Yet Another 'Disaster' That Actually Wasn't

The East Palestine, Ohio derailment “disaster” presents us with an interesting twist on the way that the public relations professionals exert control over both political parties. Usually, when there is a Republican president in office and something goes off the rails (pun intended) in the environmental world, Democrat media types quickly develop talking points designed to paint the party in power as indifferent and/or incompetent. The MSM, fulfilling its role as the primary public relations tool of the Democrat party, dutifully follows suit.

With East Palestine, the roles are reversed. Many in the Republican party have now assumed the hand-wringing role, no doubt following the instructions of their own PR professionals. (Note to J.D. Vance: it's not a "chemical rainbow," it's a petroleum sheen. Next time your car leaks a little hydraulic fluid and there's a rainstorm, you can enjoy watching one appear in your driveway.) I take little pleasure in pointing out the error of the party’s ways in this case, but err they did. The same, sadly, is true of Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who is usually a reliable and thoughtful source of commentary. He too got this one wrong.

The East Palestine derailment was no disaster. Disasters require multiple bodies, or extensive/expensive property damage, or long-term environmental harm, preferably all three. East Palestine includes none of those elements. The one thing East Palestine had that allows people to label it a disaster is ugly visuals. I get it. Everyday, non-technical people who don’t understand dispersion, or exposure, or risk see that big black cloud and think “that’s what disasters look like!”

Looks worse than it was.

Those politicians and journalists who tried to use the East Palestine derailment as a means to attack the Biden administration and its secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, played the same game as their Democrat counterparts regularly play. Their concern sounded sincere, but there was nothing of substance to be had in their declarations. It’s the political equivalent of Professor Harold Hill whipping up the citizens of River City against the evils of pool. I have no idea what qualifies Buttigieg to be in the cabinet, but using a train derailment to criticize the guy is the political equivalent of kicking a puppy, and a not very clever puppy at that.

There are facts about East Palestine that are true, but don’t actually matter. Toxic materials were present and some had been released into the environment. True, but immaterial. Burning off the contents of a tanker containing vinyl chloride released potentially toxic chemicals into the air. Also true, but also immaterial. Some potentially toxic chemicals could possibly seep into the water table, significantly affecting the quality of well-water that is used by some nearby residents. True again, but ultimately of no concern.

How can I make such claims? What makes me right and the vast majority of politicians and journalists wrong? The flip answer is this: I’m a chemist. They’re not. I’ve got 38 years experience dealing with atmospheric chemistry, dispersion modeling and risk evaluation. They don’t. Releasing potentially toxic chemicals into the environment does not necessarily mean that the environment will suffer, either in the long term or the short term. Generating potentially toxic pollutants and releasing them into the air does not necessarily put anybody in the public at risk. The toxicity of the chemical doesn’t matter. The amount of the chemical released doesn’t matter. The only things that ultimately matter are the following:

  1. What is the maximum dose of a chemical to which a person can be exposed and how does that dose compare to established (and quite conservative) public health guidelines?
  2. Can the chemical release cause actual, long-term damage to eco-systems or to natural resources that we depend on?

The chemically contaminated soil in East Palestine may be removed and replaced with clean fill. Alternately, it might be left in place for naturally-occurring bacteria to clean up, which they do quite well. The state and the feds will closely monitor the course of the spill to ensure that no one using wells drinks or uses contaminated water from them. It would not be a surprise to find the railroad hooking all well water users in the area up to city water. There will be no long-term environmental damage or danger to the local water supply if local officials and the railroad continue to do the right things.

The dispersion model says not to worry.

How about that ugly black cloud. Surely it put people at risk!? No, it didn’t. We have the tools to determine potential exposures to airborne pollutants to very high degree of accuracy in virtually any situation. Tried, tested, and true environmental tools called dispersion models enable us who are part of the environmental world to predict how plumes containing pollutants will behave upon being released to atmosphere.

The primary pollutant of concern generated by the vinyl chloride burn was hydrochloric acid. You may also know it as muriatic acid. Among other things, it does a great job of removing stains from concrete. The vast majority of the chlorine in vinyl chloride will form hydrochloric acid when burned. There are other, more toxic, chlorine compounds that can form during a burn, but the realities of chemistry means they will form in very small amounts that can be ignored.

I looked at emissions from the East Palestine burn using the most conservative dispersion model available, USEPA’s SCREEN3 model. It is designed to overestimate downwind exposures and we know it does just that because SCREEN3 results have been compared to real world measurement:

So let’s look at the plume generated by the East Palestine burn in those terms. As expected, the model predicts very high concentrations close to the burn, over 3,000 ppmv 100 meters away. That’s in the middle of the ugliest part of the cloud. There are also no people there. When you do a controlled burn you create an exclusion zone to keep everyone safe.

As the plume travels downwind, concentrations steadily drop. The exclusion zone during the burn was reported to be a one mile by two mile area downwind of the burn. That’s roughly 1,500 meters by 3,000 meters. At 1,500 meters the model predicts a peak concentration of 3.0 ppmv and at 3,000 meters the model predicts a peak concentration of 1.1 ppmv. Both values are far under the hydrochloric acid IDLH and comfortably under the OSHA PEL. The burn was ugly to see, but one is forced to conclude that the actual risk to people who followed orders to stay out of the exclusion zone was negligible. (If you want to see all my assumptions and calculations, use this link to download an Excel workbook that contains that information.)

Democrats who chant “follow the science” rarely do, especially when environmental issues are in play. How about we on the right use East Palestine as an opportunity to show them what following the science actually looks like, instead of playing their silly games?

Produce Here, Produce Now

For two years we at The Pipeline have argued that petroleum products, the life's blood of the modern world, are going to be produced somewhere, and that it would be best if they were produced by us and our allies rather than by nations such as Russia, Saudia Arabia, Iran, or Venezuela. Keeping oil and gas production at home ensures that that life's blood keeps flowing, and that we aren't as affected by the whims of a Vladimir Putin or an Ayatollah Khomeini as their subjects are.

It prevents us from having to depend on the political stability of the oft-unstable Strait of Hormuz or Russian borderlands which have been fought over for a millennium. And it empowers us to ensure that our resource sector is both abiding by reasonable environmental standards and free of the human rights abuses so common in nations like those mentioned above.

Russia's war in Ukraine has demonstrated the utter necessity of this position, making it so obvious that anyone with half-a-brain could see it. So, of course, the Biden administration is headed in the opposite direction. On Tuesday, bowing to bi-partisan pressure, Washington announced a ban on oil imports from Russia. This decision in itself is commendable -- the West's addiction to Russian oil has helped fund Putin's war effort, and it would be silly for us to condemn the shelling of Ukrainian cities while essentially paying for the shells. Unsurprisingly, gasoline prices skyrocketed in response, hitting record highs this week, records which will probably be eclipsed in the coming days, with some predicting that we will see averages of 6 dollars per gallon before too long.

The correct response from the White House would be to back off its war on domestic oil and gas production, revisit the Keystone XL pipeline and get back to issuing oil and gas leases on federal land. Yes, it would take months for the first drops of this new product to enter circulation, but the knowledge that it is coming would exert downward pressure on the market, bringing down prices in the near-term while insulating us against shocks further down the road.

Instead, the Biden team has apparently settled on a malignant two-pronged response:

This is madness, and even Democrats have started to notice. Senators Jon Tester and Joe Manchin have been quite vocal about the insanity, with the former asking why we would give an economic boon to "countries who don't share our values" when we could ramp up production here, and the latter saying, "Go back to the policies that we had before.... that's all we're asking."

Quite right, and eminently reasonable. Which is why it isn't gonna happen.

If We Only Had a Brain...

The Babylon Bee strikes again:

With oil imports from Russia banned and gas prices continuing to rise, many around the nation report really wishing we had our own oil we could dig up with big machines and then transport around with some sort of pipeline. "If only we had oil, and knew how to get it," said one local mom as she shelled out $300 for gas to take her kids to soccer practice. "Then maybe we wouldn't have to buy it from evil regimes around the world and gas prices would be lower. I know that's ridiculous, but it sure would be nice if that were possible!"

Wouldn't it, though? Never fear, however: Li'l Petey B., the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has a solution!

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg says he commiserates with people who are struggling right now. "I do have a solution though," he said. "If you all just plop down $90K on an electric car and another 3 million on building a windmill in your backyard, you won't have to deal with these gas costs. I am smart!"

According to the Bee, American scientists are working hard on a solution to the nation's energy woes, but so far no dice. Nuclear power, long bruited in the pages of science fiction, is still years if not decades away.

One solution might be for the feds and the states to immediately suspend all taxes at the pump, thus reducing the price-per-gallon to 1970s' level, but that has been dismissed in Washington as the kind of crazy talk we've come to expect from the insurrectionists of Jan. 6 and their fellow travelers in states that didn't vote for Joe Biden.

But Where Does Electricity Come from, Pete?

Ladies and Gentleman, "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg, United States Secretary of Transportation and, perhaps, the future face of the Democratic Party:

The Build Back Better legislation] contains incentives to make it more affordable to buy an electric vehicle, up to a $12,500 discount in effect, for families thinking about getting an E.V., families that, once they own that electric vehicle, will never have to worry about gas prices again.

Suffice it to say, I can't remember when I've heard a more brainless sentiment. Buttigieg can't possibly be this dumb, can he?

Maybe it's just that he's been given an impossible assignment -- talk up the increasingly unpopular Build Back Better plan while shifting blame on rising gas prices to combat the president's tanking poll numbers. He might as well be saying, 'Hey, if you people had bought an electric car, you wouldn't have to worry about gas prices right now! But no worries -- we've got a plan to give you a pile of money so you can fix that mistake. That's why pencils have erasers!"

Still, at the risk of asking some obvious questions: Where does Buttigieg think that electricity comes from? Does he not know that it is inextricably tied to the price of petroleum products? Here's David Harsanyi spelling that out for him:

Natural-gas prices have increased over 150 percent in a year’s time — with help from Biden-administration policy. More than 40 percent of our electricity is generated by natural gas.... Right now, fossil fuels are responsible for generating around 60 percent of our electricity — with nuclear, a source that Buttigieg now opposes, responsible for another 20 percent. The remaining 20 percent — often at tremendous up-front costs — is generated by renewable sources.

And as Harsanyi points out, "plugging your car into an outlet for 15 hours every night is going to cost plenty if Democrats get their way and make fossil fuels more expensive."

Even Buttigieg's reference to a $12,500 discount for people buying a new electric vehicle is ridiculous -- the average price difference between a new E.V. and a gas-powered car is $19,000! And that is on top of the significant tax-payer funded subsidies to the E.V. industry, enacted in the hope that it might one day be profitable on its own. It's farcical that even with this new subsidy embedded in BBB they're unable to close the gap.

All of which is to say -- Mayor Pete is trying to take you for a ride. Don't let him.

Biden Administration: 'Actually, Pipelines are Good'

I quoted this the other day, but Kyle Smith's line about how anti-pipeline Joe Biden has been bears repeating. For candidate Biden, "Keystone XL not only was a menace to our American way of life by bringing us energy, Biden thought it had to be cut off before his first afternoon nap." And he did, in fact, kill Keystone on Day 1 as promised.

That's a good fact to remember, since during the Colonial pipeline fiasco at least three officials in the Biden administration have admitted that pipelines are the safest and most efficient way to transport fuel. H/T to Breitbart for collecting the quotes:

First, "Climate Czar" John Kerry:

Kerry, when asked by Republican Rep. Darrell Issa (CA) if it is “true, the pipelines are more carbon-delivery efficient than trains or trucks or other forms of delivery?” Kerry immediately responded and said, “Yeah, that is true.”

Next, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm:

Granholm... admitted Tuesday, “pipe is the best way to go” when transporting fuel, during a press briefing regarding the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack.

And finally, Transportation Secretary and former McKinsey Globalist... er, sorry, Small Town Mayor/Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Asked whether he agrees with Secretary Granholm's comments that "pipelines are still the best way to move oil,”

Buttigieg responded by saying, “certainly.” He then continued, especially “when you’re talking about the efficiency of moving petroleum products.” “That’s why we have pipelines,” he added after.

Maybe someone should clue in the old man upstairs, after he wakes up from his nap.