Questa settimana la corte suprema del Nebraska ha rigettato una presunzione d’incostituzionalità degli espropri per pubblica utilità a favore del gasdotto Keystone, spianando così la strada alla confisca di terreni privati, comprese falde acquifere vulnerabili, e completare l’attraversamento dello stato in direzione del Texas. La lobby finanziata dai Koch ha una presenza pesante nel progetto; tra le altre cose, finanzia messaggi pubblicitari che attaccano i politici contrari al progetto. I gasdotti a lunga distanza, ovviamente, dipendono dai diritti di prelazione dello stato su grosse porzioni di terreni non edificati, hanno trattamenti di favore, e ricorrono all’esproprio quando il privato non vuole vendere. Più in generale, sono proprio le industrie estrattive, come quella del petrolio e del carbone, ad avere più bisogno dell’accesso esclusivo a quelle terre acquisite con diritto di prelazione dallo stato. Sono loro ad avere più bisogno dello stato per evacuare territori ricchi di risorse.

A proposito, il Bollettino della Società Sismologica Americana questa settimana ha pubblicato una ricerca che attribuisce una serie di 77 terremoti in Ohio, tra cui uno abbastanza forte da essere percepito con i sensi, alla fratturazione idraulica. Le scosse sono avvenute lungo una linea di frattura e sono dovute ad uno scivolamento causato dai processi di fratturazione, processo che prevede il pompaggio ad alta pressione nel sottosuolo di enormi quantità di acqua e agenti chimici per spaccare lo shale e liberare il gas. Tanto per dire la mia, non credo che iniettare milioni di litri di questo minestrone chimico in una formazione rocciosa instabile e permeabile faccia un gran bene alle acque di superficie.

Tutto ciò sarebbe impossibile se fosse ancora in vigore la responsabilità civile per atti illeciti prevista in molti statuti dalla common law fino al 1830 circa. Con la tradizionale common law, una persona era responsabile dei danni apportati ai suoi vicini, punto. A partire dai primi dell’ottocento, però, una serie di precedenti modificarono gli standard di responsabilità così da renderli più favorevoli alle aziende: non solo la parte lesa doveva sobbarcarsi pesanti oneri per dimostrare il dolo, ma c’era tutta una serie di “attività economiche e commerciali in regola con le norme” virtualmente esente da responsabilità. Se fossero ancora in vigore le vecchie norme, chi pratica la fratturazione, chi spiana una collina avvelenando le falde acquifere di un’intera comunità, chi con l’inquinamento causa un aumento dei tumori, o semplicemente distrugge l’ecosistema di una valle intera, si vedrebbe imputare la responsabilità dell’atto da un tribunale, e gli abitanti non rimarrebbero con un pugno di mosche. Attività come la fratturazione idraulica, o i gasdotti, con tutti i rischi che comportano per l’aria e l’acqua (a prescindere dal fatto che tali rischi siano previsti o meno in “attività in regola”) probabilmente non sarebbero assicurabili.

Dopo che i tribunali ebbero indebolito le norme della common law, ecco che arriva la Epa (l’agenzia americana per l’ambiente, es) con le sue norme minime in materia di inquinamento dell’aria e dell’acqua, che suonano come un’esenzione dalla responsabilità: l’espressione “nel pieno rispetto delle norme vigenti” è una scappatoia legale che prescinde dal danno vero e proprio causato alle comunità. A coronare il tutto, c’è ogni genere di legislazione che attribuisce responsabilità artificialmente basse in casi come perdite di petrolio in mare, perdite degli oleodotti e incidenti nucleari, legislazioni che rendono queste attività artificialmente remunerative.

Riassumendo, quando Charles Koch dice di essere per “libertà economica”, vuole dire che le industrie che estraggono, raffinano e trasportano i combustibili fossili (sotto la protezione piena dello stato) devono essere libere di rubare, avvelenare e fare altri danni senza pagarne le conseguenze. Proprio quel genere di “libertarismo” di cui non abbiamo bisogno.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

This week the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the use of eminent domain for the Keystone pipeline, clearing the way to seize private land (including vulnerable aquifers) to complete the pipeline route across the state on its way to Texas. Koch-funded lobbying organizations are heavily behind the Keystone project (among other things, funding attack ads against politicians who oppose the project). Long-distance pipelines, obviously, depend both on state preemption of large tracts of vacant land and preferential grants of access, and on the use of eminent domain to seize land from private owners who decline to sell. And more generally, extractive industries like oil and coal have had a close dependency on privileged access to land preempted by the state or on the actual clearance of existing populations from resource-rich land.

In related news, the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America this week published research attributing a series of 77 earthquakes in Ohio — including one strong enough to be felt by humans — to hydraulic fracturing. This follows on research over the past couple of years associating large numbers of earthquakes in Oklahoma and Texas with fracking. The quakes in Ohio all occurred along a faultline due to slippage caused by the fracking process, in which enormous quantities of high-pressure water and chemicals are injected into the ground to fracture shale rock and free up gas for extraction. Just for the record, injecting a million gallons of chemical soup into unstable and permeable rock formations probably isn’t very good for the groundwater, either.

This is the kind of thing that simply could not have been done under the common law of tort liability as it existed in most states until the 1830s or so. Under traditional common law, you were responsible for anything you did to harm your neighbor, period. But from the early 19th century on, state case law heavily modified liability standards to make them more commerce-friendly — not only by requiring plaintiffs to meet new burdens of negligence over and above the bare fact of harm, but by treating a whole array of “standard business or commercial practices” as safe harbors against negligence. If the original standards were still in effect, those responsible for a fracking or mountaintop removal operation that poisoned the groundwater for all the communities sharing an aquifer, or caused a local cancer spike from pollution, or just plain destroyed the ecosystem of an entire valley, would be assessed full damages by a civil jury and likely not be left with a pot to pee in. And activities like fracking or pipelining that carried non-negligible risks of causing such harm to air and water — regardless of whether the risks were entailed in “standard practices” — would likely find themselves uninsurable.

In addition to this weakening of common law standards in the state courts, the minimal regulatory standards drafted by the EPA under clean air and water legislation are treated as safe harbors against liability — “in compliance with all regulatory standards” is a legal defense regardless of any actual harm done to surrounding communities. On top of that, we have all sorts of corporatist legislation imposing artificially low liability caps on things like offshore oil spills, pipeline leaks and nuclear meltdowns that make these activities artificially profitable.

So when Charles Koch says he’s for “economic freedom,” what he means is the freedom of fossil fuel extraction, refining and transport companies — with the full protection of the government — to rob, poison and otherwise injure without consequences. That kind of “libertarianism” we don’t need.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Con Libertari come i Fratelli Koch, chi Ha Bisogno dello Stato?

Thus A. Barton Hinkle’s “Get Ready for Keystone Pipeline 2?” (September 15) in  Reason magazine (motto: “Free Minds and Free Markets”). Hinkle ridicules environmentalist criticism of a proposed Atlantic coast pipeline shipping natural gas to North Carolina from West Virginia’s Marcellus shale formation. According to Hinkle, the power companies comply with EPA regulations. What’s more, environmentalists are partly to blame for the rise of natural gas consumption reflected in new pipeline projects, because they make it more difficult to expand production of coal-fired electricity. And, he adds, “[n]obody who protests power plants and power lines ever volunteers to give up electricity …” Yuk yuk yuk!

In fairness to Hinkle, he addresses, at respectable length, the problematic nature of the eminent domain abuses required to build such pipelines — fairly unusual among fossil fuels cheerleaders on the self-proclaimed libertarian right.

But he leaves out several things. First, eminent domain isn’t the only way in which the state makes natural gas pipelines artificially feasible. Pipelines also depend on liability caps or regulatory preemption of tort liability for leaks (those EPA regulations Hinkle makes so much of), contamination of groundwater and earthquakes associated with fracking and pipeline transport.

Second, it’s not just natural gas, but also coal and oil, that are artificially cheap and economical as a result of state-granted subsidies and privileges. Coal and oil, like natural gas, depend on privileged access to land in the federal domain from which ordinary individual homesteaders have been excluded — or even on land that was stolen either from First Nations or white settlers. The Bundy ranch, site of a recent standoff between a rancher and the federal government, is situated on what had originally been tribal land. And a lot of Appalachian coal mining takes place on land that had already been homesteaded in the days before fully developed state and county governments or regular land titles, then stolen by mining companies with better lawyers. All fossil fuel industries depend on the same liability caps and regulatory preemption of tort law.

And third, Hinkle makes the unwarranted assumption that the level of demand for energy is inelastic, and that the present energy dependency of our economy has nothing to do with assorted subsidies to fossil fuels and transportation. Besides all the fossil fuels subsidies and privileges mentioned above, present levels of long-distance transportation use also reflect heavy government subsidies. The civil aviation infrastructure was built almost entirely at government expense using eminent domain, and jumbo jets only became economically viable after WWII because the Cold War heavy bomber program enabled the aircraft industry to make full use of the expensive dies required to build them. The car culture has grown far larger than it otherwise would have because of urban planning and zoning, subsidized utilities for new subdivisions and use subsidies and eminent domain to support freeway construction. The taxpayer-subsidized Interstate Highway System is also a massive subsidy to artificially long corporate supply and distribution chains.

Hinkle ignores the possibility that, without government’s thumb on the scale to facilitate the consumption of energy, we might just use less of it. We might buy food and manufactured goods produced in our own communities, live closer to the places we work and shop, and keep more energy-efficient homes.

The libertarian problems with fossil fuels don’t stop with the use of eminent domain to build pipelines. That’s only the beginning. Fossil fuels in general are just one example of a larger function of the capitalist state: Providing artificially cheap inputs for an industrial model based on extensive addition of inputs rather than more efficient use of existing ones.

In other words, principled libertarians need to consistently apply their opposition to “crony capitalism” to all manifestations of it, and direct their distaste for welfare to its biggest recipients.

First, an article in Monthly Review (Lauren Regan, “Electronic Communications Surveillance,” July/August) describes the revolving door of personnel between federal law enforcement and the oil and gas industry’s private goon squads, and how “the U.S. government has colluded with private corporations and extractive industries to ratchet up their COINTELPRO-esque tactics upon climate justice activists.” The fossil fuel industries like to spin off private “security” and “public relations” firms (often staffed by retired federal and state cops) to spy on perfectly legal activist groups, infiltrate and disrupt them, and give intelligence to PR staff — who then cook up scary “fact sheets” to discredit activists to both media and law enforcement. Extractive corporations like TransCanada also give PowerPoint presentations to various levels of law enforcement advocating surveillance and prosecution of activists as “terrorists” — something the cops are all prepared to eat up, what with the proliferation of “Fusion Centers” looking for stuff to panic over.

The other item: According to a study by Katie Keranen of Cornell University, almost all of the 2,500 small earthquakes in Oklahoma in the past five years have been the result of high pressure wastewater injections related to fracking. The change of stress on existing fault lines from the injection of water can trigger them — with water travelling along fault lines and causing earthquakes up to 22 miles away. And other states — Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Ohio — have also seen sharp rises in small earthquakes corresponding to the introduction of fracking there. Youngstown, Ohio — which hadn’t previously been bothered by earthquakes — was hit by 109 of them in 2011 following the creation of an injection well.

Somehow I’m guessing even the minor structural damage to homes from thousands of earthquakes in five states, breakage of possessions, and the like, would cumulatively amount to a significant sum of money — enough to have a real impact on the bottom line of an industry that has problems with financial sustainability as it is and is highly reliant on a bubble financing Ponzi scheme. And we haven’t even gotten into the poisoning of groundwater from injection of toxic chemicals into geologically unstable areas.

At every step of the way, the state steps in to subsidize the operating costs of the fossil fuel industry, steal land for it to build pipelines on, and indemnify it against liability through regulatory preemption of tort law or even flat out statutory caps on liability for damage. And yet self-proclaimed libertarians like the Koch Brothers and much of the right-wing libertarian think tank and periodicals establishment loudly proclaim their support for fracking and Keystone in the name of the “free market.”

Sorry, folks. Fracking and pipelines have nothing to do with the free market. They’re creations of the state from beginning to end.

Over the years, I’ve been skeptical of lefty claims that prominent “libertarian” think tanks just shill for whatever corporations are willing to write checks for favorable “analysis.” But this kind of thing makes me wonder.

As I noted last month, my objection to Keystone is simple: It can’t be built without having the government steal land to build it on, from people who don’t care to sell.

For anyone operating under the label “libertarian,” that should be the end of the matter.

But I keep seeing “libertarian” calls for Keystone to be built.

Two things strike me as odd about these “libertarian” calls for Keystone:

1. They usually don’t address the libertarian objection — eminent domain — at all; and
2. The arguments they make are not only not libertarian arguments, but are in some cases just completely nonsensical.

The U. S. lacks pawns to be a leader in the foreign policy chess game — insufficient oil and natural gas production. Years of neglect in pushing fossil fuel production left the country unable to assist allies in times of emergency.

Russia provides substantial natural gas, oil, and coal to Europe that gives it leverage in the Ukraine Crises due to Europe’s fear of energy supply cutoff. The European Union has assisted in its servitude by resisting natural gas production by fracking and shutting down and curtailing future use of nuclear power plants.

The Ukraine Crises is an example of future events until the United States develops fossil fuel energy production superiority.

So the argument for Keystone is that it’s necessary to have it so the US government can dictate the affairs and relationships of other nations. That’s not a “libertarian” argument — libertarians are non-interventionists.

But even setting that aside, which we most manifestly should not, there are two major problems with the argument:

1. The US already has “fossil fuel energy production superiority.” In 2013, the US produced 12.5 million barrels of oil per day versus Russia’s 10.5 million barrels per day. In fact, the US is now the world’s leading energy producer and a net energy exporter (it achieved both those distinctions during the “anti-energy” Obama administration, by the way).
2. Keystone has nothing whatsoever to do with US energy production. It is a pipeline to trans-ship CANADIAN oil across the US to Gulf Coast refineries for CANADIAN export. It will increase neither US oil production nor US energy export by so much as a single calorie.

Over the years, I’ve been skeptical of lefty claims that prominent “libertarian” think tanks just shill for whatever corporations are willing to write checks for favorable “analysis.” But this kind of thing makes me wonder.

[cross-posted from KN@PPSTER — this piece is in the public domain]