There is No Future for Line 5
How much longer will we let politics postpone the inevitable?
Remember Bill Schuette? No, I don’t mean Bill G. Schuette, the current Michigan Republican state house Representative from Midland, I mean his father. Bill Schuette (without the G), you will recall, served as Michigan’s Republican Attorney General from 2010-18, during the Snyder administration. He then ran for Governor against Gretchen Whitmer and got his clock pretty thoroughly cleaned, which pretty much ended his political career. I’m not sure what he’s doing now; surely he sits on various corporate boards and whatnot, as these guys do.
Anyway, I couldn’t help but think of him last week after a handful of Republican state legislators introduced a resolution “to support President Trump’s policies to increase the nation’s energy infrastructure and security, which have facilitated emergency permitting for the Enbridge Line 5 project.” It’s a pointless and embarrassing document, the purpose of which mostly seems to be a sad cry for attention, as though they think if they just behave like good little boys and tell Daddy Trump how very special he is maybe one day he’ll look their way, give them a little pat on the head, and mispronounce their names in public. Fortunately, the always-sharp duo of Nichole Keway Biber and Sean McBrearty from Clean Water Action Michigan were on hand at the hearing in Lansing to call nonsense on the whole silly charade.
What does this resolution have to do with Bill Schuette? Well, ten years ago, when he was acting Attorney General, Schuette and Department of Environmental Quality Director Dan Wyant formed the Michigan Petroleum Pipeline Task Force to examine the state of oil and gas pipelines, especially Line 5, throughout the state. At a press conference to promote the release of the final Task Force report in July of 2015, Schuette stated what is now clear to everybody. “You would not build a Straits pipeline in this decade,” Schuette said. “I’m doubtful [Line 5] will be open in future decades. … Its days are numbered.”
Its days are numbered. That was a full decade ago.
Even two years later, in 2017, Schuette was asking for a timetable to shut the line down. Just think: the past ten years could have been spent negotiating, planning, and preparing for a thoughtful and orderly decommissioning of Line 5, one that in the short-term could have figured out a safe way to continue to deliver product to refineries and propane suppliers, while also working to throttle down demand and decrease petroleum consumption, building new infrastructure so that places like the Upper Peninsula could thrive using more sustainable sources of energy, and helping retrain refinery workers for alternative careers. Frankly, all of that is the sort of thing a rational society would have been doing for the past forty years, given what we have known for at least that long about fossil fuel combustion and climate change.
But instead of preparing for a future that even Bill Schuette—of all people!—could plainly see, Schuette’s boss, Governor Rick Snyder, and after him a new wave of Republican legislators, apparently as imaginatively stunted as the Republican party’s new leader, set about trying to prolong the twentieth century. They devised a fantastical and backward-looking tunnel scheme and passed it off to a gullible public as a safety enhancement rather than a corporate handout. This new House resolution just doubles down on the foolishness, on the recklessness and backwardness. At best, the resolution is a servile gesture of fealty to the White House. It’s certainly not serious policymaking.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pining for Bill Schuette. But at least he spent real time with his Task Force learning and studying the matter carefully. In doing so, he came to a reasonable conclusion. He could see the writing on the wall: there is no future for Line 5. Isn’t it time our elected officials stopped trying to forestall that future, trying to delay the inevitable, and started actually preparing for it?
Professor Insko, This is another insightful article. Thanks for your research. Two additional things: AG Schuette ,getting ready to run for Governor,gave a speech and issued a press release advocating shutting down Line 5. About 4 months before the election,in a private conversation (in which I participated)with one of his biggest fund raisers,he began to reverse himself and expressed fealty to the Tunnel deal that Gov. Snyder was hatching. Bill’s flipflop and subsequent alienation of the environmental vote in the State cost him the Governor’s race. Gov. Whitmer won that race by recognizing how damaging Line 5 could be to our State and ,true to her campaign pledge and her own sense of integrity and doing the right thing,she initiated action soon after taking office to shut Line 5. Ian Bund, Ann Arbor.
Excellent. Thanks for the history--hard to believe we are so gullible, isn't it? Well, some of us, anyway....