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White People, Please Stop Asking People of Color Dumb Questions

by JacelynPittard Posted on May 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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Scaachi Koul‘s writing has it all—a gut-busting sense of humor, clear-eyed honesty, and striking introspection that she jokes is a symptom of narcissism.

In her debut book, a collection of essays titled One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Koul, a culture writer for BuzzFeed, applies her sharp wit to tricky issues of race, culture and identity: what it means to be “lighter” than other Indians on a family trip to India, for example, and how she balances her life with her conservative South Asian parents’ expectations. I called Koul and we had entirely too much fun talking about women’s words, finding boldness, and pubic hair, of course.

Mother Jones: Part of what you talk about in the book is existing in spaces where you feel unwelcome in. It seems like you manage to be really outspoken in those spaces—where do you find that sort of boldness?

Scaachi Koul: I have the unfortunate inability to be quiet, and it did not serve me very well when I was a kid. I used to get in trouble all the time for…actually, the same stuff I get in trouble for as an adult. In my later life, it’s been beneficial, but when I was younger I didn’t know how to control it or what to do with it. I’m not sure it’s so much about finding boldness as it is about retaining control at this point, because being mouthy has never been my problem. That’s very easy for me. But now I think a lot about when it’s worth it and what I’m doing it for. When you’re a kid, it’s really obnoxious because you’re just being a dick all the time. I think that’s probably the same case with being bold or bossy or mouthy. Those things are great to have, but if they are uncontrolled and wild, it can hurt you in the long term.

MJ: It must be kind of gratifying to be able to turn your obnoxious qualities from childhood into a way to make money as an adult.

SK: Yeah, why not, right? Listen, I would also like to buy a boat. So why not try to make a profit?

MJ: What made you decide to write the book?

SK: It’s a delicate balance of narcissism and self-interest and money and the hope that you can write something and other people understand it. I write for the internet all the time, but there is something very different about writing a book that you’re asking people to buy. It feels like a different beast. But you hope that you write this thing that appeals to people in this really meaningful way. I grew up on the internet, but the things that formed my understanding of the world and made me feel less isolated were books. That’s the altruistic answer, and then the other version is, “Oh, I’m obsessed with myself.”

MJ: I feel like I’ve been reading more and more books that are memoirs or essay collections from really incredible women—I don’t know if more are being produced or if it’s just what I’ve been hungry for, so it’s what I’ve been feeding myself. Have you been reading that sort of thing, or have you been feeling intimidated or empowered by those works?

SK: While I was writing the book I avoided other memoirs, because I don’t want to get distracted or pick up somebody else’s voice. So for the year that I was working on it really heavily, I didn’t read anything else, and that was actually around the time that Lena Dunham and Jessica Valenti’s books had come out. I know that right now it feels like there’s so many memoirs by young women in particular. I don’t know if it’s that there’s more—I think there’s just been a shift on the way we talk about them, and I think the internet has shaped that. I also find that for every dude who’s really dismissive of what I’ve written, there are five women who are like, “No, I get it. Don’t worry about it. It makes sense to me.”

MJ: The book is really vulnerable in places. Did you grapple with a lot of anxiety while you were writing it?

SK: I had some anxieties about my family reading it. For one, I don’t really want my parents to read about my weird, gross body. My brother read it and he immediately was like, “This is gross. There’s so much about your vagina in here.” I’m like, “Yeah, tough. Deal with it.”

MJ: Men have been writing like that for a long time.

SK: Exactly. I have had to listen to you talk about your penis for 30 years. Get over it.

MJ: I saw your tweet about your parents having read the book.

SK: My mom read it and she was appropriately sad and confused. We didn’t talk details or anything. She said she liked it, but she was clearly quite bummed out about portions of it. My dad hasn’t read it, because he knows that it’ll give him a heart attack, and I don’t think his body can take it. So he’s making a wise decision. I abide by that policy of writing about your family as if they’re all dead. So with the exception of changing some names, that’s pretty much how I handle things, in that I can’t control your perception of what you think happened. I only have my version. I’m sure there’s stuff in there that they disagree with, but I don’t think there’s anything in there that’s libelous. I don’t think they’re going to sue me.

MJ: You also write quite a bit about existing as a woman on the internet. Any advice for outspoken ladies who want to use Twitter without losing their minds?

SK: It’s so tricky. I don’t know of a social-media entity that’s really invested in how women and girls are treated. I can only speak to media Twitter, which is a very specific section of the internet. But for the women that I talk to who are in media and who use Twitter, I always hear from them that they have this anxiety about going private because they feel like it’s antithetical to the point of it. I don’t understand that at all. If you feel like you don’t want to play, don’t play. Go private. Don’t use it. You don’t need to really use it at any great capacity if you just want to tweet your work and go home, that’s fine. I like the format. I think it’s fun sometimes. But I also recognize that it can be deeply unfun, and I had a year of really not understanding why I was using it at all. I could not see any benefit. I was exclusively getting yelled at and I didn’t feel like my work was getting promoted in any way. It was just like people had access to me in this really awful way.

I have friends who do not really use the internet beyond like Google and recipes or sometimes they read the news on it and I guess they have Netflix. And that to me is so weird. Because I use it for everything. And they go to the bank. That’s crazy to me. They go to the bank? Adorable.

MJ: That’s quaint.

SK: It doesn’t make any sense. But you should have people like that in your life, because when you go to them and you’re like, “Oh my God. I just found out that there’s like some text thread going on about one bad tweet that I sent,” they look at you like you have landed from another planet. They will bring you a perspective that will give you some comfort. Which doesn’t mean that the abuse you’re dealing with isn’t real. And it doesn’t mean it’s not serious, but at the same time it can give you some comfort, because there are people everywhere who are not using the internet like we are using it.

MJ: I also really appreciate your style of clapping back at trolls.

SK: That’s something else that like sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s really not. There are days where they say things and it cuts you to the quick and you don’t have anything funny or witty or cute to say in response. It took me a while to remember that I didn’t actually have to answer all of them. Sometimes when I have responded to them, I have felt myself starting to unravel. I’ve had friends send me notes being like, “Hey, you sound crazy.” This was like funny or whatever, but you sound insane.” And then I have to go back and I’ll read it again and be like, “Yeah, this is nuts.” Get off the internet. Leave your phone at home and go outside and go do something in the tangible world, where nobody knows what your Twitter handle is.

MJ: It’s a good friend that will tell you when you’re being crazy on Twitter, though.

SK: You need those people who tell you to like shut your pie hole.

MJ: Let’s talk about the things you wish you didn’t have to say to white people.

SK: Oh, god. I could write a second book about the things I wish I didn’t have to explain to white people. I wish I didn’t have to explain why they have to pronounce my name correctly or spell it correctly. I’m very tired of explaining that making jokes about my name sounding like Sriracha isn’t funny because it actually doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not funny. I don’t get it. I would really love to stop explaining why it’s obnoxious when they ask me where I’m from and I say, “Calgary” and they say, “No, where are you really from?” I would love to not have to explain where Kashmir is because they will press me and ask me again, and I’ll say that’s where my family’s from and that’s also not satisfying. I would love to stop explaining why I don’t really enjoy Indian weddings. I would like to not have to tell people that I don’t know how to thread eyebrows. They think all brown girls know how. By the way, I’ve never even gotten my eyebrows threaded. My mother went straight to waxing because my brows are formidable. There was no like, “Oh, we’ll use this gentle threading process.” No, no, no. We’ve got to use chemicals.

MJ: Your niece has such a major presence in the book. What do you hope she’ll gain from it if she reads it when she’s older?

SK: I signed it for her, assuming she will read it when she’s like 65. Her mother said she would give it to her when she’s 16, which is probably a better, more realistic age. But that’s only in 10 years. I hope she gets some context about our family that she won’t otherwise have. It feels so weird. I feel like I gave her my diary and I was like, “Good luck.” I don’t know how eager my 17-year-old niece will be to read about like my pussy hair, but I guess she should have that option.

MJ: I mean, presumably she’ll have some too.

SK: To be honest she’s seven and I’m already talking about my pubic hair with her, so at this point I don’t think it’s going to be that much of a shock. She asked when it came out if it was about her and I was like, “Yeah, pretty much.”

MJ: Smart kid.

SK: Well, she, like her aunt is a narcissist, so we’ve just got to make sure everything’s about us. I hope it gives her some understanding of a portion of her. I’m very curious about what her life is going to look like. I worry a lot about her growing up to be self-loathing the way I was. I was really self-loathing about being brown when I was a kid. I really resented it. And I hope that she doesn’t feel like that about herself as she gets older. My parents are there and they sort of pull her into this version of her identity. I hope she doesn’t hate that. And if she does, then hopefully the book will help reverse some of it or give her something to like.

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White People, Please Stop Asking People of Color Dumb Questions

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A New International Advice Line Will Help American Women End Their Pregnancies

by RosalynPTLY Posted on April 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Concerned about President Trump’s promise to drastically roll back legal access to abortion, an international feminist group launched a project on Thursday that aims to help women in the US safely end their own pregnancies.

Since 2014, Women Help Women has responded to over 100,000 emails from women around the world seeking abortions in countries where the procedure is highly restricted or outright banned. Among other services, the group sometimes arranges to have the abortion-inducing drugs misoprostol and mifepristone sent internationally and then counsels the recipient on their safe usage.

“We know there are different barriers that prevent people from being able to access the abortion care that they need,” says Jessica Shaw, a professor at the University of Calgary in Canada and a Women Help Women board member. “This is already going on, and we’re stepping up in anticipation that things likely will get worse with new laws coming in over the next few years.”

Women Help Women—whose new American project is called Self-Managed Abortion, Safe and Supported (SASS)—won’t be sending misoprostol or mifepristone to women in the United States for fear, says Shaw, of litigation. Instead counselors will advise the small but significant number of women in the US who manage to obtain the drugs without the assistance of a health care provider on how to successfully administer them. For added protection, WHW counselors responding to queries from American women will be working abroad, including from Canada.

Misoprostol and mifepristone are both prescription-only in the United States and are only used early-on in pregnancy. But as state legislatures continue to make it harder to access abortions—over 300 state-level anti-abortion laws have been enacted since 2010—advocates and medical experts expect that more women will look underground for ways to self-induce. Several surveys studying the approximately 900,000 women in the US who get clinical abortions in a given year indicate that many are already using misoprostol, as well as other methods, to end their pregnancies without medical supervision. In one, 2.6 percent of patients surveyed said they’d taken drugs, herbs, or vitamins in an attempt to end their pregnancy before seeking an in-clinic abortion. In another, researchers at the University of Texas estimated that as many as 240,000 women in the state had tried to self-induce at some point in their life.

Since the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the United States, more than a dozen women have faced prosecution or jail time after self-inducing an abortion, sometimes after taking misoprostol. Shaw says that most women who call WHW from know what the legal risks are where they live. “That’s how the end up on our website in the first place,” she says. “But for many people, the legal risk is far less than the risk of having a pregnancy and carrying it to term.”

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A New International Advice Line Will Help American Women End Their Pregnancies

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Trump’s travel freeze will ice climate science and cleantech

by ClaudeSambell7 Posted on February 1, 2017

Samira Samimi knew she wanted to be a scientist the first time she saw a glacier. “This is what I want to do,” she remembers thinking on her trip to the mountains. “This is who I want to be.”

She was 16 years old, growing up in Iran, where glaciers are less than plentiful. She knew she would have to leave her home country to study them, so she applied to Canadian universities with an eye on the Arctic. Now 30, she’s in her first year of a glaciology PhD at the University of Calgary, and — dream come true — part of a NASA-funded team studying the Greenland ice sheet.

But on Friday, the Trump administration’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries threw her planned research trip to Greenland this spring into jeopardy. Her cargo plane flight takes off in April from a U.S. Air National Guard base in Albany.

In the days since President Trump signed the executive order, it has already disrupted science communities in the United States and around the globe. Students and researchers have found themselves trapped out of the country, seen field work plans scuttled, or had long-awaited visits canceled. For many scientists engaged in the work of understanding and addressing the world’s next great challenge — a changing climate and the transition to cleaner energy sources — it’s clear that you can’t stifle immigration without stifling innovation, too.

“Think of the STEM fields as the engine of the American economy. That engine has gotten so big and so powerful that it can’t be fueled by talent within the U.S. itself.”

Moh El-Naggar, biophysicist at the University of Southern California

“We live in an extremely competitive global environment,” says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Just because we want to do this ‘America First’ thing doesn’t mean the rest of the world is going to stop being entrepreneurial and get out of the way.”

Told one way, the story of America the superpower is the story of innovation. Our history books and homegrown myths are crowded with inventors and entrepreneurs, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. In the 20th century, America earned its place in world events, more often than not, by MacGyvering one unlikely technological triumph after another: over disease, over German nuclear physicists and Cold War cosmonauts, over the pull of Earth’s gravity itself. And immigration played a critical role in that progress.

As The Hill pointed out last year, all six American Nobel laureates in 2016 were foreign-born. That’s not unusual: According to a 2014 study by Stanford scientists, the number of U.S. patent filings increased by 30 percent in the wake of Jewish immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany. So did the number of Nobel prizes.

In general, the less open a society is, the more likely its scientists and innovators are to go elsewhere — and for a long time, that “elsewhere” has been the United States.

One in six U.S. scientists is an immigrant, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation report. Of those, a majority are naturalized citizens, but many hold green cards or long-term visas to study and work in the United States. And those 5 million scientists have had a measurable effect on science in their adopted country.

“We’re at a point where changes in our technology are happening so quickly, we can either sit it out, or we can be full participants,” Rosenberg says. “We have some natural competitive advantages, but we could lose them simply by taking this nationalist line.”

A chart from 2011 shows Nobel Laureates by location of affiliation at the time of the win.Jon Bruner/Forbes

“Think of the STEM fields as the engine of the American economy,” says Moh El-Naggar, a biophysicist at the University of Southern California, where he studies the weird things microbes can do — including, potentially, playing a role in renewable energy technologies. “That engine has gotten so big and so powerful that it can’t be fueled by talent within the U.S. itself.”

El-Naggar was born in Libya, one of the seven countries placed under travel restrictions by Trump’s executive order. He’s now an American citizen and worries about the toll of a travel ban on the morale of his fellow foreign-born scientists — and the impact on their research.

“I look at my own work,” he says, “and I feel that almost every good thing that’s ever happened had its genesis in some unexpected conversation in some unexpected conference with some unexpected colleague. We are in a situation where we’ve put barriers on these unexpected conversations.”

Last week’s news came with a personal cost, too. His parents had been planning a trip to California in April to meet their grandchildren for the first time. Now those plans are on hold, indefinitely.

“A lot of people like me ended up in this country, doing what we love, because it was a better place to come to than where we grew up,” El-Naggar says. “So when I say that this looks bad to me right now, I hope that carries extra weight. This is coming from someone who has seen bad.”

U.S. scientific organizations have put out strong statements condemning the entry ban, including a letter sent by the AAAS and co-signed by more than 150 other institutions. Massachusetts Institute of Technology President L. Rafael Reif called the policy “a stunning violation of our deepest American values” in an email to students, while John Holdren, science advisor to the Obama administration, had even stronger words for the executive action, calling it “perverse,” an “abomination,” and a “terrible, terrible idea” in an interview with Nature.

An online petition to lift the restrictions has already been signed by tens of thousands of academics and researchers. Many tech companies — often sponsors of visas for foreign-born engineers, if not founded and led by immigrants themselves — have spoken out against the move, as well.

Their concern is amplified by additional anti-science moves by the Trump administration. In orders leaked last week, the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered to cease all external communication, including scientific releases, until they could be reviewed and approved by a member of the administration.

“You should never get to the point where someone in political power gets to decide what’s the good science and what’s the bad science,” the UCS’s Rosenberg says. “You have to worry about that.”

For Samimi, there’s very specific climate research at stake. She made a trip to Greenland last year, installing instruments in the ice sheet that need to be maintained and adjusted. If she can’t get back, she might have to abandon her PhD experiment.

“If I’m not able to work there …” she says. “I don’t even want to think about alternatives. This doesn’t make sense, you know?” Right now, a lot of the scientific community is reaching the same conclusion.

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Trump’s travel freeze will ice climate science and cleantech

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In battle over new Canadian pipeline, it’s Trudeau vs. tribes

by KelleeGiles Posted on May 24, 2016

In battle over new Canadian pipeline, it’s Trudeau vs. tribes

By on May 24, 2016Share

The ghost of the Keystone XL pipeline is hovering over every new fossil fuel project — and it’s haunting the Canadian prime minister’s office.

In the latest action against new Canadian oil and gas infrastructure, a coalition of First Nations groups publicly asserted their right to block the construction of pipelines that cross their land — and informed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that they fully intend to do just that. Led by the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, the group’s assertion follows a legal challenge that North Vancouver’s Tsleil-Waututh Nation filed earlier this month, which argued that the government has not sought proper consent for development projects on their lands.

In response to the tribes’ announcement, Trudeau told Reuters, “Well, communities grant permission. Does that mean you have to have unanimous support from every community? Absolutely not.”

It’s not the first time Trudeau has found himself caught in the middle of Canadian pipeline politics. Aboriginal objection is a growing element of the “Keystone-ization” of fossil fuel infrastructure in Canada. The term for the spread of opposition to major oil and gas infrastructure projects takes its name from the failed TransCanada Keystone XL project, which President Barack Obama vetoed last February.

A fitting example of Canadian Keystone-ization is Enbridge Inc.’s ever-delayed Northern Gateway pipeline, which would export diluted bitumen from northern oil sands to Asian markets, and has been blocked for years by both aboriginal and climate activists. Another is TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, which has been tied up with opposition lawsuits since 2013. 

But in terms of the strength of its opposition, the Canadian project most reminiscent of Keystone XL belongs to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion project — the one most recently contested by tribes in British Columbia. It’s a proposed pipeline that would stretch 715 miles between Alberta and British Columbia, alongside the existing Trans Mountain pipeline system. The controversial project was conditionally approved by Canada’s National Energy Board last Thursday. If construction goes through, Kinder Morgan would increase its transport of bitumen from oil sands from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day.

Now, Trudeau finds himself at an impasse. In 2014, he told Metro Calgary, “I certainly hope we’re going to get that pipeline approved,” in reference to the Trans Mountain project. But after his election, the Prime Minister’s stance on oil and gas infrastructure has grown more complex. In January, Trudeau’s administration began requiring all new pipeline projects to pass a tougher environmental review, one that takes into account the emissions produced by the fossil fuels that the pipeline would carry. But despite this more stringent vetting process, Trudeau remains firmly in the pro-pipeline camp, reportedly calling the approval of the Trans Mountain project a top priority during his tenure.

In Vancouver last March, when asked about the potential for these proposed pipelines to damage the environment around them, Trudeau dodged the question:

“We have hundreds and hundreds of pipelines across this country carrying all sorts of different things, and we need to make sure that we’re getting the reassurance of communities, Indigenous people, environmentalists and scientists that we’re doing it responsibly.”

As of this week, it’s clear that reassurance has not arrived for many indigenous groups. And if the Trudeau administration goes ahead with their pipeline plans, that reassurance will probably never come.

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In battle over new Canadian pipeline, it’s Trudeau vs. tribes

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Nitrogen pollution from farming lingers for decades

by JaimeLockett Posted on October 23, 2013

Nitrogen pollution from farming lingers for decades

By

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There goes the groundwater.

When a farmworker sprays fertilizer over a field, there’s a good chance he or she will be outlived by nitrogen pollution from that fertilizer.

A 30-year study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that nitrogen could linger in soil for nearly a century after fertilizer is applied.

Nitrogen from fertilizer helps crops grow, but it can be poisonous for humans and animals. When nitrates leach from farmed soil into groundwater, they can make it undrinkable.

“There’s a lot of fertilizer nitrogen that has accumulated in agricultural soils over the last few decades which will continue to leak as nitrate towards groundwater,” said researcher Mathieu Sebilo, the paper’s lead author.

Three decades after scientists applied fertilizer to sugar beet and winter wheat on two small experimental plots in France, they found that just 61 to 65 percent of its nitrogen had been gobbled up by the crops. Another 12 to 15 percent was still in the soil, and 8 to 12 percent had leached into the groundwater. (The scientists used a fertilizer with an artificially high concentration of a specific nitrogen isotope to help them track its movement over the decades.)

Based on those results, the scientists project that some of the nitrogen will still be lingering in the plots in another 50 years time.


Source
Long-term fate of nitrate fertilizer in agricultural soils, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Nitrogen fertilizer remains in soils and leaks towards groundwater for decades, researchers find, University of Calgary

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Nitrogen pollution from farming lingers for decades

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TransCanada plans colossal trans-Canada oil pipeline

by dx1d3x0 Posted on August 2, 2013

TransCanada plans colossal trans-Canada oil pipeline

By John Upton

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While the Obama administration dithers over whether to approve TransCanada’s planned Keystone XL pipeline, the pipeline builder announced Thursday that it will pursue an even bigger project connecting Alberta’s tar-sands oil fields with refineries in the nation’s east.

The 2,700-mile, $12 billion Energy East Pipeline would carry 1.1 million barrels per day, making it more than a third larger than Keystone XL, which is intended to carry 800,000 bpd.

From Reuters:

The line, which still needs regulatory approval, could be in service by late 2017 for deliveries to Quebec and 2018 for New Brunswick, potentially reshaping the Atlantic Basin oil market and opening up new markets for Canadian crude.

Customers have already pledged to use at least 900,000 bpd of the line’s capacity, suggesting that producers and refiners will pay for an export route, while regulatory hurdles delay pipelines in Western Canada and to the United States.

“It looks like they got far more interest than they were initially expecting,” said analyst Sandy Fielden of consulting firm RBN Energy in Austin, Texas.

As you would expect, Canadian environmentalists are appalled at the thought of shipping so much dangerous, climate-changing cargo across their country:

[W]hile cross-Canada political support was mostly strong, environmental groups that have resisted projects to pump crude across the Rocky Mountains to Canada’s Pacific Coast are already attacking TransCanada’s new plan. …

“The same people-power movements that have stalled other ill-conceived tar sands pipeline projects will rise up to tell our governments we need to invest in clean energy, not tar sands expansion,” Mike Hudema, a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada, said in a statement.

Even if the Energy East line is built, TransCanada will still want Keystone XL. From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

University of Calgary business professor Bob Schultz said the west-to-east pipeline project is not a backup plan for TransCanada in the event the Keystone XL project is rejected.

Schultz said there is enough demand in Alberta for oil transportation to justify several projects. …

“What this does is it enables the oil that’s in the ground to be distributed to refineries with some confidence in advance.”

If only such confidence could be extended to environmental safeguards. But oil pipelines spill; they always have and they always will.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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TransCanada plans colossal trans-Canada oil pipeline

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Train explosion in Quebec stokes debate about oil transport

by porvluef Posted on July 8, 2013

Train explosion in Quebec stokes debate about oil transport

By John Upton

Reuters/Mathieu BelangerA firefighter walks past a burning train at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.

The latest disaster caused by the transport of oil across North America has wrecked the town of Lac-Mégantic in Quebec. A driverless train loaded with crude from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota derailed and exploded early Saturday in the town’s center.

Dozens of buildings were leveled and at least five people were killed, while 40 more were still missing as of Monday morning. The fracked oil was en route to New Brunswick, which is home to the largest oil refinery in Canada. From Reuters:

The train, which did not have an engineer aboard when it derailed, was hauling 72 tanker cars of crude from North Dakota to eastern Canada. It rolled downhill from an overnight parking spot, gathered speed and derailed on a curve in the small town of Lac-Megantic at 1 a.m. on Saturday.

Each car carried 30,000 gallons of crude oil. Four caught fire and exploded in an orange and black fireball that mushroomed hundreds of feet into the air and flattened dozens of buildings, including a popular bar.

“It looks like a war zone here,” said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The disaster plunged the media into debate: Is it safer to move oil through underground pipelines (à la Mayflower, Kalamazoo, and Keystone XL), or to move it by rail?

Frackers and tar-sands miners are extracting record amounts of oil in America and Canada. Existing pipelines can’t carry the whopping bounty to refineries, so energy companies are seeking to lay lattices of new pipes. Meanwhile, the glut of liquid hydrocarbons is being loaded onto trains, which are being sent vast distances — and are triggering high-profile spills and accidents.

The Toronto Globe and Mail argues in the wake of the Lac-Mégantic disaster that “[p]ipelines are the safest way of transporting oil and natural gas, and we need more of them, without delay.” The New York Times considers the pipeline-vs.-train question more impartially, quoting environmental experts:

Edward Whittingham, the executive director of the Pembina Institute, an environmental group based in Calgary, Alberta, said there was not conclusive research weighing the safety of the two shipment methods.

“The best data I’ve seen indicates,” he said, “depending on your perspective, both are pretty much as safe as each other, or both are equally unsafe. There’s safety and environmental risks inherent in either approach.”

Accidents involving pipelines, Mr. Whittingham said, can be more difficult to detect and can release greater amounts of oil. Rail accidents are more frequent but generally release less oil.

But the comparison obfuscates an obvious reality: The oil can’t be moved safely at all. (Same goes for natural gas.)

After a string of pipeline and rail accidents in recent years, it’s clear that letting the energy industry move incendiary bulk fluids around the continent is like tossing a book of matches into the crib to keep little Johnny happy while his folks stare at the television. And that’s without even considering the climate impacts of the fossil-fuel mining binge, or the many hazards of fracking.

The weekend tragedy is a reminder that the energy industry can’t be trusted to do anything safely, let alone transport oil.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Train explosion in Quebec stokes debate about oil transport

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