And yet there are lots of excellent reasons why. There's nothing safe about pipelines. In Canada alone there over a hundred pipeline leaks or explosions every year [1,2].
[1] https://equiterre.org/en/news/new-report-oil-pipeline-safety...
[1] https://equiterre.org/en/news/new-report-oil-pipeline-safety...
They're safer than trains. The problem is new pipelines usually enable new extraction. If we could decouple those two, i.e. shift transport of existing extraction from trains to pipelines without creating lots of new extraction, that would be a net benefit to all.
- They can leak much more in an unit time than trains... hundreds of thousands of gallons, and regulatory enforcement on leaks in the US is very weak because of corporate capture.
- They are built usually by legally-stealing land (easements, eminent domain) from people along the way.
- If they leak on people's land, they don't have much recourse.
- All the safety tech and building codes in the world don't matter if the operators don't really care about leaks because the risks of fines and lawsuits is so comparatively small.
There are hundreds of oil leaks per year, and they can be absolutely huge, but because they're usually in the middle of "nowhere," they rarely make the mainstream news.
What proof do you have of the lower bound here?
The "infinite expenditures" part comes in because you can introduce redundancies and fail-safes, but those introduce complexity / more work / more materials, which have extra costs. Then you need to spend time/money making sure the whole system works together / testing failure modes. But that may also fail, etc.
I will open the bidding by suggesting that Canada's frequency of dangerous pipeline failures should not exceed its frequency of airliner crashes.