Bob Grise
St. Joseph, MN
Your Feb. 5 column, “What’s in Minnesota trenches? A move to stop Line 3” by a local student, Abigail Thomas, opined that piping tar sands oil to the United States from Canada is a bad idea and a human-caused climate crisis is upon us. My college-aged daughters were taught the same things.
When I was in school in the 1970s, I was taught we were running out of topsoil and may starve, we are running out of natural gas, (brrr), the world will run out of oil by 2015, and planet Earth is cooling. Turns out the settled science of the 1970s was anything but settled. It was the same conjecture sold as settled science that Mark Twain warned us about, and it is still going on today.
The oil industry is not dying and not in need of taxpayer subsidization as is so called “green” energy. Tar sands oil is the same type of oil we used to import in large amounts from Venezuela. If we don’t buy Canadian oil, China will. Better we have a stable supply of Canadian oil than to be dependent on hostile nations. How ironic that if mankind would have accidentally made that tar sands mess, we would be expected to clean it up, since that oil naturally seeps into the local rivers.
There is no “climate crisis,” (it’s politics). The average temperature in St. Cloud from 1900 to 1939 was 43.045. The most recent 40 years the average was 42.97. Thankfully our temps are warmer now than in the Little Ice Age of the 1600s when crop failures were common.
A recent study by independent scientist Dr. Indur Goklany of the Global Warming Policy Foundation found there is no climate emergency. “Hurricanes more intense or frequent – No. Tornadoes increase and become more intense – No. Floods more frequent and more intense – No. Droughts more frequent and intense – No. Area burned by wildfire increasing – No (peaked in mid-19th century). Cereal yields decreasing – No (they tripled since 1961). Food supplies decreasing – No. Land area/beaches shrinking – No (marginal expansion).”
Pipelines are safer than oil trains and new pipelines are safer than old ones so I’m in favor of a new line 3.
