Blog posts by FLOW team and guest writers
Childhood friends William Wright and Chris Yahanda wanted to do their part to protect the Great Lakes and to urge Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to shut down the Line 5 oil pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac. So they decided to paddle board from the governor’s mansion on Mackinac Island to the governor’s residence at the State Capitol in Lansing.
By Dave Dempsey Every now and then an environmental news headline jumps out at you as though it were printed in 12-inch-tall type on a newspaper front page or web site. It’s not necessarily because of its significance when compared to other news, but because of the personal reaction it triggers. Such was the case… Read more »
Dire Straits: A damaged portion of Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac shown in this June 2020 photo provided to the State of Michigan by Enbridge. By Nora Baty Do you remember the last time Line 5 shut down? This week marks the one-year anniversary of Line 5’s closure following significant damage to an… Read more »
Photo courtesy of Chikaming Township, Michigan. Editor’s note: This article was originally published on June 19, 2021, in the Northern Express. LEARN MORE ON JUNE 29 FLOW will host a free webinar — Managing High Water and High Tension along the Great Lakes Shoreline — at 1 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, June 29. Want to hear… Read more »
Revenues from one of Michigan’s most successful environmental laws, the 10-cent bottle and can deposit, are at risk of being diverted from public to private uses. This bill is being rushed through the Michigan Legislature, so we ask you to take action today by asking your State Senator to vote NO on HB 4443 and HB 4444.
Last week, the Board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) unanimously approved a resolution affirming water as a human right and expressing concern about the trend toward treating water as a commodity. The resolution also affirms that “the water of the Great Lakes … shall remain in the public trust for the people of the Great Lakes region.” This resolution promises to be a milestone in the looming controversy over the creation of water futures markets.
The public is invited to join FLOW on Tuesday, June 29, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. Eastern for a webinar—Managing High Water & High Tension along the Great Lakes Shoreline—that will provide frontline, scientific, regulatory, and legal insights into efforts at the state and local level to manage high waters and high tensions along Michigan’s Great Lakes shoreline.
Some 800 miles north of the Montana border, past vast prairie grasslands, clear, untroubled lakes, and pristine boreal forests, lies a place of profound devastation and desolation. Just north of Fort McMurray in Northeast Alberta, Canada, one encounters an abrupt alteration of the landscape—a ravaged wasteland of disturbed lands and metallic lakes of oil-sheened process waste. Welcome to the place where bitumen—a thick, viscous, oil-containing soil having the consistency of coffee grounds—is extracted for later upgrading and refining into tar sands oil, ultimately destined to cross the Great Lakes watershed by pipeline.
FLOW is thrilled to welcome our ambitious and talented crop of summer interns—Milliken law and policy interns Nora Baty and Henry Ludwig, and our Milliken intern for communications, Matt Harmon.
Line 5-owner Enbridge and its enablers continue to engage in a Chicken Little “sky is falling” campaign, with the Canadian company claiming that, “shutting down Line 5 would cause shortages of crude oil for refineries in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and eastern Canada, as well as propane shortages in northern Michigan. In fact, none of Enbridge’s predictions of an energy shortage materialized when both legs of the dual Line 5 pipelines in the Straits were shut down for more than a week in June 2020 and one leg remained closed until about mid-September following damage that the U.S. Coast Guard said likely was caused by an Enbridge-contracted vessel. The research results are consistent with these studies forecasting little, if any, change in energy costs after Line 5 shuts down for good.
