BUT IT MAKES WARREN BUFFET RICH(ER): The Opaque Dangers Of Oil-By-Rail.

America is in the middle of an oil and gas boom, and it’s pumping out hydrocarbons faster than it can build out infrastructure to transport them to markets. This has put a new strain on America’s extensive rail networks, which have been bringing crude from new fields in remote places like North Dakota’s Bakken formation to refineries, sometimes as far away as the Gulf Coast. With more freight cars comes more accidents. Train crashes are already destructive enough to warrant their own idiom, but when oil is involved, the risks to health and environment are compounded. Complicating the matter further, the crude being transported is of a particularly explosive variety.

To help minimize risk, railroads are required to send hazardous materials—like crude oil—along the safest routes possible. But as the NYT reports, there’s very little oversight to this process. . . .

Of course, there is an alternative: build out our nation’s already extensive oil pipeline network. Pipelines are ultimately the most efficient way to bring hydrocarbons from large fields to large refineries, and they’re also safer than transporting crude by rail or truck.

As the shale revolution continues to yield millions of barrels of tight oil, it makes sense from both cost and safety perspectives to expand and extend our pipelines. That includes the Keystone XL pipeline.

Heck, even Warren’s come out in favor of that.