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Enbridge is racing to complete the heavily contested Line 3 pipeline through Minnesota by the end of August. In the rush, the company has violated water permit restrictions at least nine times, spilling oil or hazardous liquids into waterways and wetlands. Meanwhile, the state is suffering from a severe drought and the threat of spreading wildfires. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is ignoring pleas from water protectors, scientists, and Minnesota residents to cancel the company’s water permits and address this crisis.
Minnesotans Face Loss of Access to Clean Drinking Water
Currently, 3.3 million barrels of crude oil travel through the state each day, mostly through the nearly 5,000 miles of pipelines that run beneath Minnesota. There are at least 400 drinking water management areas located less than two miles away from these pipelines which carry flammable, toxic liquid daily, posing a constant risk to the drinking water that Minnesotans depend on. Unsurprisingly, the majority of drinking water management areas that are at risk are the very ones that supply low-income, indigenous, and other marginalized Minnesotans.
Despite the threat of contamination, Governor Walz backtracked on his original decision to prevent construction of the new Line 3 last November when his administration approved the water permits Enbridge needed to start building the pipeline.
The permits allow Enbridge to move five billion gallons of water out of the ground and from rivers and lakes across the state, even as Minnesota reals from a severe drought which is, not coincidentally, even more severe in precisely the same regions where Enbridge is pumping out millions of gallons of water to construct its pipeline.
Governor Walz Shifts Drought Burden onto Farmers and Residents
To compound the matter even further, searing Canadian wildfires just north of Minnesota are threatening to spread south, into the dry, drought-ridden forests and grasslands of Minnesota. With rivers, wells, and lake beds drying up and wildfire smoke choking the air, more and more Minnesotans are joining the call for action.
The Walz administration’s response to the crisis has been to suggest that farmers switch to drought-resistant seeds and residents water their lawns less often—while Enbridge’s free pass to pump out billions of gallons of water remains intact.
“I think I have a very progressive environmental record,” Governor Walz claimed in an interview with Duluth News Tribune, “but I’m also a realist, and we need to move oil, and we need to move it safely.”
Do We Really Need to Build More Oil Pipelines?
Governor Walz’s argument in the interview echoes that of many oil pipeline proponents. Even though we’re transitioning to a fossil fuel free future, we still need oil in the meantime and to move that oil, we need pipelines.
Where proponents are right is that the transition won’t happen overnight. The global fossil fuel infrastructure, including pipelines, wells, power plants, cars, and everything else that’s built on fossil fuel is estimated at about $10 trillion. It’s massive and it’s everywhere. So, we can’t just pull the plug and plant a bunch of wind turbines. It will take decades. Conservative estimates put the transition at somewhere between 30 to 100 years.
Where proponents are wrong, however, is in their suggestion that this means we should keep building new fossil fuel infrastructure. Researchers investigated this very idea in a 2010 study that asked: what if we just let the current energy infrastructure wear out?
In the study, they examined what would happen if, instead of building new oil pipelines to replace worn-out ones, we built new wind power and solar power facilities to replace the energy output the worn-out fossil fuel infrastructure provided.
The result: we could avoid an apocalypse.
The researchers calculated that the total future emissions of all existing fossil fuel infrastructure would be around 496 gigatons of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2060. This amount of emissions would put us at somewhere between 1.1 and 1.4 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature of the planet.
The finding is significant because one of the nine planetary boundaries—the parameters used for measuring the point of no return for the climate crisis—is a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. So that 1.1 to 1.4 degrees created by all existing infrastructure brushes the boundary but doesn’t cross it. That is, as long as we don’t keep adding on to it.
As the researchers explain, “Because these conditions would likely avoid many key impacts of climate change, we conclude that sources of the most threatening emissions have yet to be built.”
Despite what Enbridge, Governor Walz, and others would argue, then, it turns out that transitioning away from fossil fuel infrastructure by building even more fossil fuel infrastructure doesn’t really work.
The best way to avoid complete, irreversible destruction—while still allowing for the fact that replacing a $10 trillion global fossil fuel economy is not a quick process—is by letting old fossil fuel infrastructure run its course and replacing it with sustainable alternatives as it dies out.
The existing Line 3 has run its course. We don’t need a new pipeline to replace it. We need sustainable infrastructure like renewable energy sources or mass transit systems that can power the same number of homes and move the same number of people that the oil flowing through that pipeline was powering and moving.
