I think you're giving them too much credit. I don't think this comes from anything as materialist as pipeline opposition, it seems like there's a fully general commitment to countering "panic" in all cases. We saw similar messages in the early days of the pandemic.
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I thought about this a lot back in March 2020 and my current best guess is that it's basically the narrative-weavers correctly perceiving unpredictable material disasters as a challenge to their position as the ones who determine what's important and what people pay attention to.
This is probably true. But it also seems clear that discussion of a fuel pipeline automatically brings up images of pipelines across Native American land. There is no way to avoid that association.
