Last week, the Keystone pipeline sprang a leak. Again.



This time, it released 383,040 gallons of oil into the northeastern wetlands of North Dakota. Two years ago, the same pipeline, which spans some 2,600 miles from Canada to Nebraska before splintering off, burst in South Dakota. Initial reports from TransCanada, the company recently renamed TC Energy that owns and operates the Keystone system, posited in 2017 that the spill was roughly 210,000 gallons in size. Then, five months later, the company was forced to admit that, actually, the spill had been twice as large. Both the most recent spill and the 2017 one rank among the top-ten largest onshore spills in the past decade.

In the time between the two incidents, the federal and state governments have done little to protect their citizens against such spills. The regular fines for safety violations tend to be in the low six figures—a paltry sum for a company regularly taking in over $7 billion in gross annual profits. Rather than raising the cost of contaminating vast swaths of American lands, the state and federal governments have spent their time re-codifying and weaponizing the legal system against citizens opposing further pipeline construction.

The week before Keystone sent its contents seeping into the soil, two South Dakota Republican state leaders quietly walked back a pair of laws they had championed earlier this spring.



The two bills, Senate Bill 189 and Senate Bill 190, came to be known as the riot-boosting bills. The legislation would have permitted law enforcement—be it local, state, or out-of-state forces, as were used at Standing Rock—to charge pipeline protestors with felonies rather than misdemeanors. It also would have allowed the state government to sue any out-of-state groups that contributed to the protests, with the option for a third party like, say, an oil or construction company, to join the lawsuit and recoup any sunk costs. The ACLU promptly sued the state, and the governor and attorney general in mid-October signed a settlement agreeing that state executives could not enforce such laws, but which did not repeal the legislation itself.