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April 20, 2019, Carlton, Minnesota: Allies from various organizations opposing Line 3 support the Ginew Collective in protesting Enbridge’s efforts to begin work before the project clears legal challenges and has all necessary permits.
On a warming April Saturday with Lake Superior still showing ice, twenty people from the Twin Cities area traveled to Duluth, Minnesota, to meet with members of the Ginew Collective, an indigenous women-led frontline group working to stop Enbridge’s proposed Line 3 crude oil pipeline. The new and larger pipeline would replace an old and failing one. It would transport up to 915,000 barrels of highly dirty tar sands oil per day across 340 miles of northern Minnesota, threaten some of the state’s cleanest lakes and streams, arguably violate treaty rights, and help accelerate climate damage.
People in the group, myself included, had different affiliations: MN350, Science for the People, Healing Minnesota Stories, Northfield Against Line 3. It was an opportunity for us to build relationships with Ginew members and support their work.
I was there as a member of the Sierra Club’s North Star Chapter, which, like these other groups, opposes the project.
Technically, Enbridge says it won’t start Line 3 construction until it has all its permits, which it expects by late this year. But it’s already begun preconstruction work, such as moving pipe into storage yards, sparking protests. State officials have also indicated that surveying and geotechnical boring are allowed preconstruction activities. Bottom line: Enbridge is moving forward as if the project is inevitable.
We traveled to Duluth expecting a strategy session. But when we arrived, we learned that trains
Ginew Collective
Enbridge has started “preconstruction work” on Line 3 even though it still needs numerous state and federal permits and faces multiple lawsuits. The Ginew Collective opposes it.
had brought oil pipelines under the cover of night to the Carlton rail yard, and trucks were moving them to storage yards.
We got paper and markers and hastily made signs. We discussed doing a low-risk action, one that would not lead to tickets or arrests. We drove to the rail yard, stood on the right of way, held up our signs, and waited for trucks to leave so we could follow and find their destination.
Work in the rail yard stopped. We waited. No trucks moved. Some Ginew members left to check out known pipe yards. Others of us shared trail mix, chatted, and waited some more. We probably delayed pipeline-moving work three to four hours, a small victory.
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission approved Line 3’s certificate of need and route permit last year, but it’s not a done deal. Opponents have filed multiple lawsuits to stop it in the Minnesota Court of Appeals. Line 3 still needs permits for the project’s 227 water crossings, including the Mississippi headwaters.
Siddharth Iyengar, a Ph.D. student in ecology at the University of Minnesota and organizer for Science for the People, a group of scientists and STEM educators pushing for social and environmental justice, found the Duluth trip valuable. It helped him see Enbridge’s strategy “to build this into reality,” despite the ongoing legal and permit challenges.
Paige Carlson of MN350, the state affiliate of the climate change activist group 350.org, said it was helpful to go to the rail yard and see the clean, green, unused pipes stacked up. It felt more tangible than emailing legislators or protesting at the capitol, and made her realize that “action can be taken here, in this place, to stop exactly these pipes from being put into this ground.”
On-the-ground organizing continues, and tension builds with preconstruction work.
On-the-ground organizing continues, and tension builds with preconstruction work.
Ginew’s Facebook page says Standing Rock planted the seeds of resistance, and Ginew is “prepared to fight and to stand side by side with indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike in our work.”
Meanwhile, Minnesota law enforcement has created the “Northern Lights Task Force” to coordinate a response to any Line 3 protest actions. The task force is working with Enbridge and law enforcement agencies from other states, according to Unicorn Riot. It even sought advice from North Dakota law enforcement that responded to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
I participated in the Duluth trip more as ally than reporter. I have attended protests, prayer vigils, and mind-numbing public hearings to oppose Line 3. My takeaway from two-plus years of engagement is that government’s levers heavily favor the Enbridge project.
For starters, Enbridge had to convince the Public Utilities Commission that oil demand justified the project. State rules favored Enbridge. Enbridge says the project would help Minnesota and surrounding region have a “reliable and growing” crude oil supply.
U.S. Energy Information Agency data says Minnesota doesn’t need it. Minnesota gas sales in 2017 were 13 percent below the 2004 peak and roughly the same as gas sales in the late 1990s.
Administrative Law Judge Ann O’Reilly provided key information for the commission’s decision. She held a “contested case hearing,” a quasi-judicial process for Line 3, in 2017. She gathered expert testimony, held public hearings around Minnesota, and issued a final report with recommendations.
O’Reilly concluded that rejecting Line 3 wouldn’t harm Minnesota refiners or residents.
However, Minnesota Rule 7853.0130 says the Public Utilities Commission had to approve Line 3’s certificate of need if denying it would harm the “adequacy, reliability, or efficiency of energy supply” to Enbridge, its customers, or to the people of Minnesota and neighboring states.
That puts the needs of Enbridge and its customers—crude oil suppliers and shippers—on par with those of Minnesota residents.
Enbridge’s proof of “need” initially relied solely on the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, a trade association who advocates for the expansion and development of Canada’s oil industry.
Joe Plumer, attorney for the Red Lake and White Earth nations, appeared before the Public Utilities Commission to take issue with this. “The need is being demonstrated by some Canadian shippers who want to get as much tar sands out to the coast as possible to serve the Asian market—and that is not serving us here in Minnesota and it is not serving our tribal nations,” he said.
Enbridge provided additional “need” information, but it all boiled down to shippers saying they wanted to ship more crude oil than current pipelines could carry. Because of the industry-friendly rule, both O’Reilly and the commission concluded that Enbridge had met the “need” test.
The Minnesota Department of Commerce, which has long opposed the project, is suing to reverse the commission’s decision in the Minnesota Court of Appeals, based on its flawed assessment of need.
In a statement, then Governor Mark Dayton said: “Enbridge failed to provide a future demand forecast for its product, which is required by state law. . . . It failed to demonstrate that Minnesota needs this pipeline to meet our future oil demand.”
But the Public Utilities Commission’s cost-benefit analysis of Line 3 dismissed key findings from O’Reilly’s report and aligned with Enbridge’s interests. The commission counted Line 3’s short-term job creation as a benefit, then ignored its long-term impacts on the climate and indigenous treaty rights —not to mention the risk of a crude oil spill in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
Commissioner John Tuma compared Line 3 to building two new Vikings football stadiums, calling the potential jobs it could generate the project’s “big selling point.”
The Laborers’ District Council of Minnesota and North Dakota and United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada, AFL-CIO, both intervened on behalf of Line 3.
Line 3 is expected to create 4,200 Minnesota construction jobs—half from local union halls, the other half for out-of-state workers. But long-term, Line 3 would add somewhere between zero and twenty full-time, permanent Minnesota jobs.
And the project comes at a steep environmental cost. The oil carried by Line 3 would create $287 billion in climate damage over three decades, the environmental impact statement found. That’s 100 times more than the $2.9 billion Enbridge would spend to build Line 3. It’s the equivalent of approving fifty new coal-powered energy plants.
If Line 3 is approved, young people would bear the brunt of its climate impacts, such as more floods, droughts, and violent storms. Thus it is no surprise that they have emerged as vocal opponents.
“We are here because our future depends on it and that future is now in your hands,” Akilah Sanders-Reed, one of the thirteen Youth Climate Intervenors who are now suing to block the pipeline expansion, told the Public Utilities Commission last year. “If you approve Line 3, you will be accepting not only the climate damages from this project, but a fundamental worldview that says climate action was only ever worth the lip service and never going to be a reality.”
The lawsuit seeks to overturn the commission’s certificate of need approval on grounds that it failed to weigh climate damage as a project cost. The Friends of the Headwaters and a joint suit by Red Lake, White Earth, Honor the Earth, and the Sierra Club also are challenging the certificate on various grounds.
Currently, Enbridge’s Mainline system has six existing pipelines in Minnesota, including Line 3. But Line 3 is failing, running at roughly half capacity to reduce pipeline stress. It would have cost Enbridge an estimated $1.2 billion to remove and clean up the existing and deteriorating Line 3. Instead, the Public Utilities Commission approved the company’s “Landowner Choice Program,” which allows it to offer landowners a one-time (undisclosed) payment to leave the old pipeline buried in the ground.
The Mainline system now crosses two native nations: the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Leech Lake is adamant that the new Line 3 can’t cross its reservation. “Our land, our water, the manoomin (wild rice), and our Tribal Sovereignty are more important than any pipeline,” said a Leech Lake Band letter published in Indian Country Today.
“The impacts associated with the proposed project and its alternatives would be an additional health stressor on tribal communities that already face overwhelming health disparities and inequities, such as diabetes, asthma, addiction, poverty, and unemployment,” declared the Line 3 project final environmental impact statement. Further, a pipeline spill “would create a significant hardship to traditional lifeways and spiritual and religious needs of the people,” including harm to wild rice, a traditional and sacred food.
Taking climate change and all other such concerns into account, Administrative Law Judge O’Reilly concluded the only way Line 3’s benefits would outweigh its costs would be if Enbridge replaced the line in its current trench, avoided the damage of opening a new corridor, and removed the old pipeline.
But the Public Utilities Commission rejected her analysis, issuing a final order approving Line 3’s certificate of need that read like industry talking points. Consumer demand for oil, not the pipeline, causes climate damage, it wrote. If it rejected Line 3, the oil would get to market some other way. Further, “the fact remains that petroleum products derived from crude oil currently and into the foreseeable future have socially beneficial uses.”
Friends of the Headwaters, Honor the Earth, and the Sierra Club are challenging the Public Utilities Commission’s Line 3 Route Permit in the Minnesota Court of Appeals, arguing that O’Reilly had recommended against Enbridge’s preferred route, and the route “failed to minimize adverse human and environmental impacts” as required by state law.
Interestingly, in approving the project, the Public Utilities Commission made one significant Line 3 route change, to avoid Big Sandy Lake. That’s where 400 Anishinaabe died in 1850 due to government relocation (read: “land grab”) efforts. It was an important change; Big Sandy is a sacred site.
Still, Line 3 would disproportionately harm indigenous people, in treaty rights, their relationship to the land, and personal safety.
Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth, told the five white commissioners her people have lived here for 8,000 years and they take the long view. “We have a great interest in this land and we want to see it protected for all of us, for all of the generations to come,” she said. “We want to be the ancestors our descendants are proud of.”
The proposed Line 3 would cross lands where bands claim off-reservation treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather. The Mille Lacs Band won a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court case, Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, which protected these rights. Line 3 would damage them.
David Zoll, the Mille Lacs Band attorney, said Enbridge’s “preferred route would directly, materially, and adversely affect the Mille Lacs Band.” He argued that while the commission is not the right forum to resolve treaty issues, treaty rights are relevant to its deliberations.
Commissioner Katie Seiben acknowledged that Line 3 is about more than transporting crude oil. It’s also about global warming and “the historical trauma that has been inflicted on native nations and peoples by people who look like me,” she said. But, a moment later, she expressed her support for the project, effectively rejecting climate change, treaty rights, and spill risk arguments. In an aside to Line 3 opponents, Seiben made the tone-deaf comment: “I want you to understand that your involvement mattered.”
The commission, in its written decision, concluded that it was not “necessary or appropriate” for it to discuss or interpret the treaties. This decision puts the burden on the native nations to undertake a long and costly federal lawsuit to protect their rights. It’s unknown whether individual bands will do so.
In the end, several commissioners based their vote on an issue over which the commission had no responsibility—a possible rupture on the existing Line 3. Vice Chair Dan Lipschultz called it “an accident waiting to happen,” a sense echoed by other commissioners.
They had every right to worry, even though the federal government, not the state of Minnesota, or the Public Utilities Commission, is responsible for the pipeline’s safe operation.
In 2010, Enbridge’s Line 6B ruptured, spilling a million gallons of tar sands crude into a tributary of Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Cleanup costs topped $1.2 billion. Two months later, an Enbridge pipeline near Romeoville, Illinois, spilled 270,000 gallons of crude into navigable waters. In 2017, Enbridge acknowledged it withheld information from regulators for three years about damage to a pipeline on the bottom of the Great Lakes.
Enbridge attorney Christina Brusven told the commission that the company would continue operating the existing Line 3 if it didn’t get a permit for the new one, “as long as we can maintain it safely.” Commission Chair Nancy Lange called the possibility that the old line would rupture “the pebble on the scale” that got her to support the project.
Lipschultz was blunt: “It feels like a gun to our head that somehow compels us to approve a new line.”
Seth Bichler, an attorney for the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, pushed back and said the existing Line 3 was not the Public Utilities Commission’s responsibility and that the agency was using a double standard.
“It is surreal to be accepting the premise that [Enbridge] can build a perfect new pipeline and it’s going to be fantastic, but when they tell us they can keep operating [the existing] Line 3 safely, no one believes that. Someone needs to explain that to me.”
Sidebar: Assessing the Risk
Honor the Earth and Friends of the Headwaters and three Native American nations (the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, and the White Earth Band of Ojibwe) are challenging the environmental impact statement on the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands crude oil pipeline. Oral arguments were held in the Minnesota Court of Appeals on March 20. A decision is expected in mid-June.
[Update: The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled June 3 that the state’s environmental impact statement for Line 3 was inadequate “because it does not address the potential impact of an oil spill into the Lake Superior watershed.” It ordered the issue back to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission for further proceedings. An appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court is likely.]
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission approved Line 3 last year, in part based on the environmental impact statement. Line 3’s proposed new route would cross:
227 water bodies, including the Mississippi Headwaters
78 miles of wetlands
12,318 acres of unusually sensitive ecological areas
25,765 acres of high vulnerability water table aquifers
87 acres of wellhead protection areas
2,443 acres of drinking water sources
The new corridor would also result in the loss of 3.4 square miles of Minnesota forest and woody wetlands.
Both lawsuits claim that the environmental impact statement fails to look at site-specific impacts of potential oil spills, “and does not use generally accepted oil spill risk-assessment methodologies.”
The environmental impact statement picked a couple of representative samples along the route for its spill analysis, says Scott Strand, Friends of the Headwaters attorney. A hydrologist looked at how far oil would travel there if a spill occurred.
Strand says the report offered a generic discussion of how oil is bad for living things, but doesn’t really get into what would happen if there was a spill. “We think that is an essential part of environmental review.”
Other criticisms include that the statement failed to identify the project’s purpose and need, failed to consider non-oil alternatives to meeting energy needs, failed to include tribal cultural survey results, and failed to consider the spill impacts on treaty-protected lands.
Sidebar: Line 3 Is Part of a Larger Global Threat
Enbridge Line 3 is one of three proposed pipeline projects to boost Alberta tar sands crude oil exports. The other two are Keystone XL and Trans Mountain; both are currently stalled, but not dead. President Donald Trump is trying to jump start Keystone XL by presidential fiat. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants to do the same for Trans Mountain, which the Canadian government bought.
Kendall Mackey, an organizer with the national climate change group 350.org, reminded people at a recent Keystone XL resistance training in Minneapolis that these fights are all connected. “Tar sands are the snake pit,” she reflected. Collectively, “we have been able to stop the expansion of this industry for the past decade.”
Canada’s proven oil reserves rank third globally behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Most reserves are high-polluting tar sands oil. Canada is growing the industry regardless of environmental damage. Cleanup costs from tar sands mining are now estimated at $260 billion, the Canadian National Observer reported.
Most tar sands oil is recovered by piping steam underground to force oil to the surface. That requires nearly six gallons of water to make a gallon of gas. Wastewater—a toxic slurry including bitumen, cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, copper, and lead—is pumped into “tailing ponds,” with “ponds” being a euphemism. These ponds can cover more than thirty square miles—making them “some of the largest man-made structures on the planet,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The ponds kill migrating birds and increase game and fish toxin levels. First Nations peoples are already shifting away from their traditional diets from fear of contamination. Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam has expressed concern that, one day, “my people will become environmental refugees.”