A new Line 3 pipeline would swing down into the Crow Wing Watershed in Central Minnesota. I've not heard opposition specific to the threat to that remarkable stream. Perhaps it's time to raise our voices.
I wrote the following for the Long Prairie Leader several weeks ago.
Tim
Central Minnesota Political
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The Line 3 oil pipeline is a disaster waiting to happen. And a disaster that has already happened.
The Canadian Enbridge Corporation owns the pipeline. The Line starts close to Edmonton, Alberta, near the tar sands oil deposit. It runs 1,097 miles through Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and a tiny corner of North Dakota near Pembina where it crosses the Red River and enters Minnesota for its long run to Lake Superior and the oil terminals and refinery at Superior, Wisconsin. The huge pipes that transport the oil are thirty-four inches in diameter.
Enbridge wants to rebuild the pipeline so it has pipes that are three feet in diameter so it can carry 370,000 barrels per day more oil. That’s the disaster waiting to happen. But first it would be well to examine the disaster that has already happened.
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| Thanks Wikipedia |
To get the oil from Alberta’s tar sands, the skin of the earth must be ripped away. This skin is a diverse, complex ecosystem made up of boreal forest, peatlands, bogs, and thousands of large and small waterways. Left undisturbed, this forest can capture and store twice as much carbon dioxide as the tropical forests in Brazil.
Once the oil companies have ripped the ecosystem skin away it will never return. Ever! Not the waterways. Not the wildlife. Not the carbon storage capacity.
Once the land is destroyed the tar sands are mined. This tar is just that - pretty much the same stuff that they put on roads. It’s too thick to put into pipelines. So the oil companies mix hot water and a chemical cocktail with the tar, sand, and gravel to separate them. Then the water and chemical mix are put into a series of twenty storage ponds that, in 2017, held an estimated one trillion liters of slurry made up of lead, mercury, arsenic, and other cancerous chemicals. These open and unlined ponds cover an area equal to seventy-three Central Parks. And they are leaking their poisons into the ground and surface waters of an even larger area. In fact, eleven million liters of waste leaks into the nearby Athabasca River each day, representing approximately four billion liters of contamination each year. As a result, the First Nations tribes and Health Canada have found that traditional foods like moose, ratroot, duck, wild mint, spruce gum, pickerel, caribou, and Labrador tea contained elevated levels of heavy metals and carcinogens. The Canadian government has stated that fish from the Athabasca River should no longer be eaten. As a result of these poisons in the water, nearly one quarter of the First Nations participants in that study, people who lived downstream from the tar sands mines, had cancers and other sicknesses that could be caused by mining pollution.
The tar sands have been dubbed the largest - and most destructive - industrial project in human history. And Enbridge wants to make it larger by expanding the Line 3 pipeline.
That expansion will bring on the second disaster. A report that came out last week says that if Minnesota allows Line 3 to be built, the resulting carbon emissions will be greater than all the gains that Minnesota plans to make on climate change in all other areas. The report, called A Giant Step Backward and put out MN350 and other environmental organizations, simply does the math.
The existing Line 3 annually emits 80.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. The new line would emit a jaw dropping 273.5 million tons. Expanding Line 3 would add more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere annually than the entire state emitted in 2016, according to A Giant Step Backward - which got it numbers from Enbridge and the State of Minnesota.
“In 2050, an expanded Line 3 would add five times as much greenhouse gas as Minnesota expects to emit in total that year. To meet the requirements of our state’s Next Generation Energy Act and our commitment to the United States Climate Alliance, Minnesota plans to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions to less than 35 million tons CO2 by 2050. But expanding Line 3 would cancel out those gains.The State may go even further to meet the “net zero” emissions goal recommended by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” according to the report.
Our Climate can’t afford Line 3 and neither can the people of Canada. Politicians say it will bring jobs to the State and lots of money. But do you want a job that poisoned the water and that caused cancer in hundreds of people in Canada? Is your paycheck worth another killer hurricane off the coast of Florida? We must not profit on the backs of Canadians and at the expense of the climate. Line 3 must be stopped.
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