Pipeline Giant Seeks Jackpot Before Climate Cataclysm
AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez
A fossil fuel behemoth is citing the climate crisis it is intensifying as rationale to jack up consumer prices.
by JULIA ROCK
As Republican state officials insist that Canadian oil pipelines are necessary to lower energy costs for American consumers, the fossil fuel giant operating those pipelines is suddenly citing the climate crisis its products are creating as a rationale for raising those prices higher, according to new documents reviewed by The Daily Poster.
Last month, Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine — who has raked in nearly $400,000 from fossil fuel industry donors — demanded the Biden administration keep open Enbridge’s controversial Line 5 pipeline, which runs under the Great Lakes, as a way to reduce energy prices.
But Enbridge just dropped a bombshell undercutting that argument: The firm told government regulators that climate change means its tar sands pipeline network only has 19 years left of economic life. That assertion could allow the company to jack up the tolls that its customers pay to transport oil through its pipelines, because pipeline operators are authorized to recoup their operational costs through rate increases — and a shorter timetable means higher levies.
The episode is a spectacle of what’s been called disaster capitalism: In this case, a fossil fuel behemoth is citing the ecological crisis it is intensifying as a justification to extract more profits from consumers already being crushed by higher prices.
“There is something ironic about pipeline companies like Enbridge conceding that they can see the writing on the wall, they’re not going to be competitive or needed less than 20 years from today, and as a result they have to raise prices today to account for that,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School. “There’s something incongruous about that.”