Recently, I read that the Grammy Award-winning Indigo Girls conducted a concert on a pontoon boat on the Mississippi River near Aitkin. The point of the concert was to protest the Line 3 Replacement Project.
Being celebrities — like Jane Fonda, who also jetted to Minnesota to protest the pipeline – doesn’t make them all-wise. They are just people like you and I, who use petroleum-based products on a near-daily basis!
Protesters – even those who drive motor homes — apparently think that our nation can just get along without petroleum. Perhaps they don’t realize how dependent we have become on petroleum in our daily lives.
Petroleum isn’t used only to fuel cars and pontoon boats that transport protesters to their destinations. Petroleum is present in very much of what we use every day.
Did you brush your teeth this morning? Most toothpastes use a petroleum derivative in their composition.
Many of our personal care products are derived from petroleum. Here’s a short list: perfume, hair dye, cosmetics (lipstick, makeup, foundation, eyeshadow, mascara, eyeliner), hand lotion, soap, shaving cream, deodorant, panty hose, combs, shampoo, eyeglasses and contact lenses.
After you showered, what did you put on in regard to clothing? Clothing is commonly made from petroleum-based fibers, including acrylic, rayon, vegan leather, polyester, nylon and spandex. Even shoes and purses use petrochemicals for their lightweight, durable, and water resistant properties.
When you went into the kitchen for breakfast, perhaps you fried an egg in a pan that is made egg-friendly by a petroleum-based coating. You probably flipped that egg with a non-scratching spatula made from petroleum-based plastic. And when you took bread from a plastic bag and put a slice in the toaster, chances are good that toaster had plastic handles and control knobs and a plastic coating on the electrical cord that you plugged into a plastic-protected socket.
And while you were in the kitchen or bathroom, you probably walked across a floor protected by a plastic product, and maybe covered by a soft rug made from petroleum derivatives.
[image_caption]Tom Burford[/image_caption]
At work maybe you got a headache and took an aspirin – you guessed it — a petroleum product.
You might be surprised to learn that modern health care relies on petroleum products that have few substitutes. Plastics are used in a wide-range of medical devices, and petrochemicals are relied on for pharmaceuticals. Products include hospital equipment, IV bags, antihistamines, artificial limbs, dentures, hearing aids, heart valves and many more. And those precious N-95 face masks are also full of petroleum products.
After work you maybe went golfing, trying your best to make par by hitting a small round petroleum product.
My point is this: The next time you talk to people who condemn “dirty and dangerous” oil and protest the flow of oil through pipelines, look at what they are wearing, what they are driving, and even look at the outboard motor propelling their pontoon boat. Ask them what they did that day and help them count how many times they utilized a petroleum product.
Perhaps they’ll see the hypocrisy in condemning something they use daily.
Tom Burford, of Bagley, Minnesota, has been a newspaper editor for more than 45 years.
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Oh come on. Do you really think any of those protesters use deodorant?
Oh come on, this is silly. You can’t criticize society’s over-reliance on petroleum products if you use any yourself, is that what the argument is? If it’s impossible to get through your day without using petroleum, aren’t you proving your opponents’ point for them?
You say “Perhaps (protestors) don’t realize how dependent we have become on petroleum in our daily lives” – this is 100% wrong, we very much do realize this, and claiming otherwise reveals that you haven’t really paid attention to what the pipeline protests are about. No one is saying that transitioning away from a fossil fuel economy will be easy, but it’s only going to make it harder if we keep tearing up our natural wetlands to build these pipelines.
Its a pretty lame piece, but still not as lame as bringing the Indigo Girls out to protest.
The pipeline is almost finished. And its replacing an older pipeline. Get over it.
I still fail to understand how rerouting & expanding- the new pipe is something like 15% bigger can be considered a simple replacement.
If I trade in my Honda CR-V for a Land Rover Defender I guess it’s a ‘replacement’ on some level, but clearly it’s a upgrade and not a like for like trade.
Its pretty simple. In the decades since the last pipeline was built, they have changed how they do it. Why would they replace it with the old standards. It would be like replacing your car with one that is decades out of date.
More like your Honda CR-V for a KIA Telluride.
And if the Telluride should happen to get better mileage and improved emissions, what is the better choice?
“if we keep tearing up our natural wetlands to build these pipelines.”
Well, the existing line 3 frequently leaks into those wetlands and Enbridge tears them up, patches the leak, tries to remediate the spill and waits for the next one to occur. What is the problem with replacing an old leaky pipeline with a new non leaky one? In reality the joke is on Enbridge: they are building a new safe pipeline at a time when alternative energy will reduce the demand for what Enbridge is pumping. I have yet to hear a coherent response why replacing rather than continually repairing a leaky pipeline is a bad thing.
The solution is not to double down on the production of petroleum. The solution is to wean ourselves away from it.
If only we had followed Jimmy Carter’s lead 40 years ago and continued looking for ways to replace and recycle petroleum-based products, to find alternatives to automobile-based transportation (electric buses and trains in cities, high-speed rail and upscale buses between them), and to stop fighting wars for oil, which themselves use tremendous amounts of oil. I recall reading that the fuel consumption of an army tank is measured in gallons per mile, not miles per gallon.
As far as small towns are concerned, I lived in one for seven years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The town was actually quite walkable, with a traditional business district and plenty of sidewalks along the busiest streets. I routinely walked if the distance was less than a mile. But I was one of the few who did. Able-bodied students drove from class to class around the campus of the local college, which was all of three blocks by three blocks. If acquaintances saw me walking the six blocks to downtown, they invariably asked if I wanted a ride and looked startled when I said that I was walking on purpose.
One day, I was downtown, and a woman from out of town asked me where a certain store was. When I told her it was two blocks away, she said, “Then I’ll have to drive.”
No, she was not elderly or disabled. She actually drove out of the one parking space on that block and headed down the street to where the parking was equally tight.
It was after that incident that I began thinking of such people as “car potatoes.”
We could stop building bigger houses than ever before for smaller families than ever before. We could stop thinking that every member of the family over 16 needs a car.
We could do a lot of things other than continuing to pollute our land and air.
Most everything you referenced in total consumes about .001% of our total petroleum usage.
They ain’t running toothpaste through line 3 (which, FYI, I have no problem with)
The vilification of green energy is a true head shaker. Check out the relentless whining by the right wing Center for the American Experiment, a typical rant:
https://www.americanexperiment.org/shellenberger-the-real-reason-they-blame-heat-deaths-blackouts-and-forest-fires-on-climate-change-is-because-theyre-causing-them/
If liberals were against green energy they would be all for it. It is simply terminal contrarianism.
Wind, solar, hydro, batteries and, gasp, things like the molten salt reactor will make petroleum products something to power your antique car in parades and insuring eggs don’t stick in your pan. And we will all be better for it…
Even as a teenager I thought it was a shame to burn all that petroleum; it’s such a great chemical resource.
60% of a barrel of oil goes into Transportation fuels. The other 40% goes into things like Propane, Plastics, Lubricants, Asphalt, and many others. Some of these can be replaced, others cannot easily be replaced. Simply shutting off oil today is going to make is critically short in other things that we rely on every day.
I hope that we are all enjoying our beautiful Minnesota summer. So far, here, we have been spared the real price to be paid for petro-driven climate change, although most of the state has been suffering under some sort of drought conditions. The Western US has not been quite so lucky. Not just drought, but severe drought with no end in sight. Try your google on Lake Mead water levels. If you snowbirds are still thinking of moving to Phoenix, Arizona, then please think again! Perhaps you have read about Duluth, and how the real estate prices there keep rising. Duluth is now considered a “climate refuge”, and a surprising number of folks from around the country are moving there. Perhaps we should not take our green and pleasant land for granted. If the drought being visited on the West (Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico,…) –if this kind of drought becomes the norm for the West, and begins to visit the Mid West (that’s us), then we will all be looking for some kind of climate refuge.
Of course, what I am saying is all just horsefeathers, and everything is going to be all right. We don’t need to worry. Nothing is going to change. Let’s drill more oil wells, and let’s build more pipelines for tar sand oil from Canada. As the Beach Boys said, “Don’t Worry Baby, Everything’s gonna be All right”
That’s all we need to know. Let the petroleum people run our world. Don’t worry. Be happy. Buy oil. Buy all this BS.