That whole clip is pure gold. She has no idea what she's doing and it's going for "gotcha!" material to post on Twitter.

She seemed surprised when he said that Wells Fargo was one of many banks who financed that project.

Future of (D), and they've got no one to blame but themselves.

This post was edited by djman72 on Mar 19 2019 08:04am

And meanwhile, people talk about the "growing anti-intellectualism of the republican party".

Cortez 2020!

Burn their own party to the ground

the dumbest part of it all is that pipelines are good for the environment
This is one of the recurring themes of 'environmoralism', that they'd happily disregard the best pragmatic solutions for an unworkable absolutist world where there are no fossil fuels or artifical chemicals or radiation.
If the oil is going to go from point A to point B, pipelines are the safest and least destructive way to do it. If you want a future with less fossil fuels, you should embrace nuclear energy. If you want to reduce water inefficiency in agriculture, embrace bioengineering.

It would be better in that clip if the wells fargo CEO just flatly stated that pipelines are good for the environment instead of being defensive and saying they're 'worth the risk'. The democrats might try to take that clip and demonize him for it, but he'd be right.

I don't think that clip is going anywhere near democratic propaganda. She was obliterated by simple thought. She's stated that her experience as a bartender was invaluable to her congressional duties - not much help in this instance.

Seems like most of the freshman (D) congress women are embroiled in controversy. Anyone check Omar's twitter last night?

I was listening to a Republican recently pushing a narrative that Iran should be held accountable for the operations mishaps of those they lend to. The Republican kept insisting that this was a legitimate reason for economic sanctions and military intervention in Iran. He also seemed surprised that Iran isn’t the only state or private firm to lend to Hamas.

I’m sure when someone drives drunk and kills someone, that Republican would want the car executive’s family executed by drones and any remaining children to be starved by financial sanctions.

Also, pipelines spill less often but they spill more. Leaks from pipelines also take much longer to discover, leading to larger volumes. And they tend to run through environmentally sensitive areas that aren’t as easy to access as rail lines. There are also around 150,000 miles of rail to 50,000 miles of pipelines, making rail transport a lot more flexible. But of course, the vast majority of people who oppose pipelines aren’t looking to shift infrastructure to rail, they are looking to reduce production and shift technologies. You already know that though, so your critique is disingenuous at best. In the meantime, rail transport is statistically better for the environment.

“For the amount of oil spilled per billion-ton-miles, it’s truck worse than pipeline worse than rail worse than boat (Congressional Research Service). Even more different is for environmental impact (dominated by impact to aquatic habitat), where it’s boat worse than pipeline worse than truck worse than rail.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/10/11/which-is-safer-for-transporting-crude-oil-rail-truck-pipeline-or-boat/#c9f27b27b237

I am amused at how many Republicans here are piling on with their bad information, self congratulating the false claims of other Republicans. What a disgusting, proto-intellectual circle jerk.

This post was edited by inkanddagger on Mar 19 2019 08:59am

never go full r...

the thing about pipelines, even the newest ones, is that the massive deregulation and generally low standards lead to hundreds of leaks each year - that's why they're exclusively built near poor communities and never in the backyard of the people that profit from them.

it is very much possible to build them safer and control them more closely (as well as have the companies report smaller spills and accidents publicly, and pay for independent assessment rather than 'regulating' themselves) - but it's not being done. i guess you just can't have some of the richest and most profitable companies in the world do everything in their power to protect the land they are making that profit on, right? that'd be too much to ask, they would just take their business somewhere el... oh wait!

so please spare me your utterly ridiculous 'safest way possible' narrative, when fossil fuel companies rather spend billions on lobbying for deregulation than for increased safety measures and adequate compensation for all the land they pollute and destroy.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/keystone-oil-spill-south-dakota-spd/ (and this concerns the controversial pipeline they proudly sold as OVERBUILT, exceeding the required safety standards)

This post was edited by fender on Mar 19 2019 09:27am

privileged lefties love the idea of a banning trucks and especially outlawing what is required for them to operate, so good effort but try another argument.

This post was edited by excellence on Mar 19 2019 09:25am

Rail only accounts for 3% of oil shipping in the US, compared to 70% for pipelines / 23% tanker / 4% trucks. In Canada, pipelines are 97%
The issues you're ignoring is that while rail has 1/3 the rate of average spills per billion-ton-miles, rail has far more catastrophic large failure events, no ability to self-contain spills and no scaleability. If you tried to lay the 20x as much train tracks and cars operating you'd need to replace pipeline transportation, nevermind the utter implausibility of the logistics, the failure rate would increase at scale. The very source you cited even points out explicitly that volume isn't as important as where a spill occurs and what kind of damage it does. Which isn't a point in favor of rain transport, because 1) if you actually wanted to replace pipelines you'd need to lay remote tracks and 2) the catastrophic failure events are absolutely destructive and kill lots of people and ruin entire towns.
There's a difference between "Pipeline automatically shuts a valve after detecting reduced pressure, then a team is dispatched to vacuum up some oil sitting in a trench in a matter of hours" and "74-car train derails and explodes with twice the force of a MOAB, flattening half a city and killing 42 people and contaminating the entire landscape and waterways with diffuse petroleum that can't be cleaned up"

She should promise access to universal basic LIT's