OREANDA-NEWS. January 12, 2012. Pipelines work, but not all pipelines are the same; the Watertown Daily Times should take note.

America has all kinds of water, sewer, gas and petro- chemical lines traveling all over the USA with different pipe pressures. It’s like comparing apples with oranges, grapes and pineapples — all fruits, but different in how they are processed.

If a natural gas line breaks, it just goes poof in a big way. When an oil, or petrochemical product line breaks, it oozes, sometimes for days before they find the break.

In the meantime, ground contamination would be covering acres, and if it’s located in a rural area, cleanup would be slow to almost nonexistent. I cite the recent spill around Yellowstone National Park, where ranchers are still complaining about the environmental damage done to their drinking water and lands.

Also, the distances are different; we’re not talking about a linear distance of around 500 miles, but to cover 2,000 miles from Canada to Texas. The Keystone XL pipeline’s initial planned route will take it over the Great Plains aquifer, the source of most of the water for our food crops from the Midwest.

What really stinks is that we Americans will see little of that oil at our gas pumps. Most of it will go to China, at a better profit margin.

You see, the Canadian government invested a lot of money tearing up their environment and destroying Native American habitat, so their Conservative government can say they sponsor job growth.

Their problem now is they need a market that will pay for this expensive brew; enter oil-starved and growing China with its 1 billion people.

The other problem is how to get the oil to China. The easiest solution is to build a short pipeline to the USA and have the American taxpayers pay for the pipeline from the border to the Texas refineries, then ship it to China.

The alternative is to build an expensive pipeline themselves over the mountains, to the Vancouver area and build their own oil refinery to ship the oil to China. That means more money that they would have to spend.

By the way, the Texas oil industry is the brains, and bankroll, for the Republican Party these days.

So good luck if you’re driving a big V-8 truck next year, you’re going to pay a lot more money for your gas.