When T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruellest month,” he was not speaking metaphorically. It’s been plenty cruel in Michigan generally and certainly here at our place (we won’t bore you with details), which is much of what accounts for the lack of output here at the blog. We’ve got a major news roundup coming your way soon, among other things.

The big Line 6B story, however, is that Enbridge has announced that they’re going to fire up the new Line 6B– that is, the sections of it that have been installed– on May 1. We’re sure they’re quite giddy about this, since it means they get to double the capacity of what the line carries and rake in lots and lots of dough. The great David Hasemyer of Inside Climate News has the story, which focuses mainly (and appropriately) on safety concerns, about which our old friend Larry Springer is on hand with some predictable assurances. Our favorite part is when he says this:

“Enbridge is part of an energy pipeline industry that is committed to the highest safety standards in the construction and operation of our facilities,” Springer said in an email…

Of course, such hollow cant from a corporate flak surely doesn’t reassure anybody. But we do have to give Springer some credit here: generating a bunch of words without actually saying anything really is an art. Perhaps not a very useful or honorable one, but an art nonetheless.

Far better than Springer’s are the remarks of our friend Beth Wallace, who as always is right on point. Beth directs her criticism toward PHMSA for giving Enbridge such a free pass:

“There has been very little progress made toward strengthening rules and regulations since the spill four years ago,” Wallace said. “So allowing them [Enbridge] to nearly double the size of their pipeline before critical rulemaking comes out of PHMSA is putting the cart before the horse.”

One final point. As much as we admire the great work of Hasemyer and Inside Climate News– and this article is no exception–there is one serious omission in this story that we’d like to point out. While Enbridge is firing up the line so that they can start reaping enormous financial rewards from this expansion, hundreds of landowners, including us, are in limbo, waiting and wondering when and how and whether their devastated properties are going to be restored. The priority here is clear: it’s profits, not people.

In a rational universe– that is, one in which a decent respect for the lives and rights of landowners, the people who have no choice but to take on ALL of the risks of this pipeline project, are more important than the financial bottom line of a multinational corporation– in that sort of universe, Enbridge simply would not be allowed to start up the new line until every single property owner along the route is completely satisfied with the restoration of their property. If, for instance, the MPSC were really interested in serving the public interest, this would have been a condition of their approval. After all, it’s not as if the world would run out of fossil fuel in the meantime. And it’s not as if Enbridge would be hurt by such a stipulation; they just wouldn’t gain by it.

Instead, here we are, staring out at our denuded waste land of a property, digging out the dead plants from our garden (killed by Enbridge’s careless work), looking over the bare patches of earth left by the half-assed seeding job of Enbridge’s restoration crews, wondering if and when we’ll ever get those trees Enbridge has promised, waiting for a phone call or email from whatever new Enbridge land agent is currently in charge of matters on our parcel.

We wonder if anyone from Enbridge will think of that– or of all the other landowners who have it just as bad, and in many cases much worse– on the evening of May 1st when they clap and cheer and toast the startup of the new Line 6B, pumping all that diluted bitumen through our blighted backyards.