Saturday, January 17, 2015

Remember - - it's Scott Walker's tar sand oil pipeline

When the inevitable tar sand oil pipeline spill occurs in a Wisconsin river, farm or neighborhood, Walker can jump into a cleanup shift wearing that orange Enbridge t-shirt he posed with last year.

He got the souvenir when he visited the Canadian company's Superior, WI storage tank farm to laud, with a few well-rehearsed re-election talking points the major expansion of tar sand oil pipeline capacity, the company wants to run north-south across the state.

His DNR elected not to do a full environmental review of the route and planned increase in pipeline capacity, limiting the review to a single air permit application for the storage tanks.

A Dane County committee will take up the matter on Jan. 27th, and some conditions might be put on the pipeline which will cross the county. Details, here.

The entire issue and Dane County developments are finally getting some national publicity.

The DNR does not make a move without clearing things with Walker's office: he chose developer Cathy Stepp to run the agency with a "chamber of commerce mentality." made Matt Moroney, another development official the agency powerful deputy, and picked a former Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce official to run the air quality division.

Details of the corporate management of the DNR are here, and the saga is a perfect example of what the national media needs to absorb if it is to accurately portray who Walker is and what he's done.

And don't forget that the Journal Sentinel editorial board gave a thumbs up to the expansion, but did not mention the company's in-state spill record.

Though the newspaper has tracked the overall drop in DNR investigations and enforcement actions since Walker put his corporate people in charge of the agency, the editorial board managed to reach this self-assuring conclusion:
Critics argue that the separate projects should all be considered as one and that the federal government should be brought into the oversight and regulatory process. We're not convinced that's necessary. We think the states might actually do a better job of watching over their domains; certainly, Michigan won't be a pushover in the wake of the 2010 spill. And we trust Wisconsin regulators to do their job right.
And for the record:


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