Want to Understand What All the Fuss is in North Dakota?
Here’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laying out the reality of today’s energy market and the massive subsidization, the last dying breaths, of the carbon extraction sector, trying to saddle us with infrastructure and gigatons of carbon where we don’t want it – in the sky.
Well this pipeline, using bald chicanery, said that they’re going to take advantage of that environmental assessment, that shortcut. They’re pretending that this pipeline which is 12,000 miles long is a one-acre project. Well that’s just a lie! It’s clearly illegal. Their clearly breaking the law. And the people of this camp are standing up and saying “All we want is law and order. All we want is compliance with the federal law.” And the state instead of supporting the people who are asking for law and order, is deploying the awesome military power of this state against the people who are asking for law and order on behalf of the criminal, on behalf of the person who is breaking our [wind masks word], and who is breaking the law.
The message is so obvious about the cheapness of renewable power. And the last two years the two biggest — three biggest coal companies in America Arch Coal and Peabody have lost 95% percent of their value because the market knows that: Carbon is dead. It’s dead and it’s still walking around, but it’s dead. The oil industry knows that, they see what the future is, and they’re protecting themselves by building infrastructure, by wrapping this nation in pipelines. And that’s why you see this huge drive to build more and more pipelines today.
And if you look what the Koch brothers are doing, the Koch brothers are going state by state and nationally to change the laws to make it very easy to make pipelines, [undecipherable] facilities, and coal export facilities and oil export facilities, and almost impossible to build transmission lines in this country because transmission lines are the vehicles for renewable power. So they made it very difficult to build transmission and very easy to build pipelines. And that’s why in the last 12 years we have built 16 thousand miles of pipeline in this country and only 600 miles of transmission lines. The reason for that is because that is the strategy for the oil industry to maintain control.
Thanks for sharing, Lars Fosdal. It wasn’t until hearing this talk that I really realized how much the industry has riding on this standoff.