Google Enbridge Kalamazoo for your first PS. On the second PPS: plastics. As you say, you thought wrong, whether about me, about environmentalists, or about the manufactured materials. Working from fewer preconceptions usually improves any thought process. Start a thread if you want to discuss any of those but my own thinking.
There most certainly are viable alternatives to fossil fuels; we got all the way to the XIXth C without much use of them at all. What we need to do is commit to a useful, serious exchange in society (not to mention across the Planet) on the definition of that critical concept 'viable'. To begin with, I suspect you're eliding it with 'cheap', or 'economical'. 'Viable' actually refers to survival, and committing to yesterday's technology is a death sentence for any society as dependent on technology as you say we are.
I think I already covered the 'technology fails' issue above, and in many previous pipeline threads. It supports my point, when you say it always fails. And we always learn too slowly from those failures. Do you imagine Titanic was the first ship to sail without enough lifeboats? The watertight compartments that could have saved the ship were a well known concept well before her plans were drawn, but ship owners and builders convinced the authorities they were too expensive and would kill their business if they were legislated. Just as pipeline owners, and railway CEOs do today.
But at least railways and tanker trucks operate out where we can see them. And because of that, unlike Titanic, their owners and operators can't cheap out and leave the tops off their 'leakproof' containment vessels. And when the inevitable happens, each one of them must be punctured individually — like those watertight compartments — for there to be a problem at all, and by the time things stop moving, the word's already on its way and the CEO's are working on it.
Not taking a whole day before they realize they've been pumping their oil into the Kalamazoo River. And it was not the CEOs and managers, but we customers and taxpayers who paid for all that clean-up, and for the pricey lobbyists paid to persuade pols to let them cut corners. Because although technology always fails, the pipeline CEOs didn't see the greater risk in letting it fail out of sight.
We can afford to buy a bit of safety and risk limitation instead of paying the cost of their "always" failing decisions. We'll just have to wait a little longer for the oil to get to us. Or to China.
BTW, the prices of PVs (which do use odd bits of plastics) and EVs (ditto) are coming down all the time.
