[News] Enbridge, Columbus, and the last tar sands pipeline

[Anti-Imperialist News]

startribune.com 
<https://www.startribune.com/line-3-opponents-can-savor-this-defeat/600105209/> 



  Enbridge, Columbus, and the last tar sands pipeline

By Winona LaDuke October 9, 2021

*The pipeline is colonialism at work in the 21st century, but water 
protectors are making waves. *

------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's somehow fitting irony as Indigenous Day approaches on Oct. 11 — 
once known by another name — that a new Columbus is about to pump oil 
through Line 3, the last tar sands pipeline. That is the colonial-like 
corporation Enbridge.

Maybe President Joe Biden will think about this one and stop the dirty 
oil from burning our rivers and air. The Indian wars could be over. 
After all, no one needs this pipeline, plus it's the dirtiest and most 
expensive oil in the world to extract and produce.

In one narrative, the Canadian corporation won. Columbus conquered anew, 
proof that might and money remain the rulers.

Then, there's another. That's the Ballad of the Water Protectors — a 
movement born in the battles in northern Minnesota and North Dakota, a 
movement that will grow and transform the economy of the future.

How do we know this?Well, no one wants to finance more tar sands. Other 
telling signs, and some new red flags, include:

The Canadian oil industry estimated that a lack of pipeline capacity 
reduced the industry's income by tens of billions of dollars before the 
pandemic started. The tar sands industry couldn't afford to approve and 
build new extraction facilities during the curtailment, and now, in part 
due to the pandemic, it still can't.

Uncertainty about Line 3 caused by Indigenous people and water 
protectors encouraged massive divestment from the tar sands by 
non-Canadian investors. Everybody from Shell Oil to the Koch brothers 
bailed out. Last month, my alma mater, Harvard University, began 
divestment of fossil fuels. Harvard wouldn't even divest from South 
Africa, those stubborn old dudes. This is, well, monumental.

A recent joint report by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil 
Change International, found that Indigenous resistance alone has stopped 
or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least 25% of annual 
U.S. and Canadian emissions.

As a result of low oil prices, reduced income and divestment, tar sands 
industry capital expenditures crashed. Almost all its capital spending 
over the past five years was used for maintenance of existing extraction 
facilities, not development of new facilities.

Put another way, the pipeline opposition campaign stopped the tar sands 
industry dead in its tracks.

We all just recently learned two more blatant things about Enbridge that 
should give everyone pause — especially our government leaders like Gov. 
Tim Walz and U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, whose cowardly 
silence makes them complicit in this egregious crime.

First, after piercing an aquifer in January — an aquifer that is still 
bleeding 100,000 gallons of water a day — Enbridge covered it up for as 
long as it could until it was caught and fined $3.3 million by the 
Department of Natural Resources. This is the kind of people we are 
dealing with.

We also learned the pipeline isn't even adequately insured. The 
Minnesota Public Utilities Commission required Enbridge to obtain $200 
million of "environmental impairment liability" insurance, in addition 
to general corporate liability coverage of $900 million, and to include 
the state of Minnesota and several American Indian tribes as additional 
insureds on its policies. But Enbridge recently submitted a report to 
the Public Utilities Commission saying it will likely not be able to 
obtain this insurance "in the near future."

That's baffling and problematic at best. I'm wondering what Harvard 
Business School is thinking about that one. No insurance is not only 
dangerous but illustrates again that the tar sands party is over. The 
most expensive tar sands pipeline will be the last one to the U.S.

In 2018, due to a lack of pipeline capacity, the government of Alberta 
ordered tar sands and other crude oil extraction facilities to curtail 
production, initially by 325,000 barrels per day. This order meant that 
each month about 10 million barrels of oil (and the carbon within it) 
stayed in the ground. Although Alberta gradually ramped down the 
curtailment, it lasted almost two years. Thank a water protector for that.

We also delayed the Line 3 project by four years (Enbridge's initial 
in-service date was 2017), such that any new tar sands development 
efforts are now facing the near-term prospect of reduced oil demand 
resulting from the escalating adoption of electric vehicles and climate 
change policy developments, such as the Canadian carbon tax.

Delaying Line 3 by four years means that the tar sands industry now 
faces a global crude oil market environment that is much less favorable 
than in 2017.

Meanwhile, a Code Red has just been issued for the planet in the latest 
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. With this 
warning, Minnesota's approval of the line, from the Public Utilities 
Committee to the courts, makes us look like archaic climate crisis 
co-conspirators.

We also look increasingly like a police state, especially in northern 
Minnesota. The repressive police brutalization of Line 3 opponents using 
rubber bullets, chemical sprays and "pain compliance" have come to the 
attention of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial 
Discrimination (CERD) for "Violations of Anishinaabe Human Rights from 
Enbridge's Line 3."

This new investigation is likely to expose again into the future what a 
truly rotten idea the escrow account established by Enbridge and the PUC 
to militarize the north in the name of defending Line 3 really was. Did 
we learn something from our whippings?

Approaching this day for uplifting Indigenous peoples, here's a 
suggestion. It's time to end conquest and begin survival. Code Red for 
the environment means that we need to move away from fossil fuels and to 
organic agriculture, and to local and efficient energy. Fortunately, 
tribal nations are leading the way in the north. It's time to quit 
acting like Columbus.

/Winona LaDuke is the co-founder and executive director of the 
Indigenous-led environmental justice nonprofit, Honor the Earth./
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