I like this guy, even though he is too liberal for my taste in general. At least he is old school liberal and not an identity politics, clickbait bullshit liberal...
Wouldn't an "old school liberal" be in favor of the pipeline and domestic oil production in general because it provides well paying jobs for blue collar workers, it lowers gas prices (especially important for lower income people) and increases government revenue?
What he said about if the water cannons sprayed racial euphemisms at the crowd, then it would be covered more by the Daily Beast is true.
I have heard that it was actually the protesters who hurled racial insults at the police. But in any case, Daily Beast has written about #nodapl and quite favorably. Here is an especially egregious example, written by that guy who made Gasland.
Shot in the Back at Standing Rock
It is a very biased hit piece, but that is not even the worst thing. The worst thing are the glaring factual errors (or more likely deliberate lies).
Daily Beast said:
The moral soul of this continent is at Standing Rock, and at the moment that soul is being beaten, maced, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, and locked up by a militarized police force acting on behalf of foreign oil companies.
Quite an intro and already the first factual error/lie. Energy Transfer Partners is not a foreign company.
As North Dakota police lock up and abuse peaceful “water protectors,”
These activists are definitely not "peaceful". Second factual error/lie.
it becomes clear that the fight over the tribal land of Standing Rock is not only the primary battleground for indigenous sovereignty; it is the center of the fight for clean water, to fight climate change, and to ban hydraulic fracturing. At its base, this is a struggle between the people and a government corrupted by corporate power.
At least he is honest about the endgame/motive of the #nodapl activists and does not pretend this is all about the route of the pipeline.
Shale oil companies have dug up their backyards to transport some of this, the dirtiest, most polluting fuel on the planet, from another Indian reservation, Fort Berthold.
Third factual error/lie. Just last year the ecomentalists claimed "the dirtiest, most polluting fuel on the planet" was Canadian oil sands (Venezuelan oil sands were fine of course, because socialism covers a multitude of pollutants). Now it's supposedly the light sweet crude fracked from Bakken. Of course, neither could ever hold a candle to coal.
Their primary rallying cry was for their water. The Dakota Access Pipeline is slated to run beneath the Cannonball River, a tributary to the Missouri and part of a watershed that supplies 17 million people.
No, it is not slated to cross the Cannonball River, but the Missouri itself, just like many other pipelines.
The pipeline was originally planned to go through Bismarck, but the residents there objected and the Army Corps of Engineers along with Dakota Access Pipeline LLC decided to reroute it—straight through the Native American reservation.
When routing a pipeline it makes sense to avoid densely populated areas as much as possible. Bismarck is a city of some 70k people on 31 square miles. The population of the entire 3500 square miles of the Standing Rock reservation is under 10k. And of course, another glaring factual error/lie is that the pipeline is not going "straight through the reservation" but passing just north of it, and it is furthermore not close to any population centers in the reservation. And lastly, even this route is closer to Bismarck than to most points within the reservation because the reservation is so spread out (most of it is actually in South Dakota).
Go ahead, and look for yourselves on Google Earth. Look at the current route passing through North Dakota and at the vicinity of Bismarck. Where would you route a pipeline through?
Routing the pipeline through Standing Rock Reservation rather than via the predominantly white state capital city is emblematic of a century’s worth of housing the most dangerous energy projects in communities of color.
Doubling down on the factual error/lie of the pipeline going
through the reservation and accusing people of racism when a much simpler explanation is that it is better to avoid densely populated areas. Besides, there are some 3000 Indians living in Bismarck. Fewer Indians are probably affected by this route than would be by the Bismarck route. But, I know, to modern "liberals", it's identity politics
über alles, über alles in der Welt!
But this is not a just a symbolic or abstract moment of environmental grandstanding. The Native Americans at Standing Rock have a real point when it comes to the danger to their water supply. Pipelines the world over leak at an alarming rate—more than 2,000 in the last two decades. “Since 2009, the annual number of significant accidents on oil and petroleum pipelines has shot up by almost 60 percent,” according to the Associated Press. In fact, the industry exists in what I call a permanent state of criminal negligence, and spills are more often the result of decades of neglect than chance malfunctions.
A new pipeline would not be affected by "decades of neglect". And yes, many pipelines in the US are 40 or 50 years old and the pipes need replacing. But pipeline operator would rather not do it when idiotic activists oppose each and every pipeline project.
Also, leak volumes are usually small. If this pipeline was such an existential danger to the Missouri, it would have been killed long since by the dozens of pipelines passing under it already.
