[dugditches]

Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc and the footprint of the trains themselves operating.

There's a reason pipelines exist, and that is in their simplicity of transporting the product efficiently. Sure they can't transport anything else, but I don't think too many rocket boosters would be traveling to remote areas in Canada.

[wolverine876]

> Let alone the cost of employing all the union railway workers, maintenance crews, technicians, etc

Nitpicking to make a point: Employing people and paying them well is not just an expense; it has some enormous benefits.

[lotsofpulp]

In the context of a discussion about what method of delivering oil is more efficient, wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits. From a society point of view, if the goal is to deliver oil, then it is a societal loss to do it inefficiently just to pay more people.

If the goal is to pay people, then just pay people, no need to do it in a roundabout way of forcing an inefficiency into the system.

[wolverine876]

> wasting resources on employing people for unnecessary tasks does not have enormous benefits

Agreed, but that assumes perfect knowledge by business owners of what is most efficient.

I think business owners often lean much too far toward seeing labor as a commodity and an expense, to be minimized. Another approach is to see humans as the most powerful parts of the organization, and to invest in and empower them.

I'm speaking in the abstract; of course it's not always the case that more investment in labor is better. But there is a history of it: For example (and this is more a legend than something I have details on), back in the 1980s American auto companies had long treated workers as commodities. Toyota was far more successful by empowering them; famously, any worker could stop the assembly line.

[lupire]

Labor isn't ecologically inefficient. People are alive regardless of if they work.

[bluGill]

Then lets pay everyone well to dig holes in their backyard and fill them in.

Employing people is great gain only if they do something productive. If you can employ less people that is greater gain because those others can do something else useful.

[lupire]

Labor time is a expiring and renewing natural resource. It's OK to use some of it.

[wolverine876]

Great points, this and the other comment.

[londons_explore]

Paying people well is very negative for the environment.

A poorly paid person will have a smaller car, smaller house, use less electricity and gas, and throw away far less trash.

In fact, wealth is very strongly correlated to environmental impact. Sure, rich people might be buying electric cars and recyclable coffee cups, but it nowhere near offsets the bigger house with A/C...

[megablast]

Good. Anything that makes oil more expensive is good for the planet and everyone who lives on it.

[bawolff]

Burning oil for non productive reasons will make it more expensive, but it wont save the planet.

[ashtonkem]

But what if the product they’re transporting will kill us all?

[koolba]

No that’s transported by rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask

[ashtonkem]

Used nuclear material is not capable of killing everyone in an accident, nowhere close. More people have died drilling for and refining oil than have died in nuclear accidents, and that’s before we consider the existential risk that global warming poses.

[brorfred]

And how many people have died in the strip mining of uranium?

[ashtonkem]

Probably not as many as you think.

Studies from a New Mexico mine ending in the 1970s estimated an extra 62.4 deaths per 100,000 miners. That’s a lot, but it doesn’t even hold a candle to coal mining in the same era. In 1970 the coal mining fatality rate in the US was 960 per 100,000 (1,388 fatalities for 144,480 miners).

Secondly, most uranium is leeched from the ground, not strip mined. This is far safer for the worker, although it does pose other safety considerations for the community.

Third, we can change these things. Coal mining has gone from ~900 per 100,000 workers to ~24 per 100,000 workers. Workplace health and safety standards are a choice we can make as a society. If we can make coal mining safer, there’s no reason we can’t make uranium mining safer.

[lupire]

Is that true per joule?

[ashtonkem]

Yes.

The estimate is that nuclear kills 0.04 people per TWh produced. This includes mining, refining, and the construction and operation of nuclear power plants. Natural gas kills about 4 people per TWh produced, making it far more lethal than nuclear all considered.

Fascinating in a grim way, rooftop solar is actually more lethal than nuclear, at 0.44 per TWh. Quite literally more people have died falling off roofs installing solar panels than died at Chernobyl. With rooftop being such a minuscule percentage of global production, expect that number to change.

By and far the most lethal is coal. The world average is 161 per TWh. But that average is hiding a lot of nastiness, because the true range is between 15 (US) and 278 (China). Quite literally millions of people die each year due to pollution, most of them because of coal.

This is a classic case of how people don’t calculate risk correctly. Nuclear accidents are scary, rare things and so people focus in on them. But in trying to get rid of nuclear we’ve ended up shifting primarily to coal and natural gas, energy sources that kill multiple orders of magnitude more people than nuclear does. But because these people die one at a time in hospitals, we end up missing the scale of the tragedy as a society.

All numbers valid from 2008.