Both the House and Senate quietly passed a bill this past week that doubles the fines of pipeline operators and increases the amount of money the government is going to spend monitoring the safety of such systems. And well after the massive Gulf oil spill, the bill requires mandatory shut-off valves on new or replaced lines. But industry watchdogs say the bill falls short; that it should have required such equipment for all existing pipelines and should have created standards for leak detection systems on pipelines to ensure that accidents are swiftly identified. The elephant in the room is still the Keystone XL pipeline legislation, which Republicans have tried to tie to the extension of a payroll tax credit and the President has said he’ll veto such legislation because it’s meant to circumvent more thorough environmental study.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2011 at 1:00 pm and is filed under environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.