Turn Off the Spigot: It’s high time to shut down Enbridge’s oil pipelines in Wisconsin
The company has recently been in the news for perpetrating the largest oil spill on record in the state. Some 69,300 gallons of oil were released from Line 6 in Jefferson County.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
Fossil fuel companies have a long and storied history of getting what they want. That’s come largely at the expense of our entire planet, which is now feeling the real and painful impacts of a climate crisis brought on by unbridled reliance on the burning of fossil fuels. Extreme weather events — fires, droughts, heat waves, even last week’s polar vortex — are all made exponentially worse by fossil fuel-driven climate change.
First and foremost, though, the single-mindedness of those companies and the people getting rich from their work has the biggest negative impact on the people and places most on the frontlines of the extraction, processing, and transport of their products.
It’s called environmental racism and it has a well-documented history, not just in the U.S., but across the globe. Big corporations see profit to be made in places with lax environmental and labor regulations, in communities with less money or power to oppose them.
A stark example of that is playing out now in Wisconsin, with the Canadian oil pipeline operator Enbridge. The company has recently been in the news for perpetrating the largest oil spill on record in the state. Some 1,650 barrels (69,300 gallons) of oil were released from Line 6 in Jefferson County, and while the leak was discovered on Nov. 11, the accident report states that the pipe had likely been leaking “for an extended period of time.”
Enbridge reported the leak to the Wisconsin DNR, who three days later approved a permit application for Enbridge’s Line 5 reroute in the northern part of the state. But news of the spill wasn’t released to the public until mid-December. Given that, and the fact that the Line 6 spill hadn’t even been cleaned up at the time — and taking into account Enbridge’s history of problems and outright violations of state law — the chorus of objections to the permit approval and the reroute itself makes sense.
Line 5 has had 35 leaks over its 70-year history, releasing some 1.13 million gallons of oil into the environment; Enbridge’s Line 13 leaked 1,200 gallons of an oil diluting chemical in Jefferson County in 2012 and failed to report it to the DNR for a year.
The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa has been at the forefront of the opposition to Line 5, and for good reason: A 12-mile segment of the aging line runs through their reservation and its aging infrastructure threatens the entire watershed.
Enbridge’s leasing rights to access Bad River’s land expired in 2013, but the company continued to operate the pipeline. Bad River sued Enbridge in 2019, and in 2022 a judge sided with the tribe and ordered the company to compensate them for the years of trespassing and to reroute the pipeline around the reservation.
And while that was a good first step and a victory for the reservation and the tribe, Bad River, to their immense credit, clearly recognized the greater threat posed by the aging pipeline — that a major spill on Line 5 would not only harm the reservation, but the Bad River watershed and Lake Superior itself — that and have continued to push for its total shutdown. The watershed alone covers an approximately 250-square-mile area of incredibly delicate and important wetlands and waterways. A spill would jeopardize the economic and cultural well-being of the Bad River Reservation and dozens of other communities in Ashland, Iron, and Bayfield Counties — not to mention anyone who loves the Northwoods.
Even setting aside the crucial cultural and community goodwill reasons for doing it, the proposal to shut down the pipeline is supported by both science and economics.
It takes tens of thousands of years for wetlands and other sensitive ecosystems to develop in the first place, and they provide vital life support systems for a vast array of communities, including humans. They clean our water, trap carbon in the ground, provide habitat for countless plants and animals, prevent flooding, and more. Wisconsin has already lost 50% of its wetlands since European settlement in the 1800s.
The current DNR permit for the Line 5 reroute raises more concerns than it alleviates. For instance, Enbridge would be responsible to restore streams to “as close to pre-construction condition as practicable,” vague enough wording to leave a Lake Superior-sized amount of wiggle room for interpretation. The word “practicable” appears 23 times in the permit, related to everything from blasting to wood chip removal. It’s a messy process.
“At this point, it’s hard to even point to greed alone as the driving force behind Enbridge’s stubborn refusal to shut down the pipeline.”
On top of that, the proposed reroute would cross more than 100 bodies of water — streams, rivers, wetlands, etc. — and involve digging trenches on about 70 of them, a process which causes its own disturbance and damage to the delicate ecosystem.
On the economic side, an independent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), published Jan. 7, 2025, concludes that the company would be better off retiring the 70-year-old pipeline. The IEEFA looked at market trends for crude oil and natural gas products, as well as dramatically increased costs associated with the proposed reroute around the Bad River Reservation and a controversial tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac in Michigan.
At this point, it’s hard to even point to greed alone as the driving force behind Enbridge’s stubborn refusal to shut down the pipeline. I can’t help but think of the “sunk cost” fallacy: a tendency to continue on with something we’ve invested a certain amount of time/energy/money into, even when it’s irrational to do so. Inertia certainly also plays a role, and a refusal to own up to past misdeeds.
Fossil fuel companies are very used to doing one thing — extraction — and despite a lot of recent lip-service about transitioning to renewables, they seem largely unwilling to make the investments necessary to follow through in any meaningful way. Instead, Enbridge, like its fellows, is doubling down on old, outdated strategies — financial, environmental, and human costs be damned. We’ll all be sunk with them, if we don’t break this cycle and soon.
The odds are always stacked against those of us with less money and access to fewer levers of power, but we’re not doomed. The more of us who speak up and work to find better, more equitable and sustainable solutions, the more likely we are to achieve those ends. Those solutions largely already exist, too. There’s power in numbers to push those solutions, and we’re going to need real, persistent solidarity to make an impact — now more than ever.
We’re fortunate to have stalwart environmental advocates like Bad River, along with dozens of organizations, community groups, and other tribes across the Upper Midwest who are also fighting the good fight to prevent disaster and build a more sustainable future for all of us. I also recommend watching the “Bad River” documentary, which beautifully tells the story of the tribe’s history and its fight to maintain identity and sovereignty, including their efforts to protect the watershed from the pipeline.
Get and stay connected. Plug in wherever you can. In the end, we are all part of one big watershed, and it’s not just worth saving, it’s the only way forward.
Emily Mills is a longtime freelance writer/reporter based in Madison. They previously served as Editor of Our Lives, Wisconsin's only LGBTQ+ media outlet, and as an opinion columnist in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. You can currently find Emily's work at tonemadison.com and at their own Substack newsletter, @Grist From the Mills (emilymills.substack.com)
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Hello Emily!
Fine article. Good to see your work popping up here!
Martha