Various mainstream media outlets believe the recently rejected Dakota Access Pipeline should be completed even as environmentalists continue to fight the multi-billion-dollar project.
Major newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the USA Today, among others, have run headlines arguing the so-called DAPL’s previously approved route should be completed.
Their support comes after the project’s current route was rejected Dec. 4 after previously being approved by the Army Corps of Engineers in early July.
The pipeline was sidelined after months of opposition from environmentalists and Standing Rock Sioux, who believe the pipeline would trample on the tribe’s lands and poison its water supply.
It has endured months-long criticisms from anti-fossil fuel activists and media hounds. DAPL opponents Bill McKibben and even editorialists at the New York Times, for instance, called the reroute near Standing Rock’s reservation nothing more than “environmental racism.”
Not every media outlet opposes the pipeline’s construction.
“The United States has 72,000 miles of crude oil pipeline,” USA Today’s editorial board wrote one day after DAPL’s rejection. “Yet each proposal to add 1,000 miles or so is viewed by opponents in almost apocalyptic terms.”
The paper added that fighting pipeline construction won’t appreciably disrupt global warming ‚Äì in fact, battling such projects, the editorial board noted, will force companies to use more risky forms of transportation.
