by Jeffrey Insko | Feb 17, 2025 |
I know things have been generally quiet around here for quite some time. But regular readers of this dusty old blog might be interested to know that the amazing folks over at Oil and Water Don’t Mix have launched a new substack called The Current. And I’m honored that they’ve entrusted me to write it. Check it out and subscribe here:
https://thecurrentowdm.substack.com/
And while you’re at it, please visit the OWDM website (line above) to take action, donate, or buy some cool merch to support the cause: Shut Down Line 5.
Hope to see you over at The Current!
by Jeffrey Insko | Sep 22, 2015 |
Many long time readers of this blog are aware that we keep a side gig teaching American literature at Oakland University. Over the past several months, we’ve been collaborating with a couple of our magnificent colleagues to organize an exciting event to which we’d like to invite you: a one day symposium on climate change we’re calling “Climate Literacies: Reading the Anthropocene.”
The symposium will bring together scholars from the humanities and sciences, conservationists, leaders of Michigan environmental organizations, activists, and advocates for environmental justice to talk about politics, scholarship, the arts, the ecology of the Great Lakes, and the implications of climate change for Michigan and beyond. And don’t worry, Enbridge is sure to get a mention!
The event will take place October 15, starting, from 9 am-7 pm in the Oakland Room of the Oakland Center on the campus of Oakland University.
The symposium will begin with an address by the University of Michigan’s Henry Pollack, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and author of A World Without Ice. It will conclude with a keynote address titled “Love and Death in the Anthropocene” by the brilliant and innovative literary scholar Dana Luciano of Georgetown University.
In between, we’ll have lots of conversation and fascinating presentations featuring, among others, some friends we’ve made here at the blog as well as others whose work we’ve long admired. In addition to OU faculty, including our co-organizers, Professors Andrea Knutson and Hunter Vaughan, symposium participants are:
- Nadia Bozak, novelist and Assistant Professor of English at Carleton University; her most recent novel is El Niño.
- Tom Baird, President, Anglers of the Au Sable
- Liz Kirkwood, Executive Director, For Love of Water
- Anne Vaara, Executive Director, Clinton River Watershed Council
- William Copeland, Climate Justice Director, East Michigan Environmental Council
- Jake McGraw, Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands
- Mackenzie Maxwell, Environmental Educator, Ecology, Center Ann Arbor
- Stephanie Foote, Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois and Co-Editor of Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities
- Janet Fiskio, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies & Comparative American Studies, Oberlin College
- Denise Keele, Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental and Sustainability Studies, Western Michigan University
- Margaret A. Crouch, Professor, Department of Philosophy and Program for Interdisciplinary Environmental Science and Society, Eastern Michigan University
- Ted Toadvine, Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon and editor-in-chief of Environmental Philosophy
The event is free and open to the public. Please join us– and bring your friends!
by Jeffrey Insko | Jul 1, 2015 |
We hope everyone is enjoying the summer. We certainly are, which is why we’ve been (more than) a little neglectful of the blog of late. We hope you’ll forgive us!
Readers of this blog are probably aware of a certain anniversary that’s coming up in a couple of weeks. We’ll be remembering also. If you’re in the area, you should try to make the event.
And while you’re pondering that dark part of Michigan’s history, you might take a moment to think about how we can prevent such a thing from happening ever again. That’s a heavy task, but we can tell you one thing that won’t help: less transparency from pipeline companies.
We’re reminded of this because of a baffling recent post from our friends up at the Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowner Associations (CAEPLA). Thanks to the dedication and hard work of their founder Dave Core, they’ve been helping landowners along pipelines and protecting property rights in Canada for a long time and have done tons of good. We appreciate their efforts tremendously and respect the model they have developed, which is quite interesting.
But earlier this month, they waded into matters down here in Michigan and quickly got themselves in way over their heads. The result is a whole lot of misinformation, shoddy argumentation, and factual inaccuracies. We’re disappointed and sorry to see it. But since they’re taking issue with us specifically– well, they try to take issue with us, but they clearly don’t understand the issue or our position– we think it’s only appropriate to respond.
Honestly, there’s so much wrong with CAEPLA’s take on the proposed changes to Michigan’s FOIA laws— what we’ve been calling the Enbridge Secrecy Bill– that we hardly know where to begin. CAEPLA’s argument is convoluted and, frankly, a little bizarre. And if we didn’t know better, we’d think it was cooked up by pipeline companies themselves. In a nutshell, CAEPLA’s position is this: demanding disclosure of pipeline companies’ proprietary information is ultimately a threat to the protection of individual landowner’s personal or private information.
Now, this is both completely nonsensical and completely irrelevant to the debate at hand (over HB 4540). We explain why below. But first we want to say that virtually every sentence of the post contains something objectionable– if not just plain wrong. For that reason, we’re tempted to dissect it sentence by sentence. But that would probably make for tedious reading and this is going to be long enough as it is. So we’ll just point out three big problems:
1. CAEPLA is needlessly snarky
We’re not sure why, but CAEPLA adopts an unnecessarily snide tone, complete with industry-like caricatures and straw-man arguments. Here’s how they begin:
House Bill 4540 is being depicted as a threat to the public because it would make it more difficult for those who “are concerned about” (read: oppose) pipelines to access companies’ “secret” information.
Now, since CAEPLA takes as its example of the bill’s critics this post of ours, one might reasonably think that the quoted phrase “are concerned about” is something we wrote. But it’s not. We don’t know who are what they’re quoting. The quote seems made up so that CAEPLA can engage in that little bit of parenthetical snark, taking a shot at people who oppose pipelines. What that has to do with Michigan’s HB 4540 we have no idea. Nor do we know what pipeline CAEPLA might be referring to; evidently they just want to conjure up some phantom image of a person who opposes all pipelines. Frankly, we’re surprised by this. It’s the same tired line we’ve heard from the industry time and again. It’s disingenuous and lazy. We’ve responded to it on numerous occasions. The fact is that sometimes, for good reasons, we oppose pipelines; sometimes we don’t.
Here’s a second example of how CAEPLA paints a distorted picture of opponents of HB 4540:
Opponents of the exemption for pipeline companies argue that FOI laws are the only way to protect stakeholders – including landowners – from the growing risks associated with aging pipelines, and from the allegedly more dangerous contents coursing through them.
Again, this is nonsense. We don’t know anybody who has ever said FOIA “laws are the only way to protect stakeholders” from pipeline risks. That would be a foolish thing to argue– which is why nobody is arguing it. Opponents of HB 4540, including ourselves, have advocated many ways to protect against the risk of more pipeline incidents. Transparency is just one piece of a very complicated puzzle.
2. CAEPLA thinks apples are oranges
As we said above, the heart of CAEPLA’s argument is that HB 4540 is essentially a privacy issue. For instance, they say:
The word secret is really just another more ominous way of saying private. As in private property. The private property of pipeline company shareholders, which of course includes proprietary information.
The word secret is not another way of saying private; it’s a way of saying undisclosed. We have no idea why CAEPLA would try to smuggle the word “private” into this discussion. Presumably, it’s meant to push all sorts of buttons, since we all know that privacy is sacrosanct. You don’t want your privacy invaded, do you? That’s actually the line that CAEPLA takes. We’re not kidding. They say so very explicitly:
Threat to Pipeline Privacy is a Threat to Your Privacy
Now that’s just plain weird. In fact, there is no way whatsoever in which this statement is true. It violates about four different logical fallacies, maybe more. Aside from its implied slippery slope (ask the pipelines to reveal their emergency response program and pretty soon you’ll be forced to reveal what goes on in your bedroom!), it conflates things that are actually quite distinct. First, it conflates the ostensible “privacy” of pipeline companies with your personal privacy. But that’s just plain false. Corporations do not have rights to personal privacy like you do. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court just recently made that very clear. Secondly, CAEPLA conflates property rights with privacy rights. But those things, too, are very different. We don’t want to bore you, but we hope you’ll trust us when we tell you that, historically, the whole idea of a right to privacy depended upon distinguishing it from the right to property (in fact, that little bit of history is sort of a thing for us). Thirdly, it conflates pipeline companies’ proprietary information with the public records they are required to submit to state and federal governments. Those things, too, are distinct. It’s the latter that are covered by FOIA laws. The former is irrelevant.
So to sum up: property is not privacy. A corporation’s proprietary information has nothing whatsoever to do with your right to privacy. Nothing. In the same way, Michigan’s FOIA laws (especially as rewritten by HB 4540) have nothing whatsoever to do with your “personal and business documents.” There is simply no way to get from the one to the other. They’re apples and oranges. CAEPLA’s attempt to force the one on the other is at best confused and at worst a cheap ploy designed to scare you. One might even call it–to borrow a term CAEPLA applies to us– “alarmist.” In fact, if you want an example of alarmism, you really couldn’t do better than this:
But the power of government to pry open a privately owned pipeline company’s proprietary information is the same power to pry open any business’s private affairs and property, including yours.
That sounds bad, frightening even. The problem is that the government here is not prying open any company’s proprietary information. Nor is it prying open any individual’s “private affairs and property.” CAEPLA is just making this up.**
3. Which brings us to our final point: CAEPLA doesn’t understand anything at all about HB 4540 or, it appears, FOIA laws generally.
What we’re talking about here– what Michigan’s HB 4540 is about, what FOIA laws are always about– is access to public records, not to proprietary information. Opponents of HB 4540 aren’t seeking to “pry open” anything. They’re seeking to prevent pipeline companies from concealing even more information (that is, public information, such as documents submitted to government agencies) than they already do. This is CAEPLA’s biggest mistake. They appear not to understand the first thing about what HB 4540 says or why people like us think it is a very bad bill. Instead, they mischaracterize the whole debate over the bill as some attempt on the part of “opponents” to gain access to so-called “private” things they don’t already have access to, to try and “snoop” on the pipeline companies. That’s just plain silly. The debate over HB 4540 has nothing to do with “expropriat[ing] a private enterprise’s informational property.” CAEPLA is making that up, too.
Let us be extra clear on this point: nobody– NOBODY– is suggesting that pipeline companies don’t have the right (the property right) to keep certain kinds of information from the public, whether for proprietary or for security reasons. In fact, as we make very clear in the post that CAEPLA links to (which they apparently either didn’t read or didn’t comprehend), both federal and state laws already provide exemptions for that sort of information. We don’t have a problem with that.
The reason that HB 4540 is objectionable is because it goes far beyond those existing rules and laws. It would potentially allow pipeline companies to reveal even less than they reveal now. In fact, the bill’s language is so vague that it could allow pipeline companies to exempt almost anything from disclosure. And we’re not talking here about trade secrets or the emails that Enbridge executives send to their spouses, we’re talking (it bears repeating) about public records, things like emergency response procedures, the results of internal corrosion inspections, and integrity management systems– the kinds of things that would allow the public to participate in safety accountability.
To once again put this more simply: CAEPLA would have you believe that opponents of HB 4540 have embarked upon some kind of invasive endeavor to gain access to (so-called “private’) information they can’t currently access. We’re not sure if CAEPLA seriously believes that or if they are deliberately distorting the situation. Nor are we sure what CAEPLA has to gain by distorting the debate. But whatever the case, the truth is that what we really oppose is a bill that would prevent the public from gaining access to public information.
Honestly, we have no idea why CAEPLA has suddenly decided to carry water for the industry (and Enbridge in particular). Nor do we know why they suddenly decided to weigh in on matters about which they clearly don’t have even the most basic understanding. We hope they continue their good work, advocating on behalf of landowners. We applaud those efforts; we always have. But we also suggest that they might want to do a little more homework or take a little more care before weighing in on matters beyond their immediate purview.
—
** Even if CAEPLA’s fictional scenario were real (which it is not), here is a clear example of just how far-fetched and ill-informed it is. These are two of the existing exemptions from disclosure in Michigan’s FOIA law specifically designed to protect privacy:
“(a) Information of a personal nature if public disclosure of the information would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual’s privacy.”
“(b) (iii) [Law enforcement records that would] Constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
by Jeffrey Insko | May 9, 2015 |
Imagine a law that says that Enbridge or ET Rover is not required to disclose to you basic facts or details about the pipeline that runs through your backyard.
Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? And yet, that is exactly the law that the Michigan legislature is trying to pass. According to House Bill 4540, basic information “about the production, generation, transportation, transmission, or distribution of fuel or energy” would be exempt from Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act. That means, potentially, that the pipeline company that has access to your property — a company like Enbridge or Vector or Rover– would not have to tell you what materials are getting pumped through the pipeline on your property, where that product is going, or what plans the company has in the event that the pipeline ruptures on your property.
In fact, the language of the bill is so laughably broad that it would exempt pipeline companies from even having to disclose the specific locations of their pipelines– despite the fact that those same pipeline companies are required by federal law to mark the locations of their pipeline right of ways. The pipeline company would also not have to disclose information about its emergency response plans– something of vital importance to all of us. Think about this for a second: according to the proposed law, you would not have the right to know the same details about the operation of the pipeline in your yard that the government knows.
We’re not making this up.
As we noted on Thursday, Keith Matheny has a story on the proposed bill in the Detroit Free Press from earlier in the week. Also this week, the great Jack Lessenberry weighed in on the issue, reminding us why our legislators “don’t deserve our trust”:
They demonstrate daily that they don’t work for us, or care about what we think. Here’s the latest example: Kurt Heise, a Republican state representative from Plymouth, introduced a bill this week to prevent all of us from getting information about things like oil and gas pipelines in this state.
Currently, a lot of people are worried about a pipeline Enbridge has under the straits of Mackinac. If it broke, that would utterly devastate the Great Lakes.
Enbridge, as we know too well, had a pipeline break five years ago, sending more than a million gallons of heavy crude oil into the Kalamazoo River. Its pipeline under Mackinac would be old enough to collect Social Security, if it were a person. If that were to break it could be the worst environmental disaster in our history.
But Kurt Heise doesn’t want us to be able to find out much about it. We wouldn’t be able to find out much about high-energy power lines either, or other critical and potentially dangerous energy sources. He would exempt their owners from the state Freedom of Information Act.
To cover their backsides, the sponsors of the bill, including Kurt Heise, want to pretend that this is a national security issue. Here’s what Heise told the Free Press:
“We do not want people who may have ill intent to be able to locate the exact location of underground utilities, the pumps and surface machinery that may exist with those underground utilities, so they are protected from harm,” Heise said.
But national security risks are nothing new. Nor are pipelines in this state, which have been operating in this state for decades. So why this concern now, all of a sudden? The timing is peculiar to say the least. One plausible explanation for this timing– far more plausible than Heise’s “national security” canard– is that Enbridge’s Line 5 has been the topic of a great deal of scrutiny and concern by the public recently. It’s clear that Enbridge would rather not disclose certain information about that line and its other operations in the state (we can only speculate as to why). So they somehow managed to convince shills like Heise to type up a law for them– a law that would also apply to their industry peers, like Rover.
Whatever the reason for the bill’s appearance now, what is clear is that it won’t ensure public safety. In fact, it will do just the opposite. We know from the Marshall spill– and dozens of other similar spill all across the country— that the oil and gas industry’s failures to comply with safety regulations (and their own safety protocols) pose a far more immediate threat to property, communities, and the environment than terrorists. For that reason, what we need now is more transparency, more scrutiny– not less. Because of the failures of the industry and state and federal regulators, it is more critical than ever to provide citizens with greater information to protect themselves. Yet this bill contains language so broad and so sweeping that a pipeline company could say that almost anything related to the operation of their pipelines “could be useful to a person planning an attack on critical energy infrastructure.”
Put simply, the bill places all of us at even greater risk. What could our legislators possibly be thinking?
Two final points before we ask you to take action:
The sponsors of this legislation– by which we mean both elected officials and oil and gas companies like Enbridge– would have you believe that this bill simply mirrors federal law. Don’t believe them; it’s not true. The bill does takes language (verbatim) from federal regulations put in place by one agency (NOT the legislature) to define a process for the request or protection of potentially sensitive information. The Michigan bill goes far beyond that; it gives oil and gas companies legal protection for keeping secrets from you.
Secondly, the Michigan FOIA already has a provision that allows certain exemptions for safety and security (see section Y). HB 4540 just provides special (or extra) accommodations for oil and gas companies, like Enbridge and Rover.
The bottom line is this: it’s a very bad bill. Bad for all of us. It’s quite clearly a bill conceived, promoted, and written not by Kurt Heise or his colleagues, but by Enbridge’s cadre of lawyers and lobbyists. Nor is it a bill that will protect you or your fellow Michigan citizens or our magnificent natural resources. If anything, it will just put us all at more risk.
For that reason, we’re asking you to take action. Please take a minute to write to your state representatives. A hearing by the Oversight and Ethics Committee is scheduled for Thursday. Below are links to contact information for the members of that committee. Joe Graves has been particularly responsive to constituent concerns on such matters. But please contact your representative also. Don’t allow Enbridge to write yet another of our state’s laws.
This matter is especially urgent if you are along the Enbridge, Vector, or Rover pipelines. Don’t you think you have the right to know as much as possible about the operation and condition of the pipeline that runs through your yard?
Michigan Oversight and Ethics Committee
Ed McBroom (R) Committee Chair, 108th District
Martin Howrylak (R) Majority Vice-Chair, 41st District
Joseph Graves (R) 51st District
Lana Theis (R) 42nd District
Rose Mary Robinson (D) Minority Vice-Chair, 4th District
Kristy Pagan (D) 21st District
by Jeffrey Insko | May 7, 2015 |
What is it with Michigan elected officials? At a moment in time when almost everybody in the U.S. and Canada recognizes the need for heightened scrutiny of pipeline operators– especially given the failures of our federal regulators— Michigan Representative Kurt Heise of Plymouth has introduced legislation designed to allow pipeline operators to escape even more scrutiny. Keith Matheny of the Free Press has the story. It’s as if Kurt Heise has never even heard of the Marshall spill. Either that or he’s just a gutless shill for the oil and gas companies. Reminds us of some others.
If Heise is in your district, please contact him and express your extreme displeasure at his willingness to do the bidding of the company responsible for the most expensive inland oil spill in U.S. history– not to mention his shameful attempt to play us all for chumps and pass it off as as a matter of “national security” (his contact info is below). That line is total b.s. and everybody knows it. Also, you might send him a copy of the NTSB report on the Marshall spill as well. He’s clearly never seen it.
Contact info:
Kurt Heise
PHONE: 517-373-3816
TOLL FREE: 855-737-5878
EMAIL: KurtHeise@house.mi.gov
by Jeffrey Insko | Mar 24, 2015 |
Fresh off a visit to Washington, D.C. and a visit to PHMSA, we’ve got an op-ed this week over at Vice News in which we wonder why pipelines just keep failing:
It has been five years since the Marshall disaster in Michigan — and also five years since the terrible San Bruno, California pipeline explosion that killed eight people — but federal regulators have done almost nothing to improve the safety of the nation’s existing pipelines. Partly in response to these incidents and others like them, in 2011 Congress passed the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act. Yet in the intervening time, the agency charged with implementing that bill’s provisions, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHMSA), has failed to finalize and institute any new major regulations.
You can read the full piece here.
And while you’re there, be sure to take the time to watch the excellent video report, “Pipeline Nation,” featuring our friends Carl Weimer and Alexis Bonogofsky telling the truth.
