Winona LaDuke
On Thursday, September 10, overflow crowds packed the federal district court in Minneapolis for oral arguments in the case of White Earth Nation v. Kerry. At issue was the U.S. Department of State's back-room approval of a major expansion of Enbridge's tar sands pipeline system through the Great Lakes.
Ken Rumelt, of Vermont Law School's Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic, presented on behalf of the environmental and indigenous plaintiffs. He argued the State Department violated the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act when it allowed Enbridge to expand its Alberta Clipper pipeline last year without first completing the requisite environmental and cultural review processes. Those reviews are ongoing, but the agency has already approved the pipeline’s expansion to 880,000 barrels per day, making it larger than the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
Pumping these volumes of heavy tar sands crude oil at extremely high pressure poses significant risks to the water resources and communities along the pipeline route. For example, the pipeline crosses through important hunting, fishing, and wild rice-gathering areas that the White Earth Nation and other indigenous groups, many of whom traveled from northern Minnesota for the hearing, depend on to sustain their ways of life.
Enbridge is the same company that is responsible for the largest oil pipeline spills in U.S. history, including the 2010 disaster in Michigan that spilled nearly a million gallons of tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River and still has not been cleaned up after over a billion dollars spent on the efforts. On Saturday night, just days before the hearing, another pipeline exploded in northern Minnesota, sending massive plumes of flames into the night sky.
Furthermore, President Obama has stressed that the climate impacts of these tar sands pipelines are a critical part of the State Department's determination as to whether they would serve the "national interest." Because tar sands crude oil is significantly more carbon-intensive than conventional crude, any fair assessment of the climate impacts of Alberta Clipper would lead to its rejection.
At the hearing, State Department lawyers attempted to minimize the agency's obligation to weigh the national interest of tar sands pipelines. While the Department's pipeline reviews have always been comprehensive and covered the entirety of pipeline projects (the Keystone XL review, for example), the agency now claims that its jurisdiction is limited to the only short section of pipe that actually crosses the international border. Incredibly, the Department claimed it has "no authority to approve or disapprove" Enbridge's scheme to bring oil across the border just a few feet away on a different State-approved pipeline. In other words, the State Department made clear it is willing to allow Enbridge to call the shots rather than decide whether tar sands imports would serve our "national interest."
The judge is expected to rule on the legality of Enbridge's scheme in the coming months. Meanwhile, Enbridge has already completed its Keystone XL-clone and is now sending high volumes of dangerous tar sands crude through the Great Lakes without any public review.