Ok, but what do you consider higher standards? The vast majority of pipelines have a 99.99+% success rate (better than first class priority mail delivery rates of postage) and total success rate for rail, truck and pipeline is around 99.9%
The issue you may have is just with the shear volume of oil being shipped but that is to meet a demand that everybody needs.
"
Fact: more than
99.9 percent of the oil and petroleum products transported by pipeline, rail, and marine are delivered without incident. To put that into perspective, only
90.5 percent of first class mail shipped through the United States Postal Service arrives at its destination on time and without incident.
Rail is also much safer than road transportation. Of the 34,000 deaths resulting from
transportation-related accidents in 2011, 93 percent occurred on highways -- mostly in cars, light trucks, and vans. Rail accounted for only 759 deaths. And most of those occurred when people trespassed onto the tracks and were struck by an oncoming train.
Rail transports a very high volume of oil per year without spillage. In 2012, railroads carried
11.2 billion gallons of gas, only 95,000 gallons of which was lost in accidents. That's a 99.999 percent success rate.
Oil pipelines have also proven to be very safe, although not accident-free. The number of deaths from such oil carriage has
steadily dropped in recent years. And so has the rate of breakages and spills. In 2012, over 474 billion gallons of crude oil and petroleum products were carried by pipeline. Just
.0005 percent of that haul was spilled -- that's another 99.999 percentage success rate."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbradley/2014/02/05/rail-transport-99-9-safe/#757523401eaf
From Time:
There’s No Such Thing As a Spill-Proof Way to Transport Oil[/QUOTE]
I get nothing is failure free but we are also far from taking as many preemptive steps to protect the locals from them as we could/should.
I expect our representives to demand oversight of these pipelines so the failures that do occur aren't from cut corners and as many pre-emptive steps are taken instead of the minimum/what is the best for shareholders. These failures can and have destroyed ecosystems and water sources. Right now the shareholders are calling those shots mostly and we are accepting them instead of the other way around.
Considering this company's state of the art pipeline has had a failure and they are still moving forward with completing a nation long pipeline and the oil doesn't even stay in the states it's clear we are gambling for a small payoff and aren't even doing what we could to make the odds better because Trump nuthugs oil lobbyist and donors. It's stupid pandering.