The next essay in our ongoing series How to Know About Line 5 will drop soon (I hope you’ve read the first four!). In the meantime, as I look out at the haze and smoke and read the news that the Michigan air quality today is probably the worst it’s been since the Canadian fires began, I’ve been having a few thoughts about Enbridge and Line 5. Believe it or not, these things not unrelated.
As readers of this blog know, this is not the first time an ecological disturbance way up in Alberta has had a dramatic effect upon Michigan. The last time was in 2010. But rather than wildfires, it was tar sands oil extracted in Alberta, and transported via pipeline through Michigan. Enbridge’s Line 6B ruptured and spilled over a million gallons of the stuff into the Kalamazoo River. By now, we all know most of this story by heart.
But it wasn’t just the river that was spoiled. Air quality was pretty bad then too. In fact, benzene concentration levels were high enough to require evacuation near the spill site. And we still don’t know what else was released into the air and breathed in by nearby residents. To this day, there have been no human health studies on the effects of those airborne toxins.
But there’s more. Back in those days, Enbridge was running around talking about its “Tree for a Tree, Acre for An Acre” program. It was supposed to be a way to neutralize the company’s planetary footprint. From 2009 to 2013, for example, they claimed to have planted some 800,000 saplings (that’s less than the number of gallons of oil they spilled into the river btw!).
Where did they plant all those saplings? They sure as hell didn’t plant them in my backyard, where they cut down over 100 trees. So it’s hard to say for sure. But it appears that a lot of those trees were planted in… Alberta! https://createyourforest.ca/partner/enbridge-pipelines-inc
You see, that’s where a lot of trees get planted—in large “tree plantations” created as part of those “carbon offset” schemes that oil and gas companies love so much. They get to pretend like it somehow gets them off the hook. Here’s a great, informative twitter thread on the role of tree plantations in the current wildfires.
Enbridge stopped talking about the “Tree for a Tree” program about a decade ago. It’s not entirely clear why, but my hunch is that it’s because the program was always designed as greenwashing p.r. for their ill-fated Northern Gateway project. When that project died, or so it appears, so too did their tree program.
But they still love talking about “net zero” and about planting trees. In fact, not so long ago they were planting trees over in Lambton county—which just happens to be where Line 5 ends.As far as I know, those tree plantations aren’t currently ablaze. But the air there is still pretty bad…
But then again, for some populations, the air there has been very bad for a very long time, not because of forest fires, but because of the refineries Line 5 feeds that emit toxic pollutants (into the water and soil as well as the air).
All of which is to say that while Enbridge isn’t directly responsible for the Canadian wildfires, they are a major player in a system that inevitably produces those fires, a system they work hard to sustain and perpetuate. And a system, more importantly, that also produces lots of other harms, including global warming, that are often less visible and less dramatic but in many ways far more devastating even than the current fires.