Photo: Michigan Office of the Governor (AP)
Seizing the profits of a major oil company, making Canadians angry, tugboats causing havoc: It’s all happening in Michigan right now. The mandated shutdown of a major oil pipeline is brewing into a nasty fight that pits Michigan’s governor and environmental groups against a fossil fuel company as well as the country of Canada.
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At issue are two pipelines owned and operated by Enbridge, an energy company headquartered in Canada, that ferry crude oil and natural gas to the U.S. via the Straits of Mackinac, a shipping channel in Michigan that connects two of the Great Lakes. The two pipelines are collectively known as Line 5 and they’re in pretty crappy shape. The lines were built in 1953, but were only designed to last for 50 years; Enbridge has, essentially, been stalling on making major repairs or replacements for close to two decades. Even before the pipelines met their expiration date, Line 5’s safety record has be
Photo: Mark Ralston (Getty Images) “Climate champion” and producing more than 10 million barrels of tar sands oil a year are not exactly synonymous in most people’s minds. But that’s the exact title the British government decided to bestow on an executive at one of the most powerful oil companies in Canada.
Advertisement To mark six months until the major climate conference in Glasgow, the UK government honored 26 “climate champions” working in Canada, a commonwealth nation. Among the list of “champions” is Martha Hall Findlay, who serves as the chief sustainability officer at Suncor, a major tar sands player. An accompanying “storybook” of all the chosen climate champions includes Findlay’s resume as well as a quote attributed to her: “Suncor fully supports Canada’s Paris Agreement commitments, and we look forward to COP26 to continue building the all-important collaboration among the private sector, governments and other organizations needed to find r
Photo: Jim Mone (AP)
Unless you’re living in Huntersville, North Carolina, you may be blissfully unaware that the U.S.’s biggest gasoline spill since 1997 happened this past summer. The slowly-unfolding, little-reported-on saga in the state involves a company controlled by special interests like the Koch brothers and Shell, and a pipeline that has been transporting dirty energy for decades. And the crisis of the Colonial pipeline points to one of the next big issues for American fossil fuel infrastructure: what to do about dangerous, aging pipelines as we move to clean energy.
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In August, two teenagers riding ATVs around in a nature preserve outside of Huntersville, a suburb north of Charlotte, noticed gasoline gurgling out of the ground and told the town fire department. (State lawmakers say Colonial at first told them a different story, initially claiming that they’d shut down the pipeline after noticing a pressure drop at another point in the line.