Vol. 79/No. 45 December 14, 2015
(commentary)
Workers’ fight to control safety
is key to defending land, labor
President Barack Obama announced Nov. 6 his administration’s rejection of the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, a decision widely described in the capitalist media as a victory for environmental activists. But for the working class, protecting nature and the environment does not involve shutting down pipelines and oil production, but which class controls them in order to meet the energy needs of the world while protecting both land and labor.
The 1,179-mile pipeline extension would have carried up to 800,000 barrels a day of crude oil from the Alberta tar sands and North Dakota fracking fields to the Gulf Coast for refining or export.
“Climate control” is one of the handful of questions Obama intends to rest his legacy on. The timing of the Keystone XL decision was part of preparing for participation in the December United Nations summit on climate change in Paris, where Obama plans to present Washington as a leader in reducing world greenhouse gas emissions, even though per capita emissions in the U.S. is the highest in the world.
The Sierra Club, which opposes any extraction and use of tar sand oil, hailed the decision as “a monumental victory in the fight to protect our planet from the disastrous effects of fossil fuels and carbon pollution.”
But the rejection of the pipeline does little to change how much Alberta oil will be produced. That oil is already extracted and taken to North American ports and refineries by rail and the existing 57,000 miles of crude oil pipelines in the United States. TransCanada, the company proposing the XL project, already sends as much as 700,000 barrels per day from Alberta to Texas through the original Keystone pipeline that was completed in 2010 and has been expanded since.
Defeat of the XL pipeline guarantees increased transport of Canadian petroleum by rail. Driven by the search for profit rail bosses have slashed train crews, even down to one person, and refused to adequately maintain their tracks, which take a beating from long and heavy oil trains. They bitterly oppose efforts by rail workers to win more control over safety on the job.
Train transport of crude in the U.S. increased from 9,500 to more than 450,000 carloads annually between 2008 and 2014. Each week, 42 mile-long oil trains travel through the Chicago metropolitan area.
The 2013 derailment and explosion of an oil train in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people called public attention to the dangers of running understaffed trains carrying volatile or toxic materials on unsafe tracks.
In the hands of bosses whose icon is profits pipelines aren’t that safe either. From 1986 to 2013 there were nearly 8,000 significant “incidents” resulting in more than 500 deaths, more than 2,300 injuries, release of more than 3 million gallons of oil and some $7 billion in damages, according to data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Most arguments for and against Keystone XL, both in the U.S. and Canada, have been presented in a nationalist framework, a deadly trap for working people. Announcing his decision, Obama said that the pipeline “would not serve the national interests of the U.S.”
At the Paris climate change conference the biggest capitalist competitors, turning their backs on the needs of power-poor countries, will grandstand about reducing carbon dioxide emissions and jockey to promote the national interests of their bourgeois government. Such summits expose the exploitive social relations between the billionaire families of the industrialized capitalist nations and countries held in semicolonial bondage. They reveal how the workings of the capitalist system worldwide deny the most basic human needs to billions of people.
The key question for the working class is that these inequalities deprive billions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America of electrification, a necessity to narrow the gap in the conditions of life, the possibilities of education and culture, the political experience between them and toilers living in the industrially more advanced countries.
Under capitalism the transport of oil and other volatile or toxic substances by pipeline, rail or truck is carried out with contempt for the life and limb of workers on the job and in the surrounding communities and with the certainty of accidents that contaminate air, land and water. At the heart of a working-class response is the fight for unions and for their control over safety on the job. This fight is inextricably linked to the stewardship of nature.
In a 2001 talk titled “Our Politics Start With the World,” Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes spoke about nuclear power production. “The question is how long will the design and construction of containment vessels, the monitoring of reactor operations, and disposal of atomic waste products — with all the consequences for public health and safety — be carried out by governments beholden to the imperialist ruling families and other capitalist exploiters,” he said. “How long before these vital matters, including the eventual transition away from nuclear power toward other, safer energy sources yet to be developed, will be organized by workers and farmers governments acting in the interests of the great majority of humanity. The stakes in the resolution of that question — an outcome that will be settled in historic class battles — could not be clearer.”
The same can be said of the extraction, processing and distribution of carbon fuels.
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