Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said she’s “been fighting for years to get oil out of the Great Lakes.”
For a certain segment of voters, that should sound great: a Democrat expected to run for president in 2028 who’s taking on the energy industry, including Enbridge Inc., which operates a 645-mile oil and gas pipeline that has long drawn ire from environmentalists who fear a catastrophic spill into some of the continent’s most precious environmental treasures.
But the truth, as it always is in government and politics, is more complicated.
In 2020, Whitmer revoked an easement in place since 1953 for Enbridge’s Line 5 to operate an above-water, four-mile segment that runs through the Straits of Mackinac, where Lakes Michigan and Huron connect. At the time, Whitmer said the Canadian energy giant “has imposed on the people of Michigan an unacceptable risk of a catastrophic oil spill in the Great Lakes that could devastate our economy and way of life.”
That revocation would have essentially shut down the pipeline, which supplies propane to Michigan homes and light crude to refineries in the Midwest and Ontario.
But in the news release announcing the revocation, her administration left the door open to replacing the above-water segment with an underground tunnel. Regulators she appointed then issued their approval for that project in 2023. And while the state’s Democratic attorney general pursues her lawsuit to shut down the pipeline, Whitmer’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy just last month reissued a permit.
In other words, an administration whose leader says she’s fighting to “get oil out of the Great Lakes” would have oil flowing through them instead.
Semantics aside, Whitmer’s office didn’t respond to an inquiry about how she squares that all up. She also hasn’t weighed in on the Michigan Supreme Court’s July 31 decision that the state Public Service Commission didn’t properly weigh the project’s benefits with possible environmental harms when it issued the 2023 permit.
But on July 31, the governor released a Substack post and a one-minute, six-second YouTube video about the US and Canadian governments’ amicus briefs against the state in its appeal of a federal judge’s ruling preventing her from acting against the pipeline. In the video, Whitmer called Line 5 “a ticking time bomb” and cited a 2010 rupture where oil gushed into the Kalamazoo River from a separate pipeline.
“No one knows these Great Lakes better than Michiganders, and that’s why I’ll keep taking on big oil, special interests, and anyone who thinks Michigan shouldn’t have a voice,” Whitmer said.
Now, there’s some wiggle room in what she said, but her diverging positions haven’t gone unnoticed.
An official with the National Wildlife Federation said after Michigan’s environmental department reissued its permit that the governor “built her brand on standing up to Enbridge and protecting the Great Lakes, but now she is paving the way for the very pipeline she vowed to shut down.” The official, Climate and Energy Director Beth Wallace, called the action a “betrayal.”
On Monday, during a virtual news conference by a Native American tribe and environmental groups about the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision, Earthjustice Senior Attorney Adam Ratchenski said there’s been “a constant theme of support, at least in terms of actions rather than words, from Whitmer’s state agencies.”
It’s hard to say whether in any time of history this would register as scandalous or even a minor political problem. It’s certainly an important issue to a battleground part of the country, which the governor, who’s term-limited and leaves office at the end of the year, would need to win if she runs for president. (Whitmer said in May that she wasn’t running, then walked it back within hours, numerous news outlets reported.)
But in an era where Vice President JD Vance said the Watergate break-in and the fallout that led to President Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation would barely register as a political scandal, it’s hard to think her contradictions on Line 5 could be what causes problems for Whitmer. Recent Gallup polls show environmental issues to be low on the list of most important problems for most Americans.
Most of us can’t have it both ways. Those in politics can.