Oil Is Not Energy

What happens when an entire industry hides behind a single word?

Quick prefatory note, in case you missed it: last week, Oil & Water Don’t Mix released a new report that exposes the Line 5 tunnel boondoggle. It confirms what we all already know: the tunnel is a terrible deal for Michigan. Check it out.

Meanwhile, I’ve been nursing a gripe. Last month, I stumbled upon a radio interview about the Line 5 tunnel featuring Erica Fink, Enbridge Operations Manager here in Michigan. Fink appeared on a program called Michigan’s Big Show, hosted by some guy named Michael Patrick Shiels. I don’t really recommend listening; it’s an unsatisfying conversation, short, uninformative, and Shiels mainly plays the role of obsequious straight man to Fink’s gushy pitchwoman, as if they’re doing an infomercial on the Home Shopping Network.

But during the conversation, Fink said something that’s been bugging me for a long time. I’m sure you’ve heard it many times before from any number of Enbridge employees who are obviously trained to repeat it every chance they get, like automatons. Pipelines like Line 5, Fink said, are the “safest way to transport the energy we need.” I heard it again a couple of weeks later. I was reading a news report about the petition Attorney General Nessel has filed with the United States Supreme Court on behalf of Governor Whitmer. The boilerplate response by Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy to the filing begins with this: “As a key component of interstate and international commerce, Line 5 transports critical energy resources across the region.”

You see the problem, right? It can be hard to spot because it’s become so familiar. Fink and Duffy want us to think that Line 5 transports “energy” or “energy resources.” But this is bullshit. Line 5 doesn’t transport energy; it transports petroleum—crude oil and natural gas liquids, to be precise. These products are not energy. They are fuel, fuel which, when combusted, can be harnessed as energy.

You might think I’m splitting hairs. After all, in everyday speech, energy and fuel are often used interchangeably. But that’s only because companies like Enbridge have conditioned us to speak that way. In fact, it started back in the 1970s, during the oil crisis. At that time, oil and gas companies wanted to distance themselves from the dirty politics of oil. So Exxon, for example, launched an ad campaign it called “Energy for a Strong America.” The strategy stuck. By the late 1990s, as the public witnessed the environmental effects of oil spills—in Santa Barbara, California, and Alaska’s Prince William Sound—and became increasingly aware that fossil fuel combustion was the main driver of global warming, more companies began to distance themselves from the stench of oil. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP—all took to calling themselves “energy” companies. Enbridge did the same, taking its present name—a compound of “energy” and “bridge” in 1988. In 2000, British Petroleum even briefly renamed itself “Beyond Petroleum.” Other large pipeline companies similarly rebranded. Energy Transfer was founded in 2012. Kinder Morgan branded itself as an “energy infrastructure company.” TransCanada Pipeline changed its name to “TC Energy” in 2019.

This is more than just greenwashing. Fossil fuel companies would prefer we not think about the material properties of what they produce and transport: its odor, its filth, the violence required to extract it. They’d rather sell us a set of abstractions, like energy: power, vitality, life. Perhaps you’ve seen one of Enbridge’s “Life Takes Energy” ads, for example. They’re not selling oil, they’re selling loving parents, vacation memories, loyal pets. Dreams and aspirations.

The effect of all of this is to naturalize oil, to make it synonymous with the very concept of energy, to convince us that oil is somehow fundamental to our existence, necessary for our everyday wants and needs, crucial for the fulfillment of our fantasies and desires. They want oil to become so embedded into our ways of thinking and being that it feels like something we can’t possibly live without, like water or oxygen.

And it works. You see it every time the Reply Guy shows up in the comments section to ask you if you drive a car to work. Or when someone like Erica Fink talks about the “energy we need” and means petroleum. Or when the President of the United States declares a “National Energy Emergency” as a pretext for extracting more fossil fuels from the ground. When they say these things, they’re treating the consumption of oil as if it’s some natural law, like gravity, like the rising and setting of the sun.

This is one reason I’m so wedded to thinking about matters historically. After all, in the long sweep of human history, the fossil fuel era is a tiny blip, barely two hundred years long, the oil era even shorter. And we know it’s not going to last much longer, no matter how long corporations like Enbridge and, unfortunately, too many ordinary people so besotted by oily ways of being that they can’t see past it, want to prolong it.

The good news—and this is something else the coupling of oil with energy tries to keep you from knowing—our attachment to oil, while deep, is not strong. People want to heat their homes affordably. They want access to safe, convenient, and reliable transportation. But they don’t really care what fuel— which source of energy— makes that possible: wind, solar, algae, gremlins, a hamster on a wheel. So while it is true that life takes energy, it’s not true that life takes oil.

So let’s stop letting those who do have an intense devotion to oil (because it makes them rich!) convince us that their interests are ours or our grandchildren’s. An overheated planet plainly shows that they are not. The truth is, we don’t need to run our cars on gasoline, and we don’t need to heat our homes with propane. Which is just another way of saying what everybody knows but some of us don’t want to admit: we don’t need Line 5 and its dirty fuel.

Unfortunately, we are decades late in accepting and acting on this fact. But that’s not a reason to invest in Line 5; it’s a reason to hasten its orderly dismantling.

---

Help ensure taxpayers don’t get taken advantage of by Enbridge and its proposed tunnel. Send a message to Governor Whitmer and EGLE Director Roos: Deny the Line 5 oil tunnel.