The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in a long-running dispute over the fate of an oil and gas pipeline in the Great Lakes.
Michigan state officials had sued a Canadian company that operates a section of the pipeline, known as Line 5, which snakes under the Straits of Mackinac between Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas. They asked the courts to decommission that part of the pipeline, which runs along the state-owned lake bottom, asserting that a leak could cause an environmental catastrophe.
The question before the justices was narrow — whether the case should be heard in state or federal court. But the dispute raises broader questions both about how much power states have to regulate fossil fuels and for already frayed relations between the United States and Canada.
John J. Bursch, a lawyer for the company that operates the pipeline, Enbridge Energy LP, told the justices on Tuesday that the dispute belonged in federal court because it involved foreign affairs and international issues better suited to the federal judiciary.
He warned of dire effects across the Midwest and Canada if the section of pipeline were shut down, including a threat to infrastructure used to “provide heat for millions of people” because the propane for heating homes in the winter would become more limited. Fuel, he said, would become more expensive and harder to get.
An official with the Michigan attorney general’s office countered that the pipeline company had missed a critical deadline to move the dispute into federal court.
Michigan’s solicitor general, Ann M. Sherman, asserted that state courts were equipped to hear the case and that it should remain there. She argued that the pipeline company sought an “escape hatch” to try to get the case into federal court, often thought to be friendlier to business interests.
The politics of the pipeline dispute have scrambled traditional alliances because of the economic and job benefits the industry brings to the region.
Line 5 is part of a sprawling network of oil and gas lines that brings petroleum products to refineries in the Midwest, Ontario and Quebec. The section of line involved in the case runs from northwestern Wisconsin through Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas and into Canada. A 1953 agreement between Michigan and the pipeline company authorized the company to run the line through the bottomlands of the Straits of Mackinac.
In June 2019, Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan sued to decommission the line, calling it “a ticking time bomb in the heart of the Great Lakes.”
In their lawsuit, Michigan officials argued that problems with an aging four-mile section of the line could lead to an environmental disaster. They accused Enbridge, which is headquartered in Calgary and owns and operates pipelines in the United States and Canada, of violating three state laws, including the Michigan Environmental Protection Act.
More than two years after the lawsuit was filed, the company sought to move the case into federal court, asserting that the dispute raised federal issues.
The company argued that it qualified for an exception to normal deadlines for such a request because it decided to seek the move after a federal judge ruled that another related pipeline lawsuit belonged in federal court, not state.
A panel of federal appeals judges sided with Michigan officials, finding that the company had “failed to timely remove this case to federal court” and that the case should remain in state court. The company then asked the justices to weigh in.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
The post Supreme Court Hears Case That Could Decide Fate of Great Lakes Pipeline appeared first on New York Times.
