To

understand the concern many people have over Line 5, time-travel back to the

fall of 1953. America was obsessed with Senator Joe McCarthy’s crusade against

Communists, not environmental regulations. 

Sometime in October or November, a Canadian firm that would become

Enbridge finished putting the twin pipelines on the bottom of the Straits of

Mackinac.

               They’ve been there ever since, carrying

540,000 gallons of oil and other petroleum products every day.  Last spring, a tugboat anchor damaged, but

did not penetrate one of the ancient lines. Earlier in the year, U.S. Senator

Gary Peters told me that he had asked the head admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard

if they could rescue and clean up Lakes Michigan and Huron if the pipelines

were to rupture and a major oil spill occurred.

               The answer was no, that the most

important source of fresh water in our hemisphere likely would be damaged

beyond repair.  The more you learn about

the pipeline, the grimmer the situation seems. The more you learn about the

pipeline, the more it seems crazy to allow this thing to keep operating for

even one more day. By the way, it provides very little for this country.

Essentially, it takes oil from one part of Canada to

another part of Canada, some of it for export aboard. Yes, it does supply a

little less than half the propane the Upper Peninsula needs, but experts say

that need could be met by a couple railroad cars a day, or four or five tanker

trucks. Yes, the price would be a little higher, possibly a nickel a gallon.

But you can’t possibly put a price tag on the value of

keeping the Great Lakes free from an oil spill. Here’s all you have to know

about Enbridge:  Eight years ago, that

firm’s pipeline near the Kalamazoo River ruptured. When the alarms went off,

incompetent Enbridge workers somehow concluded that the line was just clogged,

and so they kept forcing oil through.

The cleanup cost more than a billion dollars and is

still not complete. Now, if you know about state government in Michigan, you

know that it takes forever to get anything done. I’m not a conspiracy theory

kind of guy.  But isn’t a little

suspicious that they were able to create a new body, this Mackinac Straits

Corridor Authority, in a manner of days?

Isn’t it curious how so many automatically swallowed

Enbridge’s claims not only that it can put the pipeline in a tunnel, but how

long that would take, how much it will cost and how safe all this would be? And

why are so many, including Governor Snyder, so concerned about making sure

Enbridge gets exactly what it wants?

Did you realize, by the way, that the tunnel idea

means they want to keep pumping oil through these ancient pipes for decades

more?  When asked what would happen were

the pipelines to rupture inside the tunnel, Enbridge’s answer is that it won’t.

It’s pretty clear that somebody in high places sees

money in this for themselves. The bottom line goes something like this. If

Enbridge’s theory is right, then they and their shareholders will get a little

richer. If they are wrong, the ecology and the fresh water supply of this quadrant

of the world could easily be ruined beyond repair.

Let’s hope that Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney

General Dana Nessel have the power and the willpower to do the right thing, and