Michigan SCT Overturns Line 5 Permit

ALSO from Oil & Water Don’t Mix

Last night, the Michigan Supreme Court did something Enbridge didn’t think was coming and vacated approval of the Line 5 oil tunnel.

The justices didn’t split hairs. They found the tunnel has no state siting approval that’s required under federal law. And they held that before any state agency can waive a project like this through, it has to weigh the public trust doctrine–the public’s right to the Great Lakes itself–and the environmental impacts of the pipeline. Regulators, the Court said, can no longer pretend a “replacement” tunnel has nothing to do with extending the life of the 73-year-old pipeline already sitting on the bottom of the Straits.

This win belongs to the people who never stopped fighting for it: Bay Mills Indian Community, Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, and the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi — represented by the Native American Rights Fund, Earthjustice, FLOW, Michigan Climate Action Network, and the Environmental Law & Policy Center. They led. The Court listened.

As Bay Mills Indian Community President Whitney Gravelle put it: “When people stand together with courage and conviction, change is possible.”

But here’s the hard truth: the old pipes are still in the water.

Line 5 has been operating in the Straits of Mackinac since 1953, seventy-three years of steel, welds, and coatings sitting exposed on the lakebed, in open water, at the meeting point of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Every day it keeps running is another day of risk, including corrosion, an anchor strike like the ones that dented the line in 2018, a support-structure failure, a leak that current modeling shows could reach hundreds of miles of shoreline before it’s stopped. This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s the same aging infrastructure the Court just said the state can’t keep rubber-stamping without reckoning with what’s actually at stake.

The Michigan Supreme Court just told the Whitmer administration it got the Line 5 decision wrong. Michigan’s citizens and Tribal Nations have been saying the same thing for years, in court, at hearings, and in the streets.

Now it’s her move.

Take Action

Tell Gov. Whitmer to listen to Michigan’s citizens and Tribal Nations, withdraw the administration’s support for the Line 5 tunnel, and finish the job by shutting Line 5 down.

EMAIL GOV. WHITMER

The tunnel was never the real fix. The only way to actually protect the Great Lakes from Line 5 is to stop pumping oil through a 73-year-old pipeline lying exposed in one of the most sensitive waterways on Earth.

The Court gave us an opening. Let’s make sure Lansing hears just how many of us are walking through it.

In solidarity,
David Holtz
Oil & Water Don’t Mix
https://www.oilandwaterdontmix.org/