{"id":4629,"date":"2020-03-09T11:08:45","date_gmt":"2020-03-09T15:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/?p=4629"},"modified":"2020-03-09T14:05:45","modified_gmt":"2020-03-09T18:05:45","slug":"the-line-5-disaster-is-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/2020\/03\/09\/the-line-5-disaster-is-now\/","title":{"rendered":"The Line 5 Disaster is Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much of the debate over the fate of Enbridge\u2019s Line 5 beneath the Straits of Mackinac has taken the form of speculative fiction: frightening imaginative projections of a not-so-distant future. Opponents and proponents of Line 5 alike each cast their gaze forward and offer competing semi-apocalyptic narratives of what they foresee. Those calling for the shut down of Line 5 imagine a catastrophic rupture, in which thousands of gallons of oil spill into the Straits, get swept away by powerful currents, and despoil hundreds of miles of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron shoreline, poisoning the water and killing fish and wildlife. On the other side, Enbridge and its supporters conjure a dangerous future that features a nation in thrall to foreign sources of energy, rising gasoline prices, grandmothers freezing in UP winters, and convoys of exploding tanker trucks rumbling across the Mackinac Bridge.<\/p>\n

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Crews in 1953 prepare to pull steel pipe across the Straits of Mackinac<\/p><\/div>\n

Two sides of the same coin, these doomsday narratives echo the nightmare visions of post-apocalyptic fictions: nuclear winter, zombies,\u00a0or the mass floods and burned-out landscapes of \u201ccli-fi\u201d (fiction about climate change<\/a>)– books and movies that simply\u00a0duplicate the terrifying projections of climate scientists. Just read the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change<\/a> (IPCC), for example, or a nonfiction best-seller like David Wallace-Wells\u2019s The Uninhabitable Earth<\/em><\/a>. The power and appeal of this dystopic, future-oriented narrative form resides in its potential to rouse people from apathetic slumber, its ability to inspire action-before-it\u2019s-too-late. After all, we should be worried and scared. Therefore, visions of a frightful future might well prove rhetorically, and perhaps even politically, effective.<\/p>\n

But lately, I\u2019ve become increasingly concerned with what I think are some of the limitations of this concern for the future, this preventative attitude that, strangely, unites people on both sides of the Line 5 question. For one thing, I\u2019m increasingly worried that imagining catastrophe as belonging to some imagined, avertable future allows us to pretend that things are okay right now. More and more, I wonder whether we focus on future possibilities, good and bad, as a way of avoiding present realities.<\/p>\n

The latest news from Enbridge has prompted these reflections. Just last week, they announced that they\u2019ve secured contractors to build their tunnel<\/a> (itself, as I\u2019ve argued before<\/a>, an implausible speculative fiction). I was particularly struck by the comments of Enbridge\u2019s Vice President of U.S. Operations Brad Shamla, who, according to the Detroit News<\/em> insisted that Line 5 is \u201cessential to the state\u2019s energy future.\u201d Shamla then repeats the standard Enbridge boilerplate about the \u201ccritical fuel\u201d Enbridge Line 5 provides and touts \u201cthe thousands of products Line 5 helps make possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shamla\u2019s claim about \u201ccritical fuel\u201d succinctly evokes the Enbridge dystopic narrative about freezing UP residents and national energy (in)security. But what about the \u201cthousands of products Line 5 makes possible\u201d? What does that phrase evoke? It\u2019s a fairly new line of argument for Enbridge, one that didn\u2019t feature prominently in Enbridge\u2019s PR two or three years ago, when all the talk was about propane and gasoline. Deliberately nonspecific, this new talking point is meant to remind us that the oil Line 5 transports isn\u2019t just used as fuel to heat our homes and power our cars, but is used in the production of a myriad of everyday products. At the same time, Enbridge is careful not to push the point too hard, careful not to specify precisely what those \u201cthousands of products\u201d might actually be.<\/p>\n

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Imperial Oil web copy<\/p><\/div>\n

Which brings me to the catastrophe of the present. What Enbridge doesn\u2019t say about the products Line 5 makes possible is that nearly all of them have one thing in common: plastic.\u00a0I\u2019ve written about the early history of Line 5 elsewhere;<\/a>\u00a0it\u2019s worth remembering that the pipeline wasn\u2019t built to deliver propane to heat Michigan homes; it was built to feed the rapidly expanding oil and gas refineries in Sarnia, Ontario, the manufacturing hub now known as \u201cChemical Valley.\u201d To this day, the vast majority of oil Line 5 transports is exported to Sarnia, where refiners like Imperial Oil<\/a> (a subsidiary of ExxonMobil) transform it into petrochemical feedstock like polyethylene and vinyl intermediates, materials that are used to manufacture everything from shopping bags to plastic bottles and kayaks\u2014literally \u201c1,000s of products,\u201d as Imperial also boasts.<\/p>\n

The problem with this boast is that plastic pollution, as we’ve discussed on this blog before<\/a>, is choking the planet, inundating the oceans, killing wildlife, penetrating the earth\u2019s soil, and infiltrating our drinking water. A recent article in Rolling Stone<\/em> magazine<\/a> tells the story in grisly detail. Buy you\u2019ve likely already seen the appalling images: the great Pacific garbage patch<\/a>, sharks entangled in plastic nets<\/a>, pounds of plastic found in the stomachs of dead whales<\/a>, cattle grazing on pastures of plastic.<\/p>\n

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Photo credit: Zikri Maulana\/SOPA Images\/LightRocket\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Less visible and less extensively studied, the Great Lakes are likewise awash in plastic. These days, a casual stroll of any Lake Michigan shoreline will yield you far more plastic debris than it will Petoskey stones. Experts estimate that more than 20 million pounds of plastic winds up in the Great Lakes each year<\/a>. Researchers have also discovered that tiny microplastic particles are ubiquitous in the Great Lakes<\/a>, where they are ingested by fish, then by the birds (and humans) that feed on those fish. Microplastics pervade our drinking water and even, according to a recent study, our craft beer<\/a>. The health effects of ingesting all this plastic, full of toxins, are still unknown.<\/p>\n

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Lake Michigan shoreline, Glen Arbor<\/p><\/div>\n

All of which is to say that Line 5 is not just a disaster waiting to happen; Line 5 doesn\u2019t just threaten<\/em> to pollute the Great Lakes and to poison wildlife and humans alike. Line 5 has already<\/em> polluted the Great Lakes. Line 5 has already<\/em> poisoned wildlife and humans. Line 5 has already<\/em> helped produce a disaster.<\/p>\n

A tunnel to house Line 5 beneath the Great Lakes simply guarantees a continuation\u2014an intensification\u2014of this ongoing planetary calamity at a moment when everybody knows that what we desperately need is to find a way to reverse course, to figure out how to kick our plastic habit. And make no mistake about it: Enbridge understands this. Their recent rhetoric touting \u201cthe thousands of products Line 5 makes possible\u201d is part of an industry-wide effort to increase petrochemical production<\/a> as demand for fossil fuels decreases due to the climate crisis. Fossil fuel companies seem to figure that if they can’t set the planet on fire, they can nevertheless bury it in plastic.<\/p>\n

Obviously, Enbridge’s Line 5 isn’t the sole source of petrochemical feedstock. Nor will shutting down Line 5 solve the problem of plastic pollution. But sooner or later– probably sooner– the dismantling of the fossil fuel infrastructure that is destroying species and the planet has to commence. Michigan has an opportunity to lead the world in the process of undoing an unsustainable system and building a new, better one.<\/p>\n

For that reason, maybe it\u2019s time those of us who want to see the permanent decommissioning of Line 5 to stop talking about prevention, to stop imagining disaster as looming in the future, to stop telling stories about what might<\/em> happen . Maybe instead we should be telling stories about the damage, visible and invisible, that is all around us here in the present. After all, the catastrophic future is now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Much of the debate over the fate of Enbridge\u2019s Line 5 beneath the Straits of Mackinac has taken the form of speculative fiction: frightening imaginative projections of a not-so-distant future. Opponents and proponents of Line 5 alike each cast their gaze forward and offer competing semi-apocalyptic narratives of what they foresee. Those calling for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4642,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4629"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4657,"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4629\/revisions\/4657"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grangehallpress.com\/Enbridgeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}