Various mainstream media outlets believe the recently rejected Dakota Access Pipeline should be completed even as environmentalists continue to fight the multi-billion-dollar project.
Major newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the USA Today, among others, have run headlines arguing the so-called DAPL’s previously approved route should be completed.
Their support comes after the project’s current route was rejected Dec. 4 after previously being approved by the Army Corps of Engineers in early July.
The pipeline was sidelined after months of opposition from environmentalists and Standing Rock Sioux, who believe the pipeline would trample on the tribe’s lands and poison its water supply.
It has endured months-long criticisms from anti-fossil fuel activists and media hounds. DAPL opponents Bill McKibben and even editorialists at the New York Times, for instance, called the reroute near Standing Rock’s reservation nothing more than “environmental racism.”
Not every media outlet opposes the pipeline’s construction.
“The United States has 72,000 miles of crude oil pipeline,” USA Today’s editorial board wrote one day after DAPL’s rejection. “Yet each proposal to add 1,000 miles or so is viewed by opponents in almost apocalyptic terms.”
The paper added that fighting pipeline construction won’t appreciably disrupt global warming – in fact, battling such projects, the editorial board noted, will force companies to use more risky forms of transportation.
“[P]ipelines fill a vital need for the economy and for America’s energy security, and therefore need to be built,” the USA Today concluded.
The Post offered support for the DAPL as well, noting in a Dec. 5 editorial that the “approval or denial of one or two will do little to cure global oil addiction or right generations of harm to tribal groups.”
The editorial board, which has run its share of anti-DAPL pieces, also noted how the Army Corps attempted more than a dozen times in a two-year period to discuss the route with Standing Rock, but the tribe failed to respond in time.
The WSJ meanwhile bemoaned the opposition of a pipeline that’s already seen numerous reroutes and modifications, all to satisfy environmentalist and Indian Americans concerns.
“The political obstruction illustrates why it’s so hard to build anything in America these days,” the WSJ editorial board wrote on Tuesday, referring to the pipeline’s opponents.
The project was moved from its original spot to the mostly rural area surrounding Standing Rock, because the route was 11 miles shorter and considered less damaging to the environment. The project was modified more than 141 times to satisfy those concerns.
The extensive modifications did not go unnoticed by The WSJ’s editorial board.
“Energy Transfer devised the least intrusive route to expedite permitting but it still got caught between the Standing Rock tribe and no-fossil-fuels greens who have turned the Dakota Access into a Battle of the Alamo,” they wrote.
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