What a week! After a few weeks of relative silence (and almost complete silence from us– we’re sorry!), things Enbridge-related exploded this week.
It started Monday morning with a harmless phone call to an Enbridge land agent to try and get some simple information about restoration. But he didn’t know anything. Nothing. At all.
But no sooner did we hang up the phone than we saw some workers pounding stakes into the ground on our property. Minutes after that, bulldozers arrived and started pushing dirt around. Now hundreds of feet of pipe are back on our property, causing us to have traumatic flashbacks to last November. Here is what our property looked like last week:
And here is what it looks like this morning (we’ll bring you the full story of all of this in a subsequent post):
The same day, the second of two reports on Line 6B by Keith Matheny appeared in the Detroit Free Press. It’s fine work, though as usual, the disingenuous remarks of Enbridge spokesperson Jason Manshum raised our hackles. So we wrote to him for clarification. It’s been two days now and he has not responded. Evidently, Manshum is not obligated to adhere to Enbridge’s stated corporate values of “maintain[ing] truth in all interactions,” “tak[ing] the time to understand the perspective of others,” and “treat[ing] everyone with unfailing dignity.”
Also on the same day, an intrepid young activist decided to climb inside a section of Line 6B to protest the transportation of dilbit from Canada to the U.S. Reports say he is healthy and safe.
Then, as if all of that weren’t enough, the National Academy of Sciences released its congressionally-mandated report on the safety of transporting dilbit. It’s pretty weak tea, we have to say, but in place of our analysis we’ll just point you to stories by our favorite reporters Lisa Song at Inside Climate News and Elana Schor at Energy & Environment News. And we’ll also direct you to important responses by our friends Anthony Swift of the NRDC and Carl Weimer of the Pipeline Safety Trust.
We will add one tiny bit of our own commentary here. The industry response to the NAS study included this little gem by Shawn Howard, a spokesman for TransCanada:
“At some point, the professional opposition that has used Keystone XL and the oil sands industry as a symbol for their fundraising and advocacy campaigns will need to accept the fact that this product has been moving through the U.S. for decades, that oil is oil and that pipelines remain the safest way to move oil to refineries where it is needed,” TransCanada Corp. spokesman Shawn Howard said via email.
“As a responsible, publicly traded company, TransCanada has an obligation to provide accurate and factual information about our projects to the public and our shareholders — and we hope that the professional opposition to this project will start to do the same.”
Taking a page from the Pat Daniel playbook, Howard refers to a diverse group of citizens with varied and mostly reasonable concerns as “professional opposition.” And he does it twice, in a willfully dishonest attempt to dismiss critics of his industry. What rankles us so much about this– and we’ve seen a similar tactic employed by Enbridge; not just Daniel, but also Larry Springer and even, we’re sorry to say, Tom Hodge— is not just that it is reductive, misleading, and an affront to the truth. It’s also that Howard does it in the very same sentence in which he’s trying to convince us that TransCanada is “responsible” and devoted to “accurate and factual information”! It’s exactly like Enbridge telling us they’re committed to being good neighbors while in the midst of behaving in an unneighborly manner.
But that’s not all this week has had in store for us. Yesterday, the president gave a much anticipated climate speech. Many groups are heartened by his remark that the KXL project should go forward “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” For ourselves, we don’t think that’s a terribly unequivocal statement. But we’re trying to be hopeful.