The environmentalists are being used by the railroads to attack the environmental safety of the pipeline. This is an economic battle in reality, railroads vs. pipeline, who gets the contract to carry the oil?
Softheaded environmentalists being used.
Economics is the dismal science.
And it causes serious displacements in the lives of innumerable people.
People keep trying to tinker with the edges of the economics of any situation, either striving to keep an obsolete means of production and distribution, or introducing new and sometimes poorly thought out innovations which turn out to have a net negative effect.
There is a vast store of empirical knowledge about what works, and what has never been successfully applied in the past. Return on investment has been the most vital driving force behind all successful innovations, and the innovations are what create and expand the total sum of wealth.
Otherwise we would still be living in caves and gathering grubs from under the bark of dead trees. Stasis is no way to go through life.
So when beer was invented, people could then go through life fat, drunk and stupid. Which was not really progress, but just another invented dead-end.