A North American ‘Nord Stream 2’: Canada Gets ‘Green’ Enemy Treatment on Pipeline

May 3, 2021 (EIRNS)—Shortly after Joe Biden’s inauguration his Secretary of State Tony Blinken declared that the United States “would not stand for China building projects with dirty technologies” overseas—only Blinken’s first of many attacks on the Belt and Road Initiative. Now Biden’s Administration, backing up Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, is referring to Canada in the same terms, in the matter of the Enbridge Line 5 oil pipeline, operating since 1953.

Former Michigan Governor, and now Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, sounding like the German Green Party’s Annalena Baerbock on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, said at a CNN town hall April 29, “If we’re going to do pipes, let’s do pipes that build the infrastructure of America in a way that is future-looking, and not rely upon fuels or transport fuels—even though our neighbors to the north want it—that are not going to contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” Thus with an extreme line even Whitmer has not even used, Granholm (a Canadian by birth) declared war on Canadian oil exports to the United States. Whitmer had ordered that Enbridge Line 5 be shut down by May 12, citing alleged pollution dangers to the Great Lakes, which allegedly are inextricable from having a pipeline under the Strait of Mackinac.

Canada’s ambassador calls this a “matter of national energy security”—for both countries. Ottawa could invoke a 1977 treaty that bars actions that “would have the effect of impeding, diverting, redirecting or interfering with ... the transmission of hydrocarbon in transit” except in case of natural disaster. Such an invocation would only then add a hostile act on Canada’s part, to the clearly hostile act from the United States.