Psychology and Social Sciences
 
Too Hard to Breathe in Low-Income Minority Communities with the Installation of the Keystone Pipeline

Title

Too Hard to Breathe in Low-Income Minority Communities with the Installation of the Keystone Pipeline

Authors

Sara Hillman

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Description

Sara Hillman, PSC 204: Political Statistics
Faculty Mentor: Professor Kyeonghi Baek, Political Science Department


The City of Alberta, Canada, the beginning of the Keystone Pipeline, sits on a tar sand deposit. Within the deposit is a chemical compound known as bitumen, a type of petroleum that can be converted into fuel. However, crude oil is known as the dirtiest oil because of the difficulty of extracting the oil and cleaning up the crude. Besides the Congressional vote on the Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Act, the states of Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas county’s Board of Commissioners offices have had to vote on whether the installation of the Keystone Pipeline would pass through their counties. People living in low-income communities are reduced to the negative effects of the Keystone Pipeline. TransCanada, the company responsible for the Keystone Pipeline, guaranteed the installation of the Pipeline would bring in thousands of jobs as well as billions of dollars to the United States economy. With this research, I examined two questions: a) whether the economic status of the counties that the pipeline runs through, affected the voting actions of the counties for the Keystone Pipeline proposal, and b) whether the installation of the Keystone Pipeline decreased poverty rates for surrounding counties. I argue that with the route of the pipeline passing through low-income minority communities, the county Boards are more likely to approve the Keystone Pipeline with little consideration of the environmental and human impacts.

Streaming Media

Publication Date

2020

Too Hard to Breathe in Low-Income Minority Communities with the Installation of the Keystone Pipeline

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