@1: I think the idea is that the government can, and should, be mandating that the rail operators act more aggressively to get safer cars into service.

Wow, another reason not to let Hansen build an arena at the site he wants.... many more bodies in the blast zone of oil trains for over 100 nights a year.

#3, if you don't think that the Vice piece is about train car safety, you didn't watch it. You should watch it, it's pretty good. However you are correct in your assumption that they don't touch upon pipelines as an alternative. It really is just about train car safety.

Pipelines may be safer than oil trains, but there are plenty of reasons to demand thoughtful routing (even if more expensive) and extra safeguards/inspections for them as well.

Bakken crude is still far more volatile (read "explosive") and corrosive than the standard crude of decades past, because of all the organic solvents and other ingredients in fracking fluids that help release it from the fractured rock—those same ingredients that are hard as hell to get details on because they're "trade secrets" and the era of deregulation lets that shit stand alone as a defense.

So if oil trains are "pipelines on wheels," pipelines are "oil trains without wheels," and their integral pumps and seals and welds are more vulnerable to explosions and leakage and blowouts as well. In addition, we have to think of future decades; it's not just about designing, routing, and building them correctly. The longer a pipeline exists, the more it seems to be overlooked, forgotten, ill-maintained, when just the opposite is needed. Major pipelines are likely to be used eventually for tar-sands oil as well, or "dilbit" (diluted bitumen) and that's just like sandpaper on all the equipment in addition to needing lots of solvents added to thin it, or very high pressures to move it, or both.

@1 & @3: I disagree with both of you on your misguided views that pipelines are the way to go. Pipelines are not 100% safe, either. I live in a city built on pipelines. After a disastrous pipeline rupture that sent toxic black smoke billowing and took the lives of two boys in 1999, pipelines cannot automatically be called totally safe, either.

We need to pursue more sustainable forms of energy and have the means. Fossil fuels, at the exponential levels they are currently being fracked, mined, transported by rail & pipelines and exported by shipping are unsafe, unhealthy, and the Earth is suffering from all the corporate greed behind the "record profits" green-lighted by billionaire lobbyists.