As we noted last week, the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline started transporting diluted bitumen (or tar sands oil from Canada) to the Gulf Coast on January 22nd. Activists did more than speak out: a new organization, Texas Pipeline Watch, announced its plans to “equip landowners and citizens with cameras to document every spill, leak, and disturbance along a pipeline they see as rife with risk potential.”
Sound like a bunch of rabble-rousing radicals? Well, maybe, but TPW labels itself a “cross-partisan effort” that joins environmentalists like Jim Hightower with concerned landowners like Julia Trigg Crawford. The organization raises issues like water safety commonly associated with green organizations, but also property rights/eminent domain abuse arguments that usually come from more conservative groups. Despite claims that opposition to Keystone XL comes from only from greenie elitists, groups like this show that a diverse population is unhappy about this development, and that there’s hope for bridging ideological divides surrounding environmental issues.
Take a look at the efforts they’re making, and then let us know what you think of their work… and the pipeline itself that’s brought these folks together.
HOUSTON, Texas, January 22, 2014 (ENS) – Today, Texas residents picked up their cameras as the Canadian company TransCanada started operations on its new $2.3 billion pipeline carrying tar sands crude oil from Cushing, Oklahoma to refineries in Nederland…