Tuesday, February 16, 2021 – Courts back Line 3 pipeline construction despite risks

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Two recent court decisions denied efforts by Minnesota tribes and environmental groups to halt the controversial Line 3 Replacement Project last week. Despite the setback, the chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa says his tribe will not stop fighting the 1,097-mile pipeline project. The Enbridge Energy pipeline is slated to go across northern Minnesota, carrying crude oil from Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin. The planned route skirts the Red Lake and White Earth reservations and crosses through the Fond du Lac reservation. The company expects the project to take about 9 months to complete.

Guests:

Frank Bibeau (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe: White Earth) – tribal attorney

Joe Plumer (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) – legal counsel for the Red Lake Nation

Nick Kedrowski (Oneida Nation) – managing partner and senior instructor of Five Skies Training

Paul Eberth – director of U.S. tribal engagement for Enbridge

Break 1 music: Track 06 (song) Red Lake Singers (artist) Old Times (album)

Break 2 music: I Rise (feat. Murray Porter & Sandy Scofield) Russell Wallace (artist) Unceded Tongues (album)

Nicholas Kedrowski says

February 17, 2021 at 6:38 am

Thank you for the opportunity, being long winded I hadn’t gotten around to answering your question entirely. How does what we do relate to environmental concerns? One of the skills we try to teach is critical thinking and we discuss divergent and convergent thinking. We want everyone who comes through our program to understand the importance of looking at each side and formulating their own opinion based on as much information as they can find. We also teach them that you can research to learn something or you can research to prove something and how one of those two approaches can skew your findings. It is important to understand when figuring out how they would best like to move forward in a career pathway after completing our program. For many, this means they need to dig much deeper into the Line 3 project to learn enough to form their own opinion and in some cases, defend that outcome to their friends, family and communities. This skill can be honed and applied in virtually all aspects of our everyday lives but in particular in this case, it means finding out what the environmental impacts really are.

I enjoyed listening to the guests and agreed with most everything I heard. My only disagreement is in the apparent conclusion that shutting down pipelines is the answer to a brighter future. Truck and rail, both funders of the fight against the “evil black snake”, stand ready to take up the slack if pipelines stop transporting oil. We won’t simply stop using oil products until there is a reliable alternative that is widely available. Deregulation has already been happening at a federal level to enable rail to have a bigger role in transport under the previous Administration and the companies actually extracting the oil are continuing to ramp up their production. If your goal is truly to force a shift from fossil fuels to green renewables, your fight should be trying to make it too costly to extract, rather than make it too costly to transport because there are hundreds of companies out there willing to transport oil in a manner that is both more environmentally damaging to both our land and water but also our air than pipelines ever will be and for a much longer term and the fight against pipelines will have then become a fight against railroads and then a fight against trucking all the while, oil will continue to be extracted, shipped (yes they are involved too). I encourage you to not take my word for it or that of any of the guests, do your own research in an open manner, think convergently and decide for yourself.

Comments

Nicholas Kedrowski says

February 17, 2021 at 6:38 am

Thank you for the opportunity, being long winded I hadn’t gotten around to answering your question entirely. How does what we do relate to environmental concerns? One of the skills we try to teach is critical thinking and we discuss divergent and convergent thinking. We want everyone who comes through our program to understand the importance of looking at each side and formulating their own opinion based on as much information as they can find. We also teach them that you can research to learn something or you can research to prove something and how one of those two approaches can skew your findings. It is important to understand when figuring out how they would best like to move forward in a career pathway after completing our program. For many, this means they need to dig much deeper into the Line 3 project to learn enough to form their own opinion and in some cases, defend that outcome to their friends, family and communities. This skill can be honed and applied in virtually all aspects of our everyday lives but in particular in this case, it means finding out what the environmental impacts really are.

I enjoyed listening to the guests and agreed with most everything I heard. My only disagreement is in the apparent conclusion that shutting down pipelines is the answer to a brighter future. Truck and rail, both funders of the fight against the “evil black snake”, stand ready to take up the slack if pipelines stop transporting oil. We won’t simply stop using oil products until there is a reliable alternative that is widely available. Deregulation has already been happening at a federal level to enable rail to have a bigger role in transport under the previous Administration and the companies actually extracting the oil are continuing to ramp up their production. If your goal is truly to force a shift from fossil fuels to green renewables, your fight should be trying to make it too costly to extract, rather than make it too costly to transport because there are hundreds of companies out there willing to transport oil in a manner that is both more environmentally damaging to both our land and water but also our air than pipelines ever will be and for a much longer term and the fight against pipelines will have then become a fight against railroads and then a fight against trucking all the while, oil will continue to be extracted, shipped (yes they are involved too). I encourage you to not take my word for it or that of any of the guests, do your own research in an open manner, think convergently and decide for yourself.