Malpractice insurance mentality....

All depends on the cost of oil... with cheap oil, the ships win. Trains move cargo for less energy expended per ton-mile, but cost in the infrastructure construction.

I've seen the project discussed for decades too, this is the first time the headline overtly states that China would consider paying for it...

No, no, NO! You power it with a $5 piece of crap power supply that you got at an outlet sale - then watch as the power supply fries everything in sight the first time you look at it crosseyed....

I did this in college with my "free" evaluation DSP (that cost $200 in reality...) took me a month to get another sample out of the sales rep.

That would be absolutely awesome - microchip traces are probably ~200nm, and your 3D printer nozzle might be capable of 1mm thick traces... imagine the barn you'd need to protect the finished product from the weather!

You make me think: baby seal catapults probably are viable competition for Amazon drone delivery - more likely to be cleared for legal deployment by the FA whatever that regulates baby seals, and more gentle on the cargo than UPS delivery.

Why would they inspect when they've got you doing their work for them?

Tropicana used to pipeline orange juice about 1/2 mile to the Middle School my father taught at - they shut the pipeline down after a few years due to intractable contamination issues.

There was a pipeline from Miami International Airport to Homestead Air Force base carrying jet fuel.

A small leak under Cutler Ridge shopping mall went undetected for years, until somebody noticed the storm drains were all flammable.

All in all, pipelines are safer than trains are safer than supertankers, but each has its place and none are perfect.

Not just pipelines made in the 1930s - leaky pipelines are a feature of the system, it costs too much to keep them 100% intact, so a little leak here and there goes unrepaired for long periods of time.

We looked at buying acreage in East Texas, pipeline easements are pretty common there, as are contamination spots from pipeline leaks.

So, we should be converting fossil fuel directly to foodstuffs, then?

Oil is incredibly inefficient in all its forms of use - what's the efficiency of an internal combustion engine? How about heating a home with a furnace, how much heat is lost out the flue? When you make electricity with an oil fired generator, what's the efficiency there? Take any of these figures and square, or maybe cube them to account for multiple steps involved in producing and delivering food - 10% seems optimistic to me.

which they more than compensate for via ownership of a major political party.

There's always choices. People can be relocated to areas where they don't need heating oil, using far less energy than a winter's heating oil contains.

We've dug a pretty deep hole with the food from oil thing, but that was a hole of our own digging, and will be reversed one way or another before the oil runs out - why not start today?

Ya know, long pipelines (100s of miles) leak, all of them, all the time. Installing and maintaining a pipeline is a huge expense, even compared to a railroad.

That being said, they have their places.