Big Oil Spoils North Dakota

Big oil companies in North Dakota said their impact on the environment would be minimal. They lied.  The citizens of Tioga witnessed the largest land oil spill in recent American history in September, 2013.  Also in 2013, the locomotive of an oil train derailed and exploded in a collision near Casselton.  This year North Dakotans discovered illegally dumped oil filter socks, a source of hazardous radiation. A landfill with waste from oil fields is near the banks of the Missouri River.  Some families experienced dirty drinking water.  “One company, in fact, sued three activist landowners in 2011, seeking damages for trespassing after the men tried to document what they believed was the cover-up of a saltwater spill.”  Federal wildlife agents asked the oil companies to cover their waste pits as migratory birds sometimes dived in.  They were refused.  Thirty percent of the natural gas produced in the state was being treated as a byproduct and burned off, spoiling the air for neighbors.

      The oil drillers are lightly regulated by the three-member North Dakota Industrial Commission composed of the Governor, Attorney General, and the Agricultural Commissioner.  In their eagerness to gain great wealth, the state largely let the oil companies police themselves.  The oil companies made contributions to the governor’s campaign in 2012, a total of $550,000 from oil-related executives.

         A family signed a lease and saw their first well drilled in 2008.  Then June, 2011, they were informed that Burlington Resources intended to create a 30,883 acre oil production unit that would override their lease agreement.  Instead of receiving royalties for their land, the revenues would be split by all owners in the mega-unit. The mega-unit would include part of the Little Missouri State Park (three storage tank batteries inside park boundaries). The family learned that their consent was not required.  Only 60 percent of the unit’s owners were needed, and Burlington together with the Federal government land already amounted to 60%.  This freed Conoco Phillips, successor to Burlington, from boundary lines that required 200-foot set-backs from the borders of each production unit.  The companies would not have to negotiate easements or rights of way for pads, roads, and pipelines.  Dec 20, 2013, the commission approved the mega-unit.  This amounts to private eminent domain—taking of land by private companies for their own benefit.

             Source: New York Times, Nov. 23, 2014

Catastrophe- Part 7 of series-- Mississippi floods

After weeks of rain, the Mississippi River crested at Cairo, Illinois—an all-time high, exceeding the 1937 record by two feet. The Army Corps of Engineers breeched a levee to reduce the level at Cairo. The water has to go somewhere, flooding the town of Pinhook, Missouri and acres of farm land, a kind of triage. The same thing was done in 1937. Cairo is probably the most poorly situated city in the country on a narrow strip of land between the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers. As Isabel Wilkerson writing for the New York Times in 1993 pointed out, “For generations, some farmers figured floods and droughts into the cost of doing business. But then the country’s big plumbing system of levees and dams, made better after every flood, was supposed to keep the rivers in their place and maintain the comfortable paradox of living on a floodplain.”
Just because our ancestors ignored nature and put a city in harm’s way does not mean we need to perpetuate the mistake. There will be heavy rains and hurricanes, and the flood waters will reclaim their own ancestral haunts. The truth of floods is that despite huge investments in flood control, the long term damage is unchanged. Why? Because we keep adding people and structures to the flood plain so that when the protections inevitably fail, the damage is higher.

Land Use & Development Rights

Under the banner of protecting property rights, a number of states have passed laws requiring compensation if land use regulations lower owners' property value. This slogan ignores the fact that regulation of one person's property often increases the value of neighboring property including public interests in the environment. For example, a regulation restricting building on coastal shorelines may prevent some owner from putting up an intensive development and thereby make his parcel less valuable, but it may protect the shoreline from erosion and losses to other owners. The issue is which owners count.
The voters of Oregon passed a 2004 law allowing owners to seek compensation if state and local regulations reduced their property values. Voters probably had in mind individuals who wanted to build a house on their property, but it was widely used for large housing projects, strip malls, and landfills.
The voters thought again, and in Novemeber, 2007, approved a law preserving a landowner's right to build homes, but curbs large commercial and industrial development. A coalition of farmers, business groups, and conservation groups such as the Nature Conservancy spent $4.5 million to support the new law. These coalitions are hard to put together as many are tempted to be free riders, as the results of the campaign are available to all whether or not they have contributed (a high exclusion cost good).
Source: Nature Conservancy, Spring, 2008.