, that its pared down simplicity helps people think about the problem clearly. 

A note about fatality rates.

The case fatality rate and the actual fatality rate are not the same thing. The case fatality rate is a number derived from known diagnosed cases vs deaths from diagnosed cases. It may overestimate or underestimate the threat of a disease-causing pathogen. How close this estimate (CFR) is to a pathogen disease process’ actual fatality rate will depend on how reliably that disease process leads to fatalities. For instance, a CFR will massively overestimate deaths if a pathogen is actually widespread but not very prone to actually causing symptoms or killing people. For instance, if it turned out that most of the world was already infected with SARs-CoV-2, the current CFR would be massively overestimating the lethality of SARs-CoV-2. 

The actual fatality rate of a pathogen is much harder to derive. To discover this requires more intense and often more difficult investigation. In addition to knowing the CFR, epidemiologists must find out who has the disease, who has symptoms, who dies from the disease, who gets it and who doesn’t. This kind of estimate requires massive amounts of work. In relation to SARs-CoV-2, that detailed work is only just beginning. The bigger picture won’t be known for some time. For an examination of the case fatality rate, click this text. Crude as the case fatality rate may be, it is the most reliable data we have.

A few notes about the back of Maine’s COVID-19 envelope

This is a simple model. I haven’t accounted for time frames, or contagion rates, mitigation efforts, or no mitigations efforts. My total deaths simply assume the disease runs its course and infection doesn’t extend beyond 1/3 of Maine’s population. These assumptions were meant to simplify the model. In reality the spread of the disease could be much greater than 1/3, or much lower. The fatality rate for SARs-CoV-2 will undoubtedly be refined as more data is gathered, as will COVID-19’s CFR. I think both will skew downward. The former because I expect we will find significant percentage of infected persons who present with no or mild symptoms, the latter because doctors, nurses and an army of medical scientists are going to figure out better ways to treat COVID-19. 

We can, even with this paucity of data, infer a few things, and posit a reasonable course (that can and should be corrected as new data comes in). 

Given that the projected losses of life, as well as the costs associated with that lost life can be quite high, keeping as many people as possible from getting SARs-CoV-2 must be a policy goal. The other thing that seems obvious even if the CFR of COVID-19 is only as high as South Korea’s, is that it would be much better for the economy if Maine, the US, and world as a whole, spread those losses over a longer period of time so no one financial quarter absorbs the bulk of the losses.  Additionally, a slower disease spread over a longer period of time would mean that health care workers would have greater resources, time, and space to treat sick people as they come in.  This would almost certainly mean a lower death toll than any projected in my simple model. If that humanitarian argument doesn’t move you, it is also true that lower overall deaths would mean lower overall economic costs.

Plenty of Quibbling Room

There is plenty to debate in my model. Which estimate is likely to be closer to COVID-19’s actual fatality rate? Is a US life really worth ten million dollars? Does life devalue with age? Some might argue that earnings go down with age, but on the other hand, older people also spend a lot of money in the economy. How do population demographics affect fatality rates? Why are CFRs different across countries? The questions are endless and should absolutely be explored. The purpose of these back of the envelope numbers is more to frame issues in a more quantitative way. I want to present an argument in opposition to “Keeping Maine under social distancing will ruin Maine’s economy forever,” and “More people will die from social distancing than from COVID-19!” 

The “Open Up Now” crowd rarely offers numbers to support their hypotheses. The discussion offered is consistently without links to economic analysis of reduced economic activity. We should definitely pay attention to the concerns of those who want to open up the economy immediately. However, those concerns, subjective as they are, can be hard to set into a robust economic analysis. One of the goals of this piece is to encourage anyone one considering the disease management issue to think more quantitatively and less qualitatively. Hyperbole gets us nowhere. Vague worries don’t help either. Quantitative thinking bolstered by facts and trends in the data can lead to much more fruitful discussions. They can help us see each other points and concerns much more clearly. 

As to what the economic costs of continued physical distancing might be projected to be, there is at least one comparable event, the 1918 flu pandemic, which seems to deflate the qualitative arguments of the “Open up now” contingent. The 1918 flu, which was also mitigated with physical distancing programs which were certainly economically costly, and came on the heels of a costly world war. However, a Planet Money analysis of a city by city approach to physical distancing (shorter less strict vs longer more strict) and the economic costs found that, "We found that cities that intervened earlier and more aggressively actually experienced a relatively stronger bounce back in their economy in 1919, the year after the pandemic.”

It appears that at least in the 1918 flu pandemic, physical distancing did not equal financial Armageddon. The places that did early, and comprehensively seemed to have bounced back faster.

Important considerations.

In Maine we currently don’t see widespread infection, or overwhelmed health care systems. There are only 65 deaths and, it seems, limited disease spread. Currently the Maine infectious rate for SARs-CoV-2 is 1.08 and not the 2.4 found in COVID-19 hotspots. This is incredibly good news and seems to argue against some of the more dire financial and human costs in the model offered. An infection rate of 1.08 does mean that the number of infected is still growing in Maine, but at a substantially slower rate (down from a March 8, 2020 peak of 1.58). It is entirely reasonable to wonder if Maine would ever see a third of its population infected SARs-CoV-2. Maine seems very nearly to have plateaued in infection. We most certainly want to avoid the exponential growth of which this virus is clearly capable. 

I hypothesize that the part of that excellent trend is a product of Maine being an early adopter of physical distancing at both the government level and at the level of individuals. I also think Maine has benefitted from the natural physical distancing imposed by the state’s lower population density. There may be other local cultural factors too that have led to a lower overall rate of infection and fatalities. Maybe Mainers don’t actually travel that much within the state. Mainers may stay outdoors a lot more and don’t, especially in more rural areas, congregate in cramped poorly ventilated areas. If trends in grocery and supply hoarding is any indication, People, without direction from the federal, state, or local governments, began to self-isolate and limit their exposure to others. It is possible, even likely, that a combination of factors has likely been responsible for Maine’s good numbers. 

Will lifting restrictions lead to a “second wave” of infections? Will the number of infected approach the large numbers assumed in the model? What effect will an influx of tourists have on Maine’s rate of infection? Given that each state in the US is, in many ways, unique, should every state necessarily adopt the exact same strategy in dealing with SARs-CoV-2? Maine’s strategy probably shouldn’t mimic Massachussetts’ COVID-19 strategy for instance.

Summary

Given that the COVID-19 CFR for Maine, and for the US as a whole, is actually quite high, and that CFR represents the only really reliable data we have, we should certainly want our pandemic strategy to move forward cautiously. The economic and human costs associated with even moderately high CFRs make basing COVID-19 management policy on optimistic estimates of the actual SARs-CoV-2 fatality rate potentially quite dangerous. What we know means that letting SARs-CoV-2 run rampant through populations is irresponsible and unwise. The disease it causes is incredibly dangerous. There is no shortage of evidence that COVID-19 outbreaks can be very bad indeed. In the US we have several examples from places like Washington state., Gallup, New Mexico, and New York City.  The first known US citizen infected with SARs-CoV-2 arrived from Wuhan China on January 15, 2020.  In only about four months, COVID-19 has killed, in the US, 82,461 people (as of 13 May 2020).   We have no reliable treatments beyond symptom management. There is no vaccine to prevent it and no medicine to knock it down, or to reduce the severity of COVID-19. Remdesivir looks promising, but more work needs to be done to establish how effective it is in the treatment of COVID-19. There is also no herd immunity to insulate the vulnerable from the virus. A SARs-CoV-2 infection widely spread through the Maine population, even assuming a low COVID-19 CFR, would crush Maine’s economy. A prudent strategy, especially given the documented dangers as well as the many unknowns, would be to seek to limit the spread of SARs-CoV-2., while continuing to refine our understanding of SARs-CoV-2/COVID-19. 

Maine is poised to be one of leaders in testing capacity. Within the week (13 May as of this writing), anyone who’s physician wants them to be tested for COVID-19 will be able to do so without needing to present the telltale symptoms. We are still a long way off from reliable antibody testing, and not just in Maine, but everywhere in the US. Maine, along with the rest of the country, must increase the ability and reliability of tests for COVID-19 antibodies. Current anti-body tests have a great deal of cross-reactivity. This means that the current tests have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between SARs-CoV-2 antibodies and antibodies from other coronaviruses. Accurate antibody testing would provide a much more accurate picture of how deadly this novel coronavirus actually is. It would reveal where it has been and give a better idea of who has had it, crucial since we know a significant percentage of those infected with SARs-CoV-2 have either no symptoms, or only very mild symptoms.  Robust data collection could answer many questions that remain to be answered while driving a much more precise response to COVID-19, one reminiscent of the very successful South Korean model. 

Acknowledgments

Dr. Jessica Richmond and Damian Sorenson kindly took the time to read this, and offered a great deal of useful feedback that helped me clarify. 

A Day of Birding Around New Orleans, and Slightly Relevant Climatological Musings

9 October 2018

Birding Around New Orleans:

Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Area, and Audubon Louisiana Nature Center

After a breakfast at the delightful Café Beignet (fast becoming my morning necessity while I am here) I drove to the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, which lies about 20-30 minutes east of New Orleans. It is a flat marshland that sits between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi Sound. Even though I expected and got sporadic rain, the birding was good, if not great. I got a life list bird, saw some old southern coastal favorites and learned that I really need to brush up on my Gulls. Gull confusion aside, the day was fun. After my trip to the wildlife refuge, I stopped by the Audubon Louisiana Nature Center. Here is the list from both places. 

Mourning Dove lots

White Ibis 2 adults, 1 juvenile

Little Blue Heron 4

Tricolored Heron 2

Great Egret 6

Snowy Egret 6-10

Turkey Vulture 4

Great Blue Heron 2

Double-crested Cormorant 4

Red-winged Blackbird lots

Brown Pelican 15

Northern Harrier 1

Killdeer 2

Blue Jay 9

Northern Mockingbird several

American Crow 5

Hermit Thrush 1

Mallard 1

Purple Gallinule 4

Yellow-rumped Warbler 2-4

Laughing Gull lots

Herring Gull lots

Ring-billed Gull lots

Gull-billed Tern 1 

Loggerhead Shrike 1

photo by Greg Homel 

via abc birds.com

The Loggerhead Shrike was the big prize for me today though, of course, I thought all the birds were delightful. However, I’ve never seen any representative of the genus Lanius, much less, Lanius ludovicinianus. Louisiana granted me a bird for the life list. The American South is pretty dependable for that. It has been for me anyway. On better days, I’ve gotten 90 + species, but the wind and rain certainly had an effect on today’s numbers. The waters of the Mississippi Sound at the eastern edge of Bayou Sauvage were really choppy, frosting white everywhere. I had hoped to get skimmers there, but alas, no luck. Flooding everywhere, a point on which I will reflect a bit below, prevented a lot of exploration too. 

Reflecting on Climate Change

The drive to the refuge functioned as a reminder, as if one were needed, of the region’s precarious position along this coastal landscape in a future that will be defined by rising sea level and an increasing frequency in devastating tropical storms and hurricanes. The roads and many houses along the road way were already experiencing flooding. Route 90 was limited in many places to one lane per direction. The parking lots of many businesses and the streets of a larger neighborhood were all under water. Vacation homes, elevated on stilts, still contended with flooded yards and driveways. While all this water was excellent for my birding excursion I did wonder if we didn’t need to start seriously thinking about the manner in which we deal with climate change and its attendant costs. Should New Orleans be here? Should we continue to rebuild the same structures disaster after disaster? This beautiful city, along with the surrounding communities will get hit again. Soon. As I write this, a tropical storm turned into Hurricane Michael in the Gulf of Mexico and is about to hit the Florida Panhandle. Everyday I’ve been here in New Orleans my Weather Channel app has been alerting me about floods. The oceans are warming and this is fueling stronger storm systems.  The 100 Year storm, formerly a once in a lifetime event, now happens several times a year during the hurricane season. 

Should we keep building as we have always done in these increasingly treacherous storm zones? 

In the October 8^th edition of The New York Times there was a thought provoking investigative piece about the costly cycle of ‘damage and repair’ into which FEMA seems irrevocably locked. To summarize “As Storms Keep Coming, FEMA Spends Billions in ‘Cycle’ of Damage and Repair” is to simply note that the federal government covers the cost of storm damage repair, which is dictated by local authority, and by local people, but this repair does little to mitigate future increasingly frequent, and inevitable storm damage. Local leaders want to a quick return to normalcy. This desire certainly makes sense. A community often wants the comforts of its traditional lines, the reestablishment of its rich historical landmarks, they want, and who wouldn’t, the comforts of stability. “Build it the way it was” seems to be a kind of operating principle among the storm devastated. But those billions spent by FEMA don’t come wholly –or even mostly- from those storm wrecked communities. Those billions come from a plurality of taxpayers living from across the country. There is nothing wrong with the helping out our neighbors in need, but I think we probably need to examine the lack of federal oversight as well as the lack of federal say in how FEMA funded projects are used. As we do this we may want to ask deeper and more difficult questions about whether continuing to rebuild in the path of certain disaster is the best thing we can do with our limited resources. Does it make sense to keep operating as if the climate hasn’t changed? Should we start trying to move, democratically, communities out of harm’s way? Failing that, shouldn’t we start considering massive engineering projects that account for our newer more deadly storm systems? Shouldn’t FEMA officials get to say, “We can’t build it that way again, because if we do, we will be back here in five years to do it again?” This cycle of destruction and repair represents a huge waste of limited funds, and it also represents huge opportunity costs. Money that rebuilds some structure over and over again could be used for something else. My day of birding, and a contemplation of a world of increased storms may seem unconnected. I’m not sure it is. 

If we let evidence guide us, I wonder if we might not craft a safer, more cost effective path forward by not letting tradition guide our repair and rebuild strategy. Research and experimentation will, or rather could, help us build and devise engineering answers to protect some places. Some places may be so important to trade, and commerce that even very costly strategies and structures might be necessary to protect them. Evidence might sometimes indicate however that wholesale relocation is in order. I don’t know what the answer is exactly and I am broadly thinking out loud here. 

Do we really need to rebuild most of Florida every few years? Is it fair to the rest of the country to send these funds to the same places again, and again? Should the rest of the country get a say in how a place like New Orleans, or, say,  Savannah Georgia is rebuilt? I wonder if some human retreat from danger zones to safer areas, and cities might not be a reasonable answer, even a more efficient, environmentally friendly and even a highly cost effective answer.  I think such a contracted human population distribution might actually be good for both humans and the environments upon which we depend. As I drove down Route 90, I wondered what a Louisiana might look like with a relocated New Orleans. I thought about expanded habitat, and increased buffers against storm surges. I thought of human pollution moved further from our waterways. Could such retreats improve the productivity and recovery of many of the natural resources upon which we, and whole industries depend? 

I’m not sure any of this is a good idea. I am sure it wouldn’t be politically feasible. We cannot even get our political leaders to deal with Climate Change and its increasing pace. However, the experts, even the Trump Administration itself, all agree, that climate change is happening, and that our predictions about it were too conservative. This much is clear at least, while we certainly need to continue to think about ways to halt, perhaps even reverse climate change, we also need to think realistically about how we handle the coming effects of an already changed climate.

Of Wolves and Ravens

Facebook is hard to beat where the generation of error riddled memes about animal behavior are concerned. Often the meme being posted tells one much more about the poster than the animal or animals in the meme itself. Many such memes are guilty of a great deal of anthropomorphism (attributing human emotions and reactions to animals). Anthropomorphism is a big no-no among biologists. Assuming that animals have some meaningful emotional life probably isn’t wrong, assuming too much detail about that life, especially for wild animals, is probably going too far. Wild animals probably don’t think like we do, or do emotions like we do.

From a friend’s wall:

Its a cute meme. It gets some things correct. Ravens are commonly associated with wolves. They may even like them. We can’t really know. What we do know about ravens though, is that they are carrion eaters. This fact probably better explains their association with wolves than merely liking wolves (which again, they may really, really like wolves). Ravens however do associate with a large number of predatory species. 

Ravens and a very handsome fox

from the White Wolf Pack blog

Ravens and Grizzly Bears at a Bison carcass

Raven’s have also had a long association with human warfare. Ravens and other carrion birds are common features of histories of war in the times when men fought and died shield to shield, by spear and by sword. This association has long made the raven (a species with a cosmopolitan distribution and many subspecies) a prominent figure in human mythology. Despite this, few people are willing to posit a great deal of affection flowing from ravens toward humans.

The ecologist Bernd Heinrich’s work with ravens has revealed a great deal about their associations with apex predators. In two wonderful books, Ravens in Winter, and The Mind of the Raven Heinrich discusses many years worth of research on ravens. Raven ecology is generally fascinating but germane to this post, is the interesting mutualism that ravens seem to enjoy with apex predators. 

Ravens follow wolves and other predators around because it is the surest path to a meal. If you are raven and you want to eat an elk, you are going to need an intermediary to help get that meal. Ravens use apex predators to open up elk, bison, moose, and numerous other animals that ravens just can’t kill for themselves. Associating with apex predators means that ravens don’t have to wait for something to fall over and die before they can eat. A moose is going to die, that is just the way of nature. Ravens have noticed that apex predators form a catalyst for the death reaction.

An immediate question may occur to readers though. Why do wolves and other apex predators put up with ravens. Having ravens at your table (there can be 5-20 ravens at moose kills on Isle Royale) is actually, from the perspective of the predator, incredibly costly. Researchers at Isle Royale, have noticed that ravens abscond with up to 40% of moose meat from kills on the island. The researchers at Isle Royale (one of the longest continuous studies of predator/prey interactions in the world) were trying to understand why wolves traveled in packs. Part of the answer may be, for wolves that hunt big game anyway, that groups of wolves get more meat from a kill than ravens. Smaller packs lose more resources to raves than do larger packs. Losing meat to closely related pack mates versus completely unrelated ravens probably translates to more copies of one’s own genes being levered in to future generations. A wolf can expect to share many genes with it pack mates and none with ravens. There is a Hamiltonian rabbit hole we could go down here, but lets save that for another post. The researchers at Isle Royale think pack size may be way to defend, or at least more efficiently utilize prey items. More wolves means fewer ravens on the kill at any one time. The researchers noted that larger packs translated to more meat per individual wolf at a kill than for smaller packs.

Another part of the answer to why apex predators put up with the competition from scavengers like ravens may be that any apex predator can only eat so much at a meal. Wolves, for instance, can consume a lot per meal (about twenty pounds in a sitting) but 10 wolves eating a moose will only get 200 pounds, or about 20% of moose meat. Wolves could certainly try defending a kill, but easy meat will quickly become scarce on the carcass, and returns will diminish. All apex predators will have some limit on what they can consume in a sitting, so loss of even a large percentage to ravens won’t really matter.

Still, putting up with competitors at a kill seems profoundly non-Darwinian. There are no free rides as it were, and we would expect that if the behavior pattern exists, perhaps it confers some advantage to the predators to put up with the ravens piggy backing on all that predatory effort. The work of Heinrich and others seems to demonstrate that ravens actually contribute to the apex predator’s meal plan. There is a lot of strong evidence that ravens act a lot like Honeyguides. 

The Greater Honeyguide

Honeyguides are highly specialized African woodpeckers that can metabolize wax. Honeyguides eat honey, wax, and bee larva. The problem is they can’t really open up beehives. They have hit upon the novel solution of getting humans and honey badgers to do that for them. They lead humans or honey badgers to beehives, wait for their biological tool to open the hive and then eat.

In his book Ravens in Winter, Heinrich documents raven calls drawing in larger predators to open up frozen carcasses with claws and teeth.  Frozen carcasses pose a large problem for a carrion bird equipped with only a bill (stout to be sure), small claws and wings. Recruiting another animal to help process the frozen carrion means sharing valuable resources, but not sharing would mean not eating. Natural selection processes probably favored ravens who made a lot of noise at frozen carcasses over those that did not (one group leaving more descendants than the other is winning evolutionarily). 

Wolves are likely not the only apex predators to have learned to listen to the ravens. Two vignettes from Heinrich’s The Mind of the Raven, may underscore this point. In the first vignette we find Inuit hunters. When hunting polar bear, Inuit hunters draw their prey in by making raven calls. Raven calls reliably attract polar bears. What holds for human tricksters, may also hold for raven tricksters. Ravens calls in the wild probably attract polar bears too. 

The other vignette, more chilling, but also kind of cool, involves a raven acting -possibly- like a Greater Honeyguide, and leading an apex predator to something to kill. In this case the prey was an old woman who had straggled a bit behind her husband on their hike. As she worked to catch up to her husband, she had a raven persistently behind her on the trail, calling its peculiar, call. She thought she had made a friend, but upon turning around to examine her new “friend” she noticed a new hiker on the trail. Approaching her in that predatory crawl that is the frightening hallmark of cats everywhere, was a puma. Fortunately for her, as the puma approached, at speed, her husband came crashing down the path from the other direction. Seeing the big man, and his big stick, the puma beat a retreat.  Wary prey makes for wary ambush predators. 

The raven also exited the scene. 

“But I just want to be your very last friend!"

That last vignette could be interpreted several ways. Perhaps the raven was warning the old woman about the feline danger that was approaching. Perhaps the raven had precisely no interest in the drama that was unfolding on the trail. Perhaps it was Huginn or Muninn on some cosmic errand? Heinrich suspected not. His work with ravens, along with the work of others, suggested to him a darker motive on the part of the raven, one that sought to put an old woman on the dinner plate. 

So do ravens like wolves? Maybe they do, but nature is complex and our human psychology may not be entirely predictive of the emotional lives of wild animals who have their own suite of concerns. A better explanation for the image in the meme, can be found in the ecology of ravens. 

Ravens eat carrion. Wolves and other apex predators generate carrion. 

The Keystone XL Pipeline is Probably a Very Bad Idea.

The beginning of the problem.

Any discussion of oil pipelines must begin with one unavoidable fact. That fact is this. All oil pipelines leak. Sometimes it is a little, sometimes a lot, and sometimes -too often- in gargantuan fashion, but all of them leak at multiple points along their path. Pipelines pump corrosive chemicals down their length, at high pressure. Heat, pressure, and a corrosive chemical mix have predictable effects on the seals that join pipeline segments as well as the pipe segments themselves. Hence the fact, all pipelines leak. Couple this with poor leak and spill detection systems and you have a prescription for an expensive disaster.

This will certainly be true of TransCanada Corporation’s proposed Keystone XL Pipeline (hereafter XL), and maybe more so than for most other oil pipelines. The XL will be moving oil of an unconventional nature called tar sands crude. More specifically they will be extracting a highly viscous petroleum product called bitumen from a semi-solid matrix of water, sand, and clay.¹ This form of petroleum is similar in smell and appearance to tar. Viscosity is one key here. Even with diluting agents (often natural gas, or synthetic oils, and solvents) pumping bitumen will require higher pressure to move down the length of a pipeline. This increases the heat and pressure on the seals and pipes which hold the bitumen in the pipe and keep it out of the environment. There is also some evidence that this mixture of chemicals is actually more corrosive than that found in other crude oils.²

Bitumen Extraction: an ecologically costly process.

Getting bitumen out of the ground is not as easy as for other types of oil. In other oil extraction process it is a matter of striking a well and pumping a liquid up from the depths of the earth. Those drills can be quite spectacular feats of engineering but the basic principle is fairly straight-forward. Bitumen is different in that extraction requires some process of strip mining or chemical leeching. This is immediately damaging to local ecosystems as it involves the clearing of forest and topsoil, referred to as “overburden” by the oil industry, to get at the tar sands beneath. The clearing can be significant as it takes about 2 tons of oil sands to produce one barrel of oil, meaning 2000 pounds of oil sand produces about 250 pounds of oil.⁴

The process of pre-refinement (just making it ready for transport for further refinement) of bitumen is also one of the most costly, pollution creating, water intensive ways of producing usable fuel products. Which is to say that it uses up vast amounts of water, produces large quantities of CO², and leaves the areas of processing inundated with an increased concentration of heavy metals, which are everywhere present in the tar sands matrix.  

Bitumen extraction is so costly in fact, the oil industry use to ignore it as a source of oil. The profit margins after processing were just not large enough to merit developing. However, as easier-to-process oil becomes rarer, this more expensive, less efficient, and more polluting method of oil extraction is becoming a viable economic option for oil companies.

Once separated from its sandy prison, bitumen, now a very thick slow moving liquid (sometimes even semi-solid), must be diluted before it is ready to make its way down a pipeline. This process, called upgrading, is accomplished by mixing it with chemicals, and some type of lighter petroleum product, natural gas, light synthetic oil as well as trade secret solvents. This produces a complex toxic mix that will be pumped over land and waterways.

Carcinogens, Teratragens, and Mutagens, Oh My.

Next time you pump your gas, read the warning label on the pump. It will remind you to not spill any gasoline on your skin (if you do, immediately wash it off) and not to spend an excessive amount of time breathing in the sweet fumes. This warning exists because gasoline is absolutely terrible for your health. As it happens, bitumen in the pipeline is much more dangerous, more toxic than the fuels you pump into your vehicle.

All fuel products, as well as many other petroleum products, are known to harbor a dangerous suite of chemicals that are ill suited to bring those exposed to them good health and a long life. There are three main classes of effects these chemicals can produce in the exposed.  A carcinogen is any substance in which exposure produces an increased risk of developing cancer. A mutagen is any agent that produces genetic changes in those exposed to that agent. A teratogen is any agent that produces changes in the development of an embryo. These agents can have multiple effects. That is to say a single chemical can be responsible for all three classes of injury. Bitumen in the pipe has more types of these compounds than refined fuel owing to the mix of solvents and diluents needed to allow it to flow down a pipeline in the first place. Like gasoline, diluted bitumen (referred to as dilbit) has the familiar, potent carcinogen 1,3 Butadiene, for which there is no known safe amount of exposure, but bitumen also has many more dangerous chemicals and heavy metals than regular gasoline.

For instance bitumen has many more benzenes than refined gas. Benzene, from which this class of compounds gets its name, is itself present in bitumen and is one of the most dangerous chemicals to be exposed to. It is responsible for all three classes of injury listed above and is associated with a host of other physiological catastrophe. Benzenes as a class are highly toxic and they are very well represented in crude oil.  Other, less toxic benzenes can also be found in bitumen and the complex solution necessary to make it pipeline ready. That is to say, turn it into dilbit. Naphthalene, which occurs naturally in oil tars including bitumen, is a known carcinogen. Acute damage from exposure to large quantities of naphthalene can cause damage to or destruction of red blood cells. Methylbenzene, also called toluene is also found in dilbit mixtures. Its smells like paint thinner. If inhaled it can cause many of the same physiological responses as benzene and Naphtha -- nausea, loss of vision, loss of color vision, fatigue, weakness, light-headness, and if exposed to fumes for too long, unconsciousness and death. Though if the exposures are corrected quickly people recover just as quickly. Methylbenzene also has a lower carcinogenic potential.⁶  That is just a brief tour of the chemical wasteland found in dilbit, all of which affects the biota. 

Spill in a Michigan River, or dilbit is hard to clean up.

The Kalamazoo River stretches from its source waters in North Adams, across one hundred and thirty miles of Michigan running through parks, through or near ecologically sensitive areas, near cities and over private lands before its mouth empties into great Lake Michigan. Near this river, too near, as it turned out, ran an oil pipeline specializing in dilbit from tar sands in Alberta Canada.

The day is July 25 2010, the sun is still probably shining, has not set in any event, it is 5:58 pm and Line 6B has just ruptured.⁷   The largest and most expensive land based oil spill has begun and is leaking into the Talmadge Creek, a tributary of the Kalamazoo. No one witnesses this event but we know with great precision when the rupture occurred. We are privy to this because engineers at the operating company, Enbridge, got the alarm the moment it happened. The engineers however don’t believe their equipment. They suspect it is an air bubble. They elect not to get a visual verification of this even though there is a pump station less than 3,168 feet away from the site of Line 6B’s rupture alert. Instead, Enbridge employees continue to pump dilbit into the pipeline, while they increase the pressure hoping to dislodge the air bubble they imagine is giving their pipeline so much trouble. Without visual confirmation of pipeline integrity, Enbridge continues to pump for nearly eighteen hours. They pump until an employee of the state of Michigan happens to witness the ruptured pipeline, and reports the spill. By this time, though, the damage is done. Between 800,000 and 1,000,000 gallons of dilbit have been spilled.

The Talmadge Creek tributary, now from the site of the spill onward just a vector for poison, quickly takes the dilbit to the Kalamazoo, and before the surface flow of the oil is stopped, more that 35 miles of the Kalamazoo must be closed, the spill nearly coming to the mouth of the river. The spill causes many households to have to be evacuated, and many more households than that are warned not to drink their water. Had the spill been worse, or caught later, it might have entered Lake Michigan, threatening an important resource for several million people and several states. It very nearly does get that far.

Enbridge didn’t tell the first responder clean up crews they were dealing with dilbit. They are not required by law to divulge this information, though it would be very important for first response teams coming to large spill to know. In fact oil companies like Enbridge are not required by law to divulge what is flowing down their pipes at all even though such a catalogue of ingredients would be incredibly helpful to first responders as they form their plan of action for tackling a spill and protecting themselves while in the process. Oil companies are allowed to protect their dilbit solutions as trade secrets. One has to suspect that they just don’t want to have to deal with the problems of running fairly dangerous chemicals through the backyards of people who might object.

Knowing that you are dealing with dilbit and not some other hydrocarbon spill means knowing the right tactics to take. Responding to dilbit like it is simple crude oil will be a mistake because dilbit does not behave like regular oil spills.  Remember earlier when we discussed the anatomy of diluted bitumen? Bitumen must be diluted in a more fluid hydrocarbon medium to be effectively transported by pipeline. When not contained in a tube and under pressure –as in spill conditions- the diluting agents evaporate and leave the heavy bitumen behind. When this happens the bitumen drops out of the water column and settles to the sediment. It is this quirk of dilbit that makes clean ups more costly and complex than oil-spill clean-ups. Though in this case it also may have helped prevent a larger ecological disaster by dropping out of the water column before hitting Lake Michigan.

The Kalamazoo River Spill occurred in 2010. As of 2013 the EPA estimated that between 100,000 and 180,000 gallons of bitumen still lay at that bottom of the Kalamazoo river bed.⁸ As of late 2013, the spill has cost more than half a billion dollars to clean. The project is on going.

 

The Proposed Pathway of the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Ogallala Aquifer, the Nebraska Sandhills: A microcosm of potential disaster. 

The Ogallala Aquifer

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer]

The proposed path of the Keystone XL Pipeline

1,661 miles of pipeline, that sure does seem like a lot to inspect [image courtesy of eystone-xl.com/keystone-xl-pipeline-overall-route-map/]

There are some small number of people who are not concerned about the fact that a large portion of the 1,661 mile XL pipeline will run over the heart of the Ogallala Aquifer, and abut the aquifer in a few other places and cross several major rivers in the west, but I am not one of them.

The Ogallala Aquifer is a ground water source that is situated beneath the Great Plains and runs under at least eight states to a greater or lesser degree and provides drinking water for a the majority people in Great Plains.⁹ It is part of a vast network of riparian (river ecosystems) and wetland ecosystems, (largest and most complex of these latter being the Nebraska Sandhills) and is used in much of the irrigation for farming along the Great Plains.

The Nebraska Sandhills

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nebraska_Sandhills_NE97_Hooker_County_3.JPG]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sand_Hills_Nebraska.jpg]

The Nebraska Sandhills are the dominant ecological feature of the Northern mid-Nebraska landscape. It is the largest sand dune formation in the United States and, perhaps counter-intuitively, supports vast and productive grass- and wetland communities. The Sandhills stretch across 19,600 square miles, and sit atop what we might call the heart of the Ogallala Aquifer.

The secret, or at least one secret, of the Sandhills’ productivity is its sandy, porous, plant anchored soils. Beneath the lush grassland, are many layers of coarse sand and gravel. This mix, loose compared to other soil types, allows water to easily percolate through to the water table below.¹⁰  There is very little run-off in the Sandhills (nearly a quarter to one half of all rainfall in the Sandhills flows down to the groundwater).¹¹¹ At interdunal depressions, the elevated water table rises above the land and creates over one million hectares of wetlands. The many streams that are fed by the Sandhills are fed by movement of ground water, and not by run-off.

This land, until very recently has never been able to support crops. It can only be done now with the aid of modern technology and then in an unsound way, ecologically speaking. Draining the wetlands, and removing the native vegetation only served to demonstrate that sand and gravel don’t provide many nutrients for cultivated plants, and that sand, when not anchored by plants erodes very quickly in the absence of the native flora, which has a long evolutionary history with such soils. Lacking a long history of farming, the Sandhills landscape remains, to a very large extent, contiguous and pristine. The US Fish and Wildlife service have teamed with local members of the community and together have created a robust, multi-use plan that respects the value, both consumptive and non-consumptive, of the landscape that is the Sandhills. It is open for ranchers to use as rangeland. Much of the land is open to hunters, fishermen (and women), as well as other varieties of eco-tourist. There are parks and wildlife refuges, and opportunities to camp and hike. There is plenty to see. It is a major flyway for migrating birds. This vast landscape is utilized by 24-27 migrating species of bird that are of special conservation concern.¹²  

In addition to the Sandhills revenue generating uses, there are other non-consumptive uses that translate to money people in the region don’t have to pay. That is to say, having an intact, undamaged Sandhills provides services to local human communities at no cost. Without the Sandhills, these services would have to be paid for in costly technological solutions.  This saved money can be tremendous. Costanza et al (1997) estimate that, worldwide, the non-consumptive use value of wetlands is about $15,000/ha/year. This value will shift from region to region of course, but the point is quite clear. Wetlands are important to human ecology.

Wetlands microfauna aerate the soils, this facilitates plant growth certainly, but in times of heavy rain it can provide space for water and thus reduce the extent and damage of floods. This same microfauna, along with the plants and soil, function as vast filters for water moving through it into streams, rivers and into the water table, cleaning it and making it safe for both human and wild consumers of that water. Without a healthy Sandhills, humans must pay for these services out of pocket. It is always important to remember that these systems are perterbable and can be overwhelmed by toxic chemicals and ecological disturbance. Once lost, it can be very hard to restore an ecosystem to its robust, former glory.

The XL pipeline will run over the Sandhills. Over time, it will develop a few minor leaks along its length. These leaks will gently ooze out into the local environment. A major spill of dilbit in the Sandhills, which lie on top of the Ogallala Aquifer, would represent, I think, a special danger. Here, at least, there seems to be an opportunity for the heavy bitumen to percolate deep into the porous soil, and perhaps be carried into the aquifer itself, threatening the integrity and safety of the largest aquifer in the United States. It is not an exaggeration to say that any major blow to the Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer would acutely affect millions of lives and perhaps for a very long time.

Though, it must be admitted, predicting specifics is a hard thing. What we do know is once the hydrocarbons in the dilbit evaporate, the bitumen those components were suspending sinks through the water column to the sediment below. Would it make it to the reservoir of water below that? It is hard to say. There is also the more immediate damage that clean up itself causes. How do you clean up bitumen that has found a home in the porous sandy soils, and perhaps further down than this without further ecological damage? Who pays for the immediate costs? Who pays for the lost services that might occur owing to a major spill? Imagine a spill the size of the Kalamazoo Spill (nearly 1,000,000 gallons of dilbit) happening in the Sandhills. What might that look like?

Its important also to realize that the Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer are simply a microcosm of the problem of running such a pipeline over such large distances. These are just two places in which the XL pipeline represents a very real danger to both local ecosystems, but also to the human communities that are obviously impacted by the health of the environment in which they live. A massive oil spill on the tundra of Alaska may cause severe ecological damage, but it won’t impact the lives of millions of people in the way a large spill that affected the Sandhills, or the Ogallala Aquifer would. These are just two points of risk. A pipeline that runs nearly 1700 miles, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, with minor offshooting pipelines, will surely come into contact with many more ecologically sensitive areas, and perhaps in direct contact with many human communities.

The Last Word: Are the Risks Worth it?

There will be assurances. TransCanada will tell communities and politicians that the pipeline will be completely safe. They will tell these communities that they have well formulated emergency plans in place. They will regale communities and their leaders with tales of state of the art leak and spill detection systems. They will grease wheels with political donations, and then there will be talk of job creation. They will, above all things, play down the risks.

They will do this because processing bitumen produces slim profit margins. One must put a great deal of effort into bitumen refinement, at every stage, reducing the amount of profit one can derive from its processing. Given its sludgy, semi-solid nature, one wonders if its packing efficiency in tanker trucks is much less than that of regular crude. In any event, for oil companies the numbers appear to favor pumping diluted bitumen through pipelines instead of running them in tractor-trailer trucks over land, though the latter method would certainly reduce the number of gallons dumped into the environment should a tanker truck crash and spill. Over land trucking spills also have the advantage of being very quickly spotted and dealt with. It is much easier to spot such things on major roadways than it is in places far from frequent travel.

It is important to remember that Enbridge, author of the largest land based spill in US history, was playing down the risks right up until the very moment Line 6B spilled carcinogens, mutagens and teratragens into the Kalamazoo River. Enbridge had been asking for extensions of the 180 day mandatory repair period (enforced ineffectively by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) on the 6B line just ten days before its corroded segments blew.¹³  

Ten days. 

Line 6B also seemed to possess a history of problems:

“In 2008, Enbridge identified 140 corrosion defects on 6B as serious enough to fall into the 180-day category. But the company repaired just 26 of them during that period. In 2009, Enbridge self-reported a separate set of 250 defects to PHMSA. The company fixed only 35 of them within 180 days. Instead of immediately addressing the 329 defects that now remained, Enbridge got a one-year extension from PHMSA by exercising its legal option to reduce pumping pressure on 6B while it decided whether to repair or replace the line...”

McGowan and Song (2012)¹⁴

Thus in that two year period of identifying damage, fatigue and corrosion Enbridge managed to leave 84.35 % of the damaged pipeline unaddressed (damage significant enough that, by law, it should have been repaired or replaced within 180 days). They delayed repairs and asked several times for extensions.

Of course none of this is anything new. We hear it every time oil companies wish to move into a community with their equipment, their pipelines, their deep sea drills and their oil tankers. We are told that no real ecological danger is present. Plans are in place. There is, we are seriously told, no need to worry.

The prospect of new jobs and the potential of money flowing into cash strapped communities is not something which can be ignored. Nor should it be ignored. But it must be factored into a much larger analysis. Are temporary construction jobs, and the addition of perhaps a few more permanent positions at pump stations worth the risk a pipeline might represent? If the risks are ignored in these calculations, as the oil companies assure us they must be, it is hard to see any down side. A total benefits to costs analysis must be made and this must include the kind of risks and valuations from the environment discussed above. The companies themselves will be on the hook for only a limited amount of time, and will try, when the spills occur to legally reduce their commitments to clean up and restoration. BP lost billions it could afford to lose in its spill. But it won’t bear the brunt of the long term consequences of any spill it causes. That cost will be borne by the local communities. The same is true of TransCanada. 

What the Keystone XL Pipeline amounts to is this. It is an effort to increase the profit margins on bitumen, while asking all the communities through which the pipeline must pass to take the risks and absorb at least some of the costs of any spill that occurs. TransCanada has no interest in bringing jobs to people, or even in creating a technological marvel that really would make for safer oil transportation. It is interested in making a larger profit on a product that is already incredibly environmentally irresponsible and costly to produce (more about that another time maybe). 

 Endnotes

1., 3., 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/opinion/the-dangers-of-diluted-bitumen-oil.html?_r=0

6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toluene

7., 8.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalamazoo_River_oil_spill

9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

10, 11, 12.   http://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/pfw/ne/ne4.htm#TheLand

13, 14. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120626/dilbit-diluted-bitumen-enbridge-kalamazoo-river-marshall-michigan-oil-spill-6b-pipeline-epa?page=show

McGowan and Song highlight several instances of lax repair work by Enbridge in part one of their informative and cautionary tale, specifically highlighting the PHMSA’s requirement that pipeline segments that cross a certain corrosion threshold must be replaced or repaired w/in 180 days. The oil companies can easily request extensions of time. This is exactly what Enbridge did for many segments of pipeline. Notorious Line 6B was no exception.

Bibliography

Costanza, R, R. R. d’Arge, R de Groot, S. Farber. 1997. The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature 386: 253-260.