Has Gov. Gretchen Whitmer finally and completely lost her mind?
As Americans in states along the eastern seaboard waited in long lines to fill up their gas tanks last week, the Democrat from Michigan saw fit to renew her calls to shut down the Enbridge pipeline that pumps 540,000 barrels of oil and other petroleum products through a section of the Great Lakes.
In an Op-Ed published Friday by The Washington Post, the governor wrote, “Oil and water don’t mix — especially when the latter involves the Great Lakes, the repository of more than 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. And yet for nearly 70 years, an oil company has pumped crude oil through the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron connect and where Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas come closest.
“The two aging, 4.5-mile sections of underwater pipeline are a ticking time bomb. I’m taking every action I can to shut them down, to protect two Great Lakes and the jobs that depend on them.”
Whitmer then reminded readers of the disastrous BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, which was followed three months later by the rupture of “an Enbridge pipeline in Michigan, Line 6B.” That incident sent “hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil gushing into a creek feeding the Kalamazoo River, near Marshall, Mich,” she wrote. “It was one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history.”
