Will Biden Cancel Minnesota’s Line 3 Oil Pipeline?

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Jim Mone/AP Photo

Protesters gather at an overlook along the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota, March 11, 2021, to call on President Biden to stop the Line 3 pipeline under construction in northern Minnesota.

In early April on the shores of Lake Bemidji in northern Minnesota, Nancy Beaulieu jokes about the things she gave up last year. “Me and my sister from White Earth, Dawn Goodwin, we had to sacrifice our blueberry picking,” she says to the three dozen people gathered there to show their support. “I didn’t get much chance to ice fish this year, and I love to ice fish.” Instead, Beaulieu explains, they used their newfound free time to assert their rights as the region’s original people, the Anishinaabe, to fight Enbridge, a Canadian-based oil company that plans to build Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline, on their native lands.

Colleen Connolly

RISE co-founder Nancy Beaulieu’s face mask calls attention to the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Beaulieu, of the Leech Lake Band of the Chippewa Tribe, and Goodwin, of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, are two of the founders of the Resilient Indigenous Sisters Engaging (RISE) Coalition. Created in response to Line 3, the group works to educate Native Americans and their non-native neighbors about treaty rights and responsibilities. They hope that President Biden will cancel the project, just as he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. But so far, even though some locals see the fight against Line 3 as the next Standing Rock, he has been silent.

Enbridge touts Line 3 as a replacement for a pipeline built in the 1960s that runs more than 1,000 miles from Edmonton, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin. The new pipeline, however, follows a different route through Minnesota and crosses underneath the Mississippi River at two separate points. Critics like Beaulieu and Goodwin say it isn’t a replacement, but rather a brand-new pipeline with further potential to damage the environment, and others like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) have called for cancellation of the project.

Biden’s climate plan is the most ambitious effort ever proposed by a U.S. president, and it should go a long way in reducing the need for new pipelines like Line 3. But he will have to contend with competing voter demands for fighting climate change, providing jobs, and determining what is “safe” for the environment as the country shifts from dependence on fossil fuels to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, a goal Biden hopes to achieve by 2050.

Shutting down Line 3 would be a small step toward the president’s ultimate goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but supporters of the pipeline say the project provides thousands of jobs and will minimize the risk of a spill. Beaulieu says the pipeline represents an infringement of their rights as Indigenous people and is an excuse to transport even more oil through their land when the fossil fuel industry is already declining—and the risk of a spill remains.

“We’re on 1855 territory,” Beaulieu told the crowd at Lake Bemidji, referring to a treaty signed with the U.S. government. Under that pact, the Chippewa ceded a large portion of their land but maintained the right to hunt, fish, and gather in the territory. “Not once did we ever surrender our inherent right to protect our water and our land,” she says. “The misconception is that the non-native people gave us land, but it’s the other way around.”

But along the construction route, yard signs are planted in the thawing ground for Minnesotans for Line 3, a group that advocates for the pipeline. Kevin Pranis, the marketing manager for the Laborers’ International Union of North America in Minnesota and North Dakota, which represents construction laborers, said that cancellation of the project would have a big impact on the local workforce. When the pandemic hit a year ago, about a thousand members of the union lost jobs, and they would have lost their health care coverage, too, if the union hadn’t stepped in to cover it. Pranis said they can’t afford to do that again.

Northern Minnesota is largely rural and faced economic challenges even before the pandemic. Unemployment is generally higher in the northern counties than in the rest of the state, particularly in the ones along the new Line 3. Enbridge promised the project would generate about 8,600 jobs, with about 6,500 for locals and more than 4,000 for union construction workers. However, a jobs report from the company released in February showed that for the last quarter of 2020, only about a third of the jobs were held by locals in Minnesota. Out-of-state workers could include those just over the border in Wisconsin, muddying the definition of “local.”

Colleen Connolly

Dawn Goodwin, co-founder of the Resilient Indigenous Sisters Engaging (RISE) Coalition, near Lake Bemidji

“If Line 3 were canceled, we would certainly be looking at hundreds of members who would be unemployed,” Pranis says. “There are certainly some construction jobs, but not nearly enough to take up the slack from that project, especially in northern Minnesota. There’s a lot more jobs in the Twin Cities, but that’s pretty far away.”

The labor leader gets frustrated by the framing of pipeline fights like this one as jobs-vs.-environment conflicts. He doesn’t see Line 3 as a threat to the environment, but rather a protection. “It’s about properly building and maintaining pipelines so they don’t spill,” Pranis says. “What really distinguishes Line 3 as a project is it’s about replacing what we think is the highest-risk pipeline in Minnesota.”

Yet the original Line 3 pipeline is responsible for the largest inland oil spill in history, something that locals remember well. Thirty years ago, it ruptured in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and spilled 1.7 million gallons of crude oil. Enbridge is also responsible for a 2010 spill from a tar sands oil pipeline near Marshall, Michigan, which spilled more than 1 million gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River.

The new Line 3 is not just a replacement, but also an enlargement. The diameter is two inches thicker than the old line. It will be able to carry more oil at a time, potentially increasing the damage if there’s a spill.

“Enbridge likes to tout its safety record, but we have no way of really predicting when these spills will happen,” said Moneen Nasmith, a staff attorney at Earthjustice, a national environmental-law organization. “The kinds of waterways and resources that this pipeline is crossing are just so important to preserve. It really is such a bad idea and such a terribly shortsighted decision to choose a few jobs for out-of-staters and profits for a corporate entity over the health and preservation of cultural resources that the tribes rely on.”

Nasmith has been fighting against gas pipelines in the Northeast through litigation for several years, and in the last few years she joined the fight against Line 3 as well. Earthjustice is representing the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, the Sierra Club, and Honor the Earth, an Indigenous environmental group, in federal court. They filed a lawsuit alleging that in November, the Army Corps of Engineers gave Enbridge permits to build the pipeline even though the company didn’t properly assess the environmental impact.

“They ignored climate change, they ignored oil spills, they ignored impacts to tribes, and they didn’t do their job under the Clean Water Act either,” Nasmith says.

Several other lawsuits have been filed over Line 3 also, including at the state level. Last month, a Minnesota court of appeals heard arguments from the state’s Department of Commerce against the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), an independent state agency. The Commerce Department argues that Enbridge did not provide an adequate forecast for long-term oil demand and the PUC should not have approved it.

Nasmith is also involved in a separate lawsuit in the court of appeals arguing that the state should not have approved the project because Enbridge didn’t show that Line 3 would comply with the federal Clean Water Act and Minnesota’s own water quality requirements.

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Colleen Connolly

Nancy Beaulieu, co-founder of the Resilient Indigenous Sisters Engaging (RISE) Coalition, speaks at an event near Lake Bemidji in northern Minnesota earlier this month.

While the lawsuits play out in court, Line 3 protesters have chained themselves to construction equipment and the gate to Enbridge’s office in Bemidji. They’ve held rallies and ceremonies and been joined by pipeline opponents from across the country, including Jane Fonda and members of other tribes who have fought against harmful development projects on their own lands.

Several people have been arrested and faced harassment from local police, pipeline workers, and even some of their own neighbors. Tara Houska, an attorney and founder of the Giniw Collective, a Minnesota-based resistance group dedicated to protecting the environment and sacred sites, has lived in a camp about 200 yards off of the new Line 3 route for the last three years. She says the harassment has gotten exponentially worse since construction began in November. The Center for Protest Law and Litigation is currently preparing another legal challenge to protect the constitutional rights of Line 3 opponents like Houska.

“I’ve had my windshield cracked by, presumably, Line 3 workers, been harassed on roads by Line 3 workers, been pulled over, and all kinds of things,” she said. “And there’s been a sheriff parked across our private property for well over a month at this point.” Line 3 construction has also been linked to sexual assaults and harassment in the area. According to Truthout, Enbridge is reimbursing a shelter for the costs of housing victims.

Like Pranis of the laborers’ union, Houska doesn’t like the framing of the conflict around Line 3 as a choice between jobs or the environment. She empathizes with the pipeline supporters who say they need jobs. “I look to the investments at the state and federal level,” Houska said. “Why is it that we aren’t as invested in northern Minnesota? The places up north, the cabins on the lake, the mosquitoes, that’s the literal idea of Minnesota. We’re the land of 10,000 lakes, and yet the only jobs that seem to be available up here, when they even come, are jobs that require us to destroy the world around us.”

Originally from International Falls, Minnesota, just across the border from Canada, and part of the Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe, Houska says she’s fighting against Line 3 because it’s on Anishinaabe territory and threatens the area’s native wild rice, a staple in their traditional food system and a significant part of their culture. The wild rice grows in watersheds that the pipeline will cross, and Houska considers it part of her sacred duty to protect them.

“Indigenous people have had the economy of wild rice since before Minnesota was a state,” Houska said. “That’s a piece that I think is really critical and is almost always missed. Our economies and our livelihood should matter also.”

Earlier this month, Houska traveled to Washington, D.C., where she got her start in organizing, for a rally calling on Biden to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline and Line 3. Houska has also attended some of the Line 3 pipeline meetings with Biden administration officials.

The administration could step in and rescind or suspend the Army Corps of Engineers permits to build the pipeline on the grounds that the assessment of environmental impact was not adequate. According to Nasmith, the Earthjustice attorney, the administration could also revoke the cross-border permit Enbridge obtained for the original Line 3, arguing that the replacement is a new pipeline and requires a new permit.

But so far, there is no indication Biden will do either of these things. Two weeks ago, the administration announced it will not shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline while an environmental review is being conducted—a foreboding sign for Line 3 opponents. Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has remained equally noncommittal. When he campaigned for governor in 2017, he said that Line 3 was a “non-starter,” but he later said that the fate of the Enbridge project should not be left up to the governor.

While the original Line 3 pipeline was built, the Bureau of Indian Affairs uprooted tens of thousands of Native Americans from reservations and rural areas and forced them to find homes and jobs in cities. Dawn Goodwin thinks her Anishinaabe ancestors may not have even known what was being built on their land more than six decades ago. But this time is different. “Back then when they first put it in, my people didn’t have a say,” Goodwin says. “Now we do, and we’re saying no.”