Green groups and progressive lawmakers heaped praise on Minnesota’s new Democratic governor on Tuesday for “working for the people first not a foreign pipeline company” by announcing that he would renew a challenge launched by his predecessor against Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline project, which would run from Canada’s Alberta tar sands through North Dakota and Minnesota on its way to neighboring Wisconsin.

“We want to thank the governor for doing the most prudent thing possible to help avert the ecological economic and social disaster that is Line 3.”
—Winona LaDuke, Honor the Earth

“Minnesotans have clearly voiced that they do not want this dirty pipeline, and Governor [Tim] Walz and Lieutenant Governor [Peggy] Flanagan showed today that they are listening,” declared Greenpeace USA tar sands campaigner Rachel Rye Butler.

“By committing to refile the state’s appeal to Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline expansion,” Butler said, “he’s rightly putting Indigenous rights, our global climate, and the water resources for thousands of Minnesotans before fossil fuel industry profits.”

Last year, the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) approved the Calgary-based company’s proposal to replace a decades-old corroded crude oil pipeline with a new 1,031-mile pipeline that would cross Native American reservations and treaty lands, threatening fresh water resources, and culturally significant wild rice beds. That approval was granted in spite of expert analysis submitted by the state Department of Commerce (DOC) that the project was unnecessary, and “serious environmental and socioeconomic risks and effects outweigh limited benefits.”

Former Gov. Mark Dayton’s DOC and other critics appealed PUC’s approval, but last week the Minnesota Court of Appeals dismissed those challenges. On Tuesday, in what many characterized as “his biggest decision since becoming governor last month,” Walz came out on the side of environmentalists and Indigenous groups that have been persistently organizing against the pipeline, which would have the capacity to transport 760,000 barrels of tar sands oil daily.

“When it comes to any project that impacts our environment and our economy, we must follow the process, the law, and the science,” the governor said in a statement. “The Dayton administration’s appeal of the PUC’s decision is now a part of this process. By continuing that process, our administration will raise the Department of Commerce’s concerns to the court in hopes of gaining further clarity for all involved.”