Save the Planet, Support Line 5

It’s Earth Day, so let’s celebrate by hugging a pipeline.

For those readers not familiar with the controversy, here’s a quick recap. Line 5 is a 70-year old oil pipeline stretching from Superior through northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and down to Detroit. (I’ve got a place in the U.P. and I probably get the propane that heats my cabin from that pipeline.) It’s owned by Enbridge, a Canadian company.

A 12-mile stretch of the 645-mile long pipeline runs through the Bad River reservation south of Ashland. The tribe is ordering Enbridge off their land. Enbridge agreed to vacate that stretch and has sited a 41-mile route to go around the reservation. But the tribe and environmental groups are suing to stop Enbridge from building the bypass. In short, they don’t want the pipeline going through the reservation and they don’t want it going around it. They want to use that 12-mile stretch to shut down the whole 645 miles completely.

Their view seems to be that climate change is such an existential threat that we need to slam on the breaks for fossil fuels entirely. Literally, in this case, shut off the flow of fossil fuels to force us to move to alternatives. This might be emotionally satisfying for the activists, but rationally it’s an anti-environmental position because it will likely produce greater threats to the environment than the status quo.

Let’s start with the obvious. Replacing 12 miles of pipeline risk with 41 miles of pipeline risk is three and a half times riskier. The new, longer route will cross no less than 186 streams and water bodies. It will displace wetlands. From an environmental perspective, it’s obvious that the pipeline should remain right where it is.

But what if the pipeline opponents succeed and shut it down altogether? Won’t that help ween us from fossil fuels? Not likely. Never mind that in the big scheme of things this is a negligible amount of product, what will happen is that the stuff will continue to move along more or less the same corridor, except now it will be by truck, rail or water or, most likely, a combination. All of those modes have risks that are greater or less than a pipeline depending on how you define the risk. This 2018 article from Forbes explains it in all its nuance, but the bottom line is that every mode has risks. Pipelines are not inherently more risky than any other mode.

There’s another more subtle problem here. In the North Woods, Enbridge is winning the public relations battle. The company claims that if the line is shut down propane prices will go up. Whether that’s correct or not, the message is that, once again, urban environmental activists are pushing the burden of their agenda on hard-working rural people with more immediate concerns.

To sum up, if the pipeline opponents succeed, oil will continue to flow, just through modes that are at least as risky, and propane prices may be forced up. Nothing will have been accomplished.

So, here’s the pro-environment thing to do. The tribe should sign a new lease with Enbridge, which should include a hefty increase in their lease payments, thus avoiding the whole 41-mile work around. But as part of the lease agreement Enbridge should be required to harden the line against leaks and step up monitoring. The company should post a bond to pay for the costs of any damage that might occur despite their best efforts. Enbridge would agree to this. In fact. Enbridge wants to address parts of the line that are most at risk right now, but the tribe won’t let the company on their land to fix the very problems that could lead to the very environmental damage they claim to want to stop.

Federal Judge William Conley, who has been more than sympathetic to the tribe’s legal case, has expressed frustration with the Bad River for asking him to shut down the line when the tribe won’t allow Enbridge to address their immediate concerns. “It’s an extraordinary request to be made when the band is doing nothing,” Conley said. He went on to point out that the tribe’s recalcitrance could damage its case if and when it gets to the Supreme Court. “You’re jeopardizing rights recognized by the court,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve been watching the Supreme Court, but I’m flummoxed.”

If cooler and wiser heads prevailed and the line was allowed to continue on tribal land with these safeguards in place, then there should also be some sort of campaign to get home owners and businesses to switch to electric and solar so that some day the line might be phased out. That would be the sane, orderly, rational and pro-environmental thing to do.

Finally, an Earth Day word in favor of fossil fuels. We have reached this point in human history where it’s time to switch over to renewable forms of energy. But let’s not demonize the age of fossil fuels or the companies that still supply them. After all, I would not be writing this now if it weren’t for those energy sources. I don’t know how many oil-based products go into an Apple laptop, but it was surely transported to me via fossil fuels. The Apple Store was lit with them. I recharge this device with energy produced with them. Anti-fossil fuel protesters drive to their rallies in cars powered by them. (Even if those cars are electric the electricity had to be produced by plants that use coal or gas as a base load fuel.) Greta Thunberg jets around the planet to save it from the fuels that power her travels. In fact, the entirety of modern society and all of its progress is built on fossil fuels. It’s not too much to say that there is an environmental movement because fossil fuels created the prosperity that allows people to look beyond mere survival. I surely agree that it’s time to move on from them, and we are, but people who denigrate these fuels are either ignorant or ungrateful.

Happy Earth Day.

And on another matter… my Congressman, Mark Pocan, joined Rep. Tom Tiffany to be one of only a few dozen House members to vote against the military aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other nations that passed on an overwhelming bipartisan vote. I assume Tiffany voted against it because of Ukraine and Pocan voted against it because of Israel. Their votes were equally wrong-headed, but they reflect the dominant hard-left and hard-right views in their respective districts.