Kommersant's headline says it:
Savior of the Baikal
President Putin yesterday bowed to pressure from citizen groups including Greenpeace Russia and ordered pipeline monopoly Transneft to move the portion of its Siberia-Pacific pipeline nearest Lake Baikal 40 kilometers north. This will put the line almost entirely out of the catchment of Lake Baikal.
The move was a surprise triumph of science and common sense over immediate cost considerations. Transneft had complained that the alternate route would cost considerably more.
As described in an
earlier diary, Transneft had managed to secure approval from the racked and stacked environmental oversight agency for its plan to route the line along miles of the lake's shore, coming at one point within 800 meters of the water. The Supreme Court refused to intervene, leaving a Putin reversal the only hope.
As Greenpeace and Irkutsk officials have long pointed out, the entire area is seismically unstable and the route was an ill-advised gamble. From the little information available, it seems that consideration may have tipped the scales with the president.
The decision came as a surprise at a development meeting in Siberia yesterday. No one was more surprised than Transneft president Semen Vainshtok, who was present at the meeting. Also there were Yury Osipov and Nikolay Laverov, president and vice-president respectively of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which has expressed concern about the potential catastrophe of a major oil spill into Lake Baikal.
The president stood and walked over to Laverov. "Is it possible to build the line farther north?" he asked Vainshtok.
"You have caught me off guard," Vainshtok admitted.
And the decision was made.
Putin:
"The route should pass to the north of the zones that Academic Laverov indicated. If there is even a 1-percent danger, we should think about that one percent, and not in reference to people who live far from the Baikal."
This is a great victory for all who campaigned to move the pipeline, including Greenpeace Russia. Says their spokesman Andrey Petrov:
"It is victory for the whole of civil society in Russia, not just the ecological movement."
Score one for the good guys, science, and common sense.
Click to enlarge map of routes. "Actual planned route" is the one that Putiin just cancelled. The new one will be the "2nd planned" or perhaps further north still.
The grey area is the catchment of Lake Baikal.