It’s Earth Day and a good time to revisit Line 5 and what that awful saga has to say about what’s become of the environmental movement — or maybe what it has always been.
To remind readers, Line 5 is an oil and natural gas pipeline, owned by the Canadian company Enbridge. It runs 645 miles from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ontario. For the last 70 years, 12 of those 645 miles have crossed the reservation of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, near Ashland.
In 2013 the lease ran out on that 12 mile stretch and the tribe refused to renew it. In 2019 a Federal Judge ordered Enbridge to remove the line. So, the company staked out a 41-mile reroute around the reservation.
Which the tribe also opposed.
Which the tribe also opposed.
Let that sink in. The tribe and its environmental group allies opposed only two things: the problem and its solution.
The real game here was to shut down the whole line. But that was never in the cards. No court and no regulatory body was ever going to shut down a 645 mile line carrying that much product over a dispute over 12 miles of it.
Moreover, what if lightening had struck and the line was shutdown? The product would still flow, just using boats, rails and trucks — all means of transport that are at least as dangerous as a pipeline.
To make matters worse, Enbridge has made the case that the line transports product that ends up as propane, which is what most folks in the UP, one of the most economically depressed places in America, use to heat their homes. So, the Line 5 fight had the added problem of digging an even deeper trench between urban environmentalists and rural, blue collar Americans.
It’s almost over. Enbridge was winning all the regulatory and legal battles anyway, but now the Trump administration will certainly allow the reroute to get built. The whole fight will have been an incredible and tragic waste.
The upshot? If you accept the fact that a pipeline poses risks — and I do — then we’re now replacing 12 miles of risk with 41 miles of risk. In addition, millions of dollars — which will end up being charged to customers — will have been wasted on the construction of the new line, not to mention the legal and public relations bills.
But what if the tribe and its enviro allies had pursued a different path? What if they had used the leverage provided by the lease to push Enbridge to not only harden the line against spills, but to also fund a program to help UP homeowners to switch from propane to electricity or, better yet, solar installations?
The environment would have been much better off had they simply left the line where it was and demanded those other strategies. But that’s not the way environmental activists think today or, for that matter, ever.
Conservationists (a different breed) and a few more reasonable groups like The Nature Conservancy are better, but the culture of the activist wing of the environmental movement has always been like this. And it’s a shame.
My hope on Earth Day is that the folly of the Line 5 fight will spawn a new generation of environmentalists who can see things more clearly and act more responsibly.
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Dave’s map of Line 5 stops at Hurley, by the border with Michigan’s UP. But Line 5 crosses that border, and then crosses the UP to the Mackinac Straits, which connects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, where the pipeline was built about 200 feet deep under the Straits in 1953. There it has sat corroding for 72 years buffeted by heavy cross currents, struck relentlessly by dragging anchors, with many of its supports crumbling. If could break at any time, which would contaminate two of the Great Lakes that contains 20% of the entire world’s surface fresh water. Close down Line 5 and the oil now coursing under the Staits stops.
Stopping Line 5, seen on the wider map it connects with, demonstrates with overwhelming facts that it is vital to close down this threat to the planet’s fresh water supply by stopping the oil from running through Line 5 to the underwater extension. The cost to remediate the inevitable accident would be billions and billions of dollars, not to mention the health effects on millions of innocent people, white and black. It is absolutely insane for society to absorb this risk to the world that, yes, transcends the risks to the Bad River Tribe, whose reservation Line 5 crosses in Wisconsin.
I also wish, though, with these terrible times we are going through, we wouldn’t ourselves get Trumpian in our outlook so callously antagonistic to the poor.
In 2012, the Dakota Access Pipeline company proposed for their North Dakota pipeline to cross the Missouri River near Bismarck as the shortest route. The white community said no the risks were too great to their health.
Did Dakota Access do like Enbridge is doing to the Bad River Tribe fighting Enbridge and say f*** you, we’re building it anyway. Nope, they instead picked up their shovels and quickly moved the pipeline downstream 25 miles to cross at the Standing Rock Reservation whose similar concerns as the Bismarck citizens about a leak were ignored. Dave why didn’t you pontificate then about those stupid white guys who presumably wear MAGA hats.
PS I don’t know why the group’s opposing Line 5 haven’t centered the fight on the Mackinac Straits. Maybe they thought that by focusing on the pipeline’s injustice to the tribe so that, even though our brutish capitalist world wouldn’t care, a God in heaven would strike her wraith down on the pipeline. On that point, I might have to agree with you. Something has gotten so unrealistic in the left’s moralistic strategies that essentially rely on her wraith, which has not been coming. Yes, the horrific immorality in our world makes all of us shake with anger. But, acting out of anger without realistic strategies ain’t going to help those being so tragically marginalized.
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