There is No Future for Line 5
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the history of Line 5, arguing that its decommissioning should be understood not just as a preventative measure against imminent disaster, but as a matter of environmental justice, of damage already inflicted. Given the stern comments of Attorney General Dana Nessel this week, it’s worth shifting our gaze forward and acknowledging what everybody knows but not everybody wants to admit: there is no future for Line 5.
Enbridge surely knows this, though they’d never admit it. And who can blame them? Their job is to transport oil and they’ll keep trying to do it as long as they possibly can. Nobody likes to imagine the inevitability of their own obsolescence. But the Line 5 tunnel scheme has always been about delaying the inevitable. It’s worth remembering, for example, that Enbridge hatched the plan less than 2 years ago. Before that, Enbridge insisted the current line is “fit for service” and could “operate indefinitely.” Only when the previous gubernatorial administration started talking tough and public pressure heated up did Enbridge start talking about “alternatives.” In other words, the tunnel idea has never been anything other than a transparent attempt to placate state officials. Enbridge can’t possibly want to build it. Large corporations are notoriously short-sighted after all. Why make a half billion dollar capital investment in infrastructure they insist doesn’t even need to be replaced? It’s a wonder so many people have fallen for this.
Even if Enbridge did want to build it, it’s hard to imagine it will ever really happen. For more than a year, Enbridge has said that construction will take 7-10 years. But this week, with Governor Whitman and AG Nessel both expressing impatience with that length of time, Enbridge’s engineers have suddenly– miraculously!– discovered that they can build the tunnel in under 5 years. (You really can’t make this stuff up.) But anyone who has paid any attention to Enbridge over the past decade knows that its history of construction timetable projections and its track record in the state of making deadlines does not engender much confidence. We were told, for instance, that the Line 6B replacement would take about 4 months. It took three years. In addition, Enbridge has a troubling habit of failing to meet deadlines (see here and here and here). So whether you start with 4-5 or 7-10 years, you can expect much longer than that.
All of which is unlikely to matter anyway, since any Line 5 tunnel construction activity is certain to be delayed for years by lawsuits, legal interventions, environmental assessments, and protests. Just this week, the Anishinaabek Caucus of the Michigan Democratic Party issued a statement, in solidarity with the 12 Tribes of Michigan and the Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority, affirming its opposition to the tunnel and announcing its intention to exert its rights under Federal Treaties. Tribal groups alone could delay approval of a tunnel plan for who-knows-how-long. And that’s to say nothing of environmental groups, business owners, and others who will surely try to intervene, through various means, in the courts and in the state approval process. Thus I couldn’t help but chuckle when an Enbridge representative said yesterday, “Assuming we work through a normal permitting timeline, we should be under construction by 2021.” Enbridge can’t possibly believe the timeline for securing approvals for such a controversial project will be anything close to “normal.” Even the Line 6B replacement, a project that generated very little organized protest one that virtually everyone supported, took far, far longer than anyone would expect under a “normal permitting timeline.”
So even under a best-case scenario (for Enbridge) approval of the tunnel project, even with the Governor’s support, is years away. But by that time the visible effects of climate change are only going to be worse, public awareness of ever-increasing global temperature rises greater, and public demand for political action to curb greenhouse gas emissions much louder than it is even now. In ten years, it’s doubtful that anyone, including many of Enbridge’s current supporters, will have the stomach for a 100-year fossil fuel infrastructure project.
My hunch is that Enbridge knows all of this. In fact, I suspect they’re banking on it. It’s going to cost them less to pay their crafty lawyers for 5 or 10 years than it will to build that tunnel. And all that time, they hope, they’ll get to keep the current lines pumping away while pretending that they’re not the ones preventing them from being encased in concrete under the lakebed. It’s a clever ruse. But it is a ruse. And it’s time to stop playing along. AG Nessel has threatened to take steps to shut Line 5 down if a deal is not reached in the next thirty days. But there’s only one deal to make: not one involving a chimerical tunnel, but a plan and a timeline for the permanent removal of Line 5 from beneath the Straits.
Update (May 31, 2019): Even Enbridge knows that their expedited timeline is ludicrous; their own press release devotes three long, legalistic paragraphs to explaining their use of “forward-looking” language. Translation: “we’re totally just making this stuff up; please don’t hold us to any of it.”