Keystone East: Not as Reasonable as Reason Thinks
“The Keystone XL pipeline is something no libertarian can support if consistency with free market principles matters. But that doesn’t stop a lot of right-leaning self-proclaimed libertarians from instinctively defending it — after all, anything that promotes fossil fuel use and gets environmentalists bent out of shape has to be “libertarian,” right?
Thus A. Barton Hinkle’s “Get Ready for Keystone Pipeline 2?” (September 15) in Reason magazine (motto: “Free Minds and Free Markets”). Hinkle ridicules environmentalist criticism of a proposed Atlantic coast pipeline shipping natural gas to North Carolina from West Virginia’s Marcellus shale formation. According to Hinkle, the power companies comply with EPA regulations. What’s more, environmentalists are partly to blame for the rise of natural gas consumption reflected in new pipeline projects, because they make it more difficult to expand production of coal-fired electricity. And, he adds, “[n]obody who protests power plants and power lines ever volunteers to give up electricity …” Yuk yuk yuk!
In fairness to Hinkle, he addresses, at respectable length, the problematic nature of the eminent domain abuses required to build such pipelines — fairly unusual among fossil fuels cheerleaders on the self-proclaimed libertarian right.
But he leaves out several things. First, eminent domain isn’t the only way in which the state makes natural gas pipelines artificially feasible. Pipelines also depend on liability caps or regulatory preemption of tort liability for leaks (those EPA regulations Hinkle makes so much of), contamination of groundwater and earthquakes associated with fracking and pipeline transport.”
Carson, Kevin. Counter Punch 25 September 2014.