Line 5 crosses tribal lands, runs beneath the water and needs major upgrades. Opponents fear spills. Supporters envision jobs. Everyone sees a fight.
Line 5 crosses tribal lands, runs beneath the water and needs major upgrades. Opponents fear spills. Supporters envision jobs. Everyone sees a fight.
Enbridge’s Line 5 operations near the Straits of Mackinac.Credit…Cydni Elledge for The New York Times
Supported by
Rebecca Halleck and
Rebecca Halleck reported from St. Ignace, Mich., and the Bad River Reservation in Wisconsin. Dionne Searcey reported from New York.
An icy crust on the Straits of Mackinac is melting into slush atop a shimmering, narrow waterway prized for its beauty and its role in supporting the local economy.
Snaking along the bottom of the heavily trafficked Straits, which connect Lake Huron to Lake Michigan, is a four-mile section of an oil and gas pipeline known as Line 5 at the center of a debate about whether it belongs there at all.
The fight over Line 5 in both Michigan and Wisconsin, where another section of the pipeline crosses the Bad River Reservation, could have sweeping implications for the power of states to regulate fossil fuels, for tribal sovereignty and for U.S.-Canada relations. Some or all of these issues are bound to surface in the upcoming presidential election.
Both Wisconsin and Michigan are battleground states. And in either place the debate over Line 5 could complicate election-year politics, particularly as candidates compete to eke out any advantage with voters they can find, whether on environmental issues, fossil fuel reliance or jobs.
The politics of Line 5 can get tangled. In Michigan, for example, unions and environmental groups, both reliably left-leaning constituents, are split on the pipeline. Organized labor supports it for the jobs and economic benefits it brings. But environmentalists in Michigan as well as Wisconsin next door want to shut down Line 5 because of the potential for spills.
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