Rollin, rollin, rollin....
The huge drums for Conoco's refinery in Montana will finally start their overland trip tonight. After many months of expensive and completely unjustified "legal" wrangling, the Idaho Dept of Transport finally put its foot down and made an actual decision. I don't know why the sudden good sense; maybe Conoco finally gave IDOT the bribe it was waiting for, maybe the "judge" simply got tired.

In any case, hippie-ass envirotyrants lose one, America wins one!




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Update next morning: First leg of trip completed without problems. The hippie-ass envirotyrants had threatened to "shadow" the convoy, but didn't materialize. Nothing like a fait accompli to wither protesters. Good video here.

Update after trip completed: Apparently the surveyors didn't get some of the angles and dimensions right. In a couple places the trucks struggled to get around a turn with a rocky ledge on one side, scraping part of the load and causing longer delays than planned.

As I said before: There's a deeper problem at the source. This hugely complicated transport route wouldn't have been needed if Conoco had built its refinery the old way, with American workers forging and fabricating everything on site from American steel panels. Those pieces could have been shipped routinely by normal rail or truck freight from Wheeling or Pittsburgh, and this mess wouldn't have been possible. But since Conoco chose the modular approach to minimize American labor, maximize Chinese profit, and maximize shipping, the hippies had a chance to break the system.

And now this misplanning of the route adds another illustration of the gross distortion of modern American business. All energy goes into lawyering and stock manipulation. No energy goes into engineering and design. The Chinese shit we buy at WalMart is shit because it was designed shittily by Americans (or more likely by Chinese spies working in "American" engineering departments), not because it was built by Chinamen in China.
  ¶ 5:45 PM