Leftist democratian shills fringe-left position on oil trains.

In life, I've come to discover you can always find a reason not to do something.  Always.

Whether the reason(s) is (are) valid or not is the key.

Leftists, of course, are always looking for reasons not to use petroleum products. For example, to your average leftist, "fracking" (The extraction of natural gas from rock) is second only to the Holocaust in its impacts.

That's demonstrably false, of course, but that doesn't stop them.

So the democratian comes out with an editorial.  The problem I have is that it's difficult to ferret out what this gobbledegook concludes.

They use some of the more bizarre arguments of the fringe leftists:

The latest news confirms that opinion. Last year’s number of 1.15 million gallons of spilled crude dwarfs the total of 800,000 gallons from 1975 to 2012, and it reflects the fact that the oil industry is not effectively managing its new penchant for transporting crude oil by rail. Even discounting major incidents in Alabama and North Dakota, last year’s total spill was more than 11,000 gallons in the United States — the highest on record. Until recently, rail lines were infrequently used for oil transportation, and advocates will point out that 99.99 percent of shipments last year arrived without any problems. In a letter to the editor published in The Columbian, Tesoro-Savage general manager Jared Larrabee wrote, “We stand ready to discuss additional measures that (the environmental review board), Gov. Jay Inslee or federal agencies feel are necessary for safe transportation and handling of crude oil.”

The allegation and the numbers are designed to instill fear of the same petroleum products used to print and deliver the newspaper.

For decades now, we've been cursed by a certain stupidity of some people who rather naively believe that milk comes from Safeway instead of cows.

This is no different tfrom that.

First, while the number "1.15 million" is impressive, it's statistically insignificant.

That's 27,381 barrels of oil.

In 2011, the US used 6,870,000,000 barrels.  At 42 gallons per measure for each barrel, that means in the United States, we consumed 288 BILLION gallons.

The rag falsely claims "99.99 percent of shipments last year arrived without any problems."  Running the numbers indicates that the number is actually 99.996... meaning that the number of problems as a percentage is reduced to thousandths of a percent.

Of course, much of this could be avoided if our "Dear Leader" in the White House would get off his incompetent ass and approve the Keystone Project, but, hey, this IS a leftist newspaper and they'd much rather pound local Republican politicians than advocate for solutions.

In short, the oil leaked represents a cause for concern that can be addressed through appropriate and adequate safety measures.  The rag, as usual, presented no real reason at all not to move forward on this project, particularly in the face of the multiples of reasons across the spectrum TO move forward.

Further, if the "reasoning" expressed by the rag were valid, we'd have to apply those same reasons everywhere to everything.

Think about that the next time you get behind the wheel, go swimming, or take a pill.

Because any one of those things has killed multiples of people... more last year than the entirety of oil incidents combined in our history.

Guess we should stop using cars, going swimming and medication, right?

God free us from the sissies of the downtown mafia.