News from a Changing Planet -- This Week on Earth #16

Putting our water supply at risk for...what exactly? Plus, wind farm opposition, remembering the "father of India's evergreen revolution", and a heat pump extravaganza!

The Straits of Mackinac as seen on a map. Credit NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory

THIS WEEK IN “YOU CAN’T DRINK OIL”: So why are we running pipelines through the country’s largest water supply? (The Guardian)

Beneath the Straits of Mackinac, which connect Lake Huron to Lake Michigan, a seventy year-old pipeline channels 24 million gallons of oil a day. Over time, this pipeline, known as Line 5 and operated by Enbridge, a Canadian company, has emerged from the lakebed where it used to lie, becoming dented by boats dropping anchor.

Now, Enbridge wants to tunnel under the lake again to rebury the pipeline, despite the fact that Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s governor, canceled the company’s easement to travel through the state, and ordered Line 5 to stop operating within six months of November…2020. None of that has happened.

The Great Lakes provide drinking water to about a third of all Canadians and a tenth of all Americans, a total of about 46 million people. Critics of the original pipeline and the plan for the new tunnel say that Enbridge has been negligent across its pipeline network, and fear that an oil spill, becoming more and more likely, would be catastrophic for the region and for the continent as a whole.

Blue ice in the Straits of Mackinac during a cold spell in 2021. Credit The St. Ignace News.

It is from the Straits of Mackinac that the North American continent was formed, according to the creation myths of the Anishinaabe, a group of Indigenous tribes that first lived in the Great Lakes region, who derive meaning and identity from the lakes, and rely on them for sustenance, both spiritual and nutritive.

“An oil spill would be catastrophic for all of North America, this place would become a toxic wasteland that would be contaminated for years,” Whitney Gravelle, an Ojibwe person who is president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, told The Guardian. “People often can’t even believe there is a pipeline going through the Great Lakes. It seems crazy that we just have this heart attack waiting to happen.”

It doesn’t matter because we need them either way, but I think wind farms are really beautiful. Credit Andrew Aitchison for Getty Images via Wired.

WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND: Neither you nor I but people are lining up to block wind farms. (Heatmap $)