On Oct. 30, over 17,000 gallons of oil spilled from a ruptured pipeline in a town outside of Austin, Texas. According to Koch Industries, the owners of the pipeline, the cause of the rupture is still under investigation but the spill has been contained.
While the damage done to the surrounding area is relatively small, this spill is only the latest incident in a series of disastrous pipeline ruptures throughout the country this year. Earlier this month, an oil pipeline spewed 20,000 barrels of oil into a North Dakota wheat field before it was discovered by a local farmer after 11 days. Residents of Mayflower, Ark., are still suffering horrific health complications after oil from a massive spill flowed through their streets last March.
Despite these recurrent disasters, oil pipeline construction is accelerating throughout the country. The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David Koch, owners of the ruptured Texas pipeline, stand to rake in $100 billion in profit with the passage of the notorious Trans Canada Keystone XL pipeline awaiting approval by President Barack Obama. Meanwhile, as opponents’ attention has been focused on battling against completion of this massive pipeline, which will bring crude Tar Sands through environmentally fragile regions of the United States, three other equally large and precariously situated pipelines are currently in the planning stages or already being built.
What is clear is that the sustainability of the environment and people’s safety mean nothing to Koch Industries, Trans Canada or others like them. They care about one thing: profit. As ruptures and spills continue to poison people and contaminate the environment, these corporations make billions of dollars and use some of their money to buy political favors and push ahead with construction of even more pipelines.
The Koch brothers, who have given $50 million to think tanks and members of Congress pushing for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and who have invested heavily in supporting congressional inaction on climate change, are a case in point. The result, according to the Pipeline Safety Trust, is that “regulations are written in such a way that to a vast degree, it’s left up to the pipeline companies to figure out how safe their pipelines are and what to do about it.”
Under capitalism, people and the environment are reduced to a cost-benefit ratio. The cost of cleaning up a spill and even paying fines imposed afterwards continues to be much less than the money made by building and operating the pipelines. As government officials are paid to look the other way, pipes will continue to rupture, land will continue to be contaminated, people will continue to get sick, and the fate of our very planet may lie in the balance.
Socialism, then, is the only way forward for people and the planet. In a socialist economy, environmental sustainability and public health would be in the forefront and the basis of planning. Production would be designed to meet these needs, and profiting at their expense would not be a tolerated.
As oil spills small and large lay bare the crises that become more frequent under capitalism, all people have a duty to fight for socialism in order to preserve this earth and build towards a common future.
