Scott Russell
Enbridge’s application for the Line 3 water quality certification must be denied by the MPCA. Here’s why:
1. Enbridge’s Line 3 poses a serious threat to Minnesota’s waterways and wetlands. The pipeline passes through northern Minnesota, home to our State’s cleanest waters and some of its most unspoiled wetlands. It will carve trenches through the vast majority of the locations at the planned 212 waterbody crossings and 818 wetland crossings and remove vegetation all along the route. It will destroy river beds, destabilize river banks, increase erosion, and threaten aquatic species and habitats. Approving this pipeline is entirely contrary to MPCA’s obligation to protect Minnesota’s waters.
2. MPCA cannot gamble with the fate of Minnesota’s water resources. Enbridge has not shown that Line 3 can be built or operated without putting the health of the State’s rivers, streams, and wetlands in jeopardy. Neither the MPCA nor Enbridge has the baseline data to know that the pipeline’s crossings can be built without irrevocably spoiling Minnesota’s critical natural resources.
Instead, MPCA is placing all its faith in Enbridge’s use of generic construction techniques to protect the individual waterbodies and waterways from the company’s trenches and, if not, assuming that any damage Enbridge causes can be fixed. Guesswork and presuming best-case-scenario outcomes do not give MPCA the basis to allow Enbridge to build Line 3.
3. MPCA has ignored how climate change will make Line 3’s impacts on waterways substantially worse. Approval of a carbon bomb tar sands pipeline flies in the face of efforts by Minnesota to counteract the climate change disaster in the making, whose effects are being felt right now by victims of the forest fires on the West Coast. Tar sands is the most environmentally-damaging and greenhouse gas intensive type of petroleum. In addition, as the effects of climate change become more pronounced, intense rain events—which Minnesota already has experienced—will become more common and make the problems caused by the Project more pronounced.
More intensive rain events will worsen the problem of runoff caused by the loss of vegetation around the waterways and wetlands crossed by Line 3. More sediment will end up in waterways, degrading the quality of the waters and threatening the waters’ ability to host aquatic species. Increased erosion also risks destabilizing already weakened river banks, which can collapse and load even more sediment into the water. MPCA cannot approve the pipeline in light of these risks.
4. Line 3 would threaten tribal rights and resources. Line 3 will pass through areas that, by treaty, are reserved to the Anishinaabe people for hunting, fishing, and gathering. The threats to aquatic life and habitat posed by Enbridge’s trenching, therefore, also pose a threat to the Anishinaabe people’s treaty-protected right to use the land in the manner that is critical to Tribal health and wellbeing.
In particular, the pipeline route passes through areas that contain wetlands supporting wild rice, or manoomin, a crop that is a staple for local Tribes and to the Anishinaabe culture. Increased sedimentation and degradation of the wild rice habitat, as well as potential spills of high-sulfur tar sands oil—another risk MPCA has entirely ignored—pose a huge risk to manoomin. If MPCA wants to take its commitment to tribal rights and environmental justice seriously, it must reconsider the impacts of Enbridge’s project and deny the certification.
5. There is no need for Minnesota to risk its water resources to support a failing and irresponsible industry. MPCA has ample authority to deny Enbridge’s pipeline given the huge risk it poses to the State’s waterways and wetlands. There also is no reason for MPCA to approve a project whose need already is nonexistent—the demand for oil has plummeted, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the tar sands industry is not profitable. The false promises of unsustainable jobs and nonexistent economic benefits must not trick MPCA into putting huge swaths of Minnesota in peril.