August 25, 2021

By Bill Berkowitz

While news of the chaos and desperation at the Kabul Airport due  to President Joe Biden’s ill-planned pull out from Afghanistan is all pervasive, back home in the U.S., activists have been waging a lengthy battle against the controversial $9.3 billion Line 3  project. Owned by the Canadian energy company Enbridge, the project is part of a six-pipeline corridor that crosses northern Minnesota, daily transporting some 3 million gallons of tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to a terminal in Superior, Wisconsin.

At the beginning of August, Democracy Now reported that “At least 20 water protectors were brutally arrested in Minnesota as resistance to the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline continues, and they say state and local police have escalated their use of excessive force, using tear gas, rubber and pepper bullets to repress opposition.”

“The level of brutality that was unleashed on us was very extreme,” says Indigenous lawyer and activist Tara Houska, who suffered bloody welts after she was shot with rubber bullets, then arrested and held in Pennington County Jail over the weekend, where several water protectors say they were denied medical care for their injuries, denied proper food and some reportedly held in solitary confinement.

Houska told Democracy Now! that “the level of brutality that was unleashed on us was very extreme. People were shot in their faces, in their bodies, in their upper torsos. I saw a young woman’s head get split open right in front of me. It was a really, really brutal scene. And the arrests in person were also quite brutal, throwing people face down in the dirt and being extremely violent in a situation in which we were outnumbered by police at least two to one, and many, many, many counties present protecting this one place, and which also happens to be a county where a murderer, an actual murderer, is still on the loose, has not been caught, but there were somehow over 50 police officers in that one place watching water protectors.”

“Not a week has passed this summer that activists haven’t used their bodies to stymie construction of Line 3, an oil pipeline that would deliver energy-intensive Canadian crude from the tar sands of Alberta to the Midwest,” Inside Climate News’ Kristoffer Tigue recently reported. “But those efforts don’t appear to be stopping the project, which has steamrolled forward since obtaining its final permits late last year.”

“I drove people to the polls for you, Joe Biden. I drove people to the polls who had never, never voted in their lives,” Winona LaDuke, a longtime Native activist who has fought Line 3 since its replacement was initially proposed seven years ago, said in a July 7 press call. “We believed in you.”

"We will stop this in the regulatory process. We will stop this in the legal process. And we will stop this with our bodies," she told Wisconsin Public Radio. "This is Minnesota's Standing Rock."

In an interview with The New York Times’ David Marchese, Duke took off after Biden. “He’s hellbent on destroying Ojibwe people with this pipeline. Why do we get the last tar-sands pipeline, Joe? It’s kind of like when John Kerry went and testified to Congress against the Vietnam War and said, Who is going to tell that soldier that he’s the last one to die for a bad war? Who’s going to tell those Ojibwes that they’re the last ones to be destroyed for a bad tar-sands pipeline?   

EarthBeat’s, Claire Schaeffer-Duffy recently pointed out that Line 3’s “route twice crosses the Mississippi and traverses 200 bodies of water, 75 miles of wetlands and territories that are under treaty obligations with the Anishinaabe, Minnesota's largest Indigenous group.”

In January, the Biden administration put the kybosh on the Keystone XL pipeline. Many activists hoped the administration would do the same for Line 3, another massive pipeline project. However, the Department of Justice sided with the pipeline builders when it filed a legal brief in late June defending the project.

As of this writing, “All but the Minnesota section of Enbridge Energy’s 1,031-mile pipeline has been finished, and now the Canada-based energy giant says that that remaining work is 80 percent complete. The company said it’s on track to wrap up Line 3, including the 337 miles that run through Minnesota, by the end of the year.”

“[I]n the latest attempt to derail the pipeline through legal action, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe tribe sued Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, arguing that when the agency granted Enbridge permission to divert nearly 5 billion gallons of water as part of Line 3’s construction work, it violated a 2018 tribal law that gives certain rights to wild rice plants.” Legal scholars are not optimistic about the suit’s outcome.

The Minnesota Reformer’s Rilyn Eischens reported that “Enbridge spilled drilling fluid 28 times at 12 river crossings this summer, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency announced last week. The news alarmed pipeline opponents — including some lawmakers — who had been demanding information about possible ‘frac-outs’ along the route for weeks.”

On Monday, August 23, Democracy Now! reported that “More than two dozen Democratic lawmakers are calling on President Biden to halt construction on the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota until a thorough environmental review is undertaken

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