The Oil and the Glory: Year of the Pipeline

Year of the pipeline: Time magazine's Person of the Year is the protester, and that is probably valid, but we think that the editors missed an important also-ran -- the pipeline. Few care to stop and notice the elegance in unsung lengths of steel cylinders stirring fierce passions such as nationalism, greed and tear-inducing anger. We are talking the 24- and 36-inch steel cylinders that carry oil and gas across continents, under bodies of water and over mountains to the 7 billion people of the Earth. Who for instance considered nominating the Keystone Pipeline as political instrument of the year for how it threatened to shut down the whole of the U.S. government, and may yet in the coming couple of months? Then there is Nabucco, a proposed natural gas line that has much of Europe, Russia along with the U.S. tied up in sanctimonious knots over who will exercise geopolitical and economic leverage in Europe. This week Russia notched up the temperature by securing crucial support from Turkey for its repost to Nabucco, a pipeline that it calls South Stream. That battle also will carry over into the new year. And who can forget the proposed trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline, known by the acronym TAPI? A powerful and high-kicking chorus is backing TAPI, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA director David Petraeus, who embraced the line when he was running the ground game as a general in Afghanistan. Observers, including this blog, have cast doubt on TAPI's feasibility given Afghanistan's chaos. Yet we celebrate it as a worthy addition to this improbable pantheon -- inanimate objects that somehow transmogrify into organic, breathing beings capable of arousing high-stakes emotion in humans.

Setve LeVine - The Oil and the Glory, Weekly Wrap Dec 30, 2011