The fate of the Line 5 pipeline is at another critical juncture in its 70-plus year history. The pipeline carries more than 500,000 barrels of petroleum products daily across the Great Lakes region from Wisconsin into Canada, taking a path that runs along the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac.
Over its lifetime, the pipeline has leaked more than 30 times and released more than 1 million gallons of oil. A 2016 University of Michigan study showed that more than 700 miles of Great Lakes shoreline was at risk of being polluted should the pipeline fail in the straits.
Enbridge, the Canadian company that operates the pipeline, has proposed boring a tunnel under the straits to protect the pipeline and continue its operation. The Trump administration, after declaring an energy emergency, has requested that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fast-track its environmental impact evaluation of the proposal.
The Corps of Engineers expects to release its draft Environmental Impact Statement May 30, potentially clearing the way for Enbridge to move forward, following a 30-day public comment period, but not without opposition.
Julia Cole, professor and chair of the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, is concerned by what Line 5's continued operation would mean for our efforts to fight climate change.
You lead a climate lab at U-M where your team works on, among other things, ocean and coral reef science. How has your background informed your speaking and writing?
I became very interested in Line 5 because I am a climate scientist and I care about how we think about managing fossil fuel energy over the coming years and decades. Ultimately, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. We need to cut our consumption in half within a shocking five years from now in order to stay below the international consensus of 1.5 degree Celisus warming. And yet, we are talking about investing in fossil fuel infrastructure that has a lifetime of decades.
I'll also say that I come at this from the perspective of somebody who cares a lot about the Great Lakes-as does everyone in Michigan, right? There's a tremendous majority of Michiganders who think we need to protect the Great Lakes for all of us, to keep them clean and keep them healthy. They want to eat the fish and boat in the waters and not worry. But with a tunnel or a pipeline-that's well past its sell-by date-under the Great Lakes, we run a huge risk.
What are the risks of exceeding that 1.5 degree threshold?
I think people often underestimate the extent to which what sounds like a small amount of warming really impacts their own lives. But when we start talking about warming of even a degree or two, we're talking about changes in, for example, the spread of infectious disease. We're talking about places where you can no longer get insurance for your home because of wildfires, sea level rise and storms that are taking out people's homes in record numbers. Climate change is everywhere and we're experiencing it now.
In the Great Lakes region, we're seeing climate change impacts related to agriculture. For example, when we have warm conditions in the February and March timeframe, the cherries all think it's spring and bloom. Then we get a frost, as one does in Northern Michigan in April, then the buds freeze and the trees don't produce. And if we get floods in May and the fields can't be planted, that leads to hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural emergency support that's needed. People often don't recognize this and it's something that's likely to get worse in the future.
While operating its pipelines, Enbridge is also investing billions of dollars in renewable energy, saying, "To solve the energy problem, the answer it still 'all of the above.'" What are your thoughts on that?
The "all of the above" solution might have sounded really good 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, but it's too late for that now. We need to move away from fossil fuel to the extent that we can because we are on a path to heat up the planet further and faster than we have any experience with as a species. We don't know what that's going to look like, exactly, but we do know it's going to be bad because of what we're seeing right now: floods, drought, sea-level rise, heat waves, ecological devastation. I work in coral reef science and coral reefs in the ocean are just being hammered by this.
We are already seeing the consequences of less than a degree-and-a-half of warming and we're trying to limit warming to a degree-and-a-half. We can't do that if we keep investing in fossil fuel infrastructure.
Is there an energy emergency?
Right now, large-scale renewable energy development is cheaper than fossil fuel for creating electricity. The claim that we are facing an energy emergency is, well, disingenuous is too weak of a term. It's false and misleading. It's designed to lead to the continued investment in fossil fuel.
We don't have an energy emergency. We have a willpower emergency in terms of trying to get into a clean energy mode here in this country. We are already moving down a path where utility-scale solar and utility-scale wind are cheaper than fossil fuel plants.
People like to say, "But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but, in fact, batteries are becoming more and more effective in storing this kind of energy. So we can create energy and store energy more cheaply as we go forward and it's win-win. I really am speechless when I hear someone say that we have an energy emergency that requires more fossil fuel because we don't have an energy emergency. We have a climate emergency and that's why we need to pay attention.
