I’m adding my voice to the chorus of those who call for Governor Snyder and the legislature to protect the Great Lakes as required by law and as demanded in Liz Kirkwood’s excellent op-ed in The Detroit News this week. Kirkwood’s study group, For Love of Water (FLOW), delivered compelling arguments that Enbridge Oil’s 62 year-old oil pipeline 5 that […]

Senate Democrats, in a very weird bid to help Democrat Mary Landrieu’s reelection bid, allowed a vote on the mythologized Keystone XL pipeline yesterday. It failed by one vote. And that’s a very Good Thing. As I have written about before, the much-touted job creation promised by the pipeline’s ignorant or lying proponents, is wildly inflated: Let’s take the first […]

You know we’re in the steely grip of corporatocracy when this happens: West Bay Exploration Company has no plans to cease drilling at the corner of West Delhi and Miller roads northwest of Ann Arbor. The company’s oil rig is in Scio Township, where the Board of Trustees passed a moratorium last week against oil exploration activity. West Bay Exploration […]

Detroit Bulk Storage has been denied a permit by the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to store petcoke on the banks of the Detroit River. As you may recall, they were storing giant piles of the toxic byproduct of tar sands oil refining by Koch Carbon, an energy company owned by the billionaire Koch brothers. Last year, the piles were […]

A new group has formed called Citizens for Oil-free Backyards (COFBY)to oppose oil and gas exploration, drilling, and extraction in Scio Township, just outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in other parts of Michigan. Their efforts are in response to an effort by Traverse City-based West Bay Exploration to begin exploring for oil in Scio Township. More than 300 people attended […]

Oil well in Saline, Michigan. CC image credit: Dwight Burdette | Wikimedia Commons A standing room-only crowd of more than 300 Scio Township residents packed a recent hearing at the Washtenaw Intermediate School District headquarters last Thursday to speak out about a proposal to drill for oil near the border with Ann Arbor. The hearing was hosted and moderated by […]

A major oil spill in the Great Lakes would be devastating to Michigan’s natural resources, the health of our citizens, and our economy, and the boom in domestic oil drilling and Canadian tar sands makes such a spill a real possibility. But the potential for this kind of a catastrophe has been almost entirely missing from the national conversation about […]

This past week a federal report came out saying the carbon emissions will not be increased by allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to run through the USA. This will rejuvenate efforts by the Big Oil proponents of the pipeline to keep up their political pressure. But this argument has, in my opinion, never been about increased carbon emissions. It’s about […]

Funny how it’s never near a posh neighborhood of mansions… Cloud of petcoke dust rises over Detroit in the summer of 2013 This past summer, thanks to the hue and cry from Democrats in Michigan as well as Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, a group owned by the notorious Koch brothers was forced to take their noxious, toxic piles of petcoke […]

What could possibly go wrong? Photo by Anne C. Savage Impending upgrades to crude oil pipelines that bring tar sands crude to the Midwest are sparking fears of a significant jump in crude oil shipments on the Great Lakes. A report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes has details of the impending oil glut, the potential devastating impact on […]

Seriously, DEQ? Why do we even have these laws if you don’t enforce them? Last month I wrote about Kalkaska-based Team Services being busted for spraying salt water contaminated with toxic industrial solvents at hundreds, even thousands of times the legal limit. The brine sample contained 28,000 parts per billion of benzene, a known human carcinogen; 1,000,000 parts per billion […]