Great Lakes Law

Detroit Enacts New Ordinance to Protect Residents From Dust Pollution

Guest post by Great Lakes Environmental Law Center staff attorney Nick Leonard. On a summer day in July of 2013, a dangerous dark cloud of dust blew along the Detroit River between Windsor, Canada and Detroit. Video captured by an individual showed several people standing along the riverfront transfixed by the dust cloud as it completely obscured their view of the Ambassador Bridge, a normally omnipresent visual landmark for Detroit and Windsor residents alike. The... Read more →

Petcoke on the Detroit River – a tar sands byproduct threatens local public health and Great Lakes water

In the early spring of 2012, a black pile three stories high and as large as many of the surrounding buildings appeared along the shores of the Detroit River. This pile was made up of petroleum coke, or “petcoke,” a byproduct created by the process of transforming heavy tar sands oil into useable fuel. While petcoke is not traditionally burned in the United States, competitive markets exist for petcoke in the developing world. This pile’s... Read more →

Wayne Law student wins Environmental Law Institute’s Beveridge & Diamond writing competition for paper on state energy policy and the dormant commerce clause

Paul Stewart, a second-year student at Wayne State University Law School, has won the Environmental Law Institute’s national 2013-14 Beveridge & Diamond Constitutional Environmental Law Writing Competition. His winning entry, The Overlooked Vulnerabilities of State-Level Greenhouse Gas Regulations Under Pike Balancing and Possibilities for Addressing Those Vulnerabilities, assesses the viability of state regulations on greenhouse gas emissions in the face of legal challenges under the Dormant Commerce Clause, a legal doctrine that restricts states from... Read more →

Anatomy of an oil spill – federal report on the Enbridge pipeline disaster that polluted the Kalamazoo River

“On Sunday, July 25, 2010, at 5:58 p.m., eastern daylight time, a segment of a 30-inch-diameter pipeline (Line 6B), owned and operated by Enbridge Incorporated (Enbridge) ruptured in a wetland in Marshall, Michigan. The rupture occurred during the last stages of a planned shutdown and was not discovered or addressed for over 17 hours. During the time lapse, Enbridge twice pumped additional oil (81 percent of the total release) into Line 6B during two startups;... Read more →

The U.S. Fuel Economy Standard “Deal” – Guest Post by Professor Brandon Hofmeister, Part 2

Energy law expert Professor Brandon Hofmeister of Wayne Law continues his guest post on the Obama Administration’s announced agreement on consensus fuel economy standards for U.S. cars and light trucks. For background on Professor Hofmeister and the first part of his analysis, see the prior post. Auto Politics Some have suggested that the reason the auto industry agreed to a fairly high standard for fuel economy was that they didn’t want to aggressively pick a... Read more →

The U.S. Fuel Economy Standard “Deal” – Guest Post by Professor Brandon Hofmeister

Buried in the national news about the debt ceiling fiasco during the last week of July was an announcement that the Obama Administration had reached an agreement with the State of California and a number of automakers on consensus fuel economy standards for U.S. cars and light trucks. These new standards will cover cars and light trucks for Model Years 2017-2025, requiring performance equivalent to 54.5 mpg in 2025. As Professor Brandon Hofmeister writes in... Read more →

Enbridge Kalamazoo River oil spill resources

Elizabeth McGowan and Lisa Song, “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of,” InsideClimate News- https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120626/dilbit-diluted-bitumen-enbridge-kalamazoo-river-marshall-michigan-oil-spill-6b-pipeline-epa. Garret Ellison, “Kalamazoo River oil spill timeline after 6 years,” MLive- https://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/07/kalamazoo_river_oil_spill_time.html. David Hasemyer, “Enbridge Fined for Failing to Fully Inspect Pipelines After Kalamazoo Oil Spill,” InsideClimate News- https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03052018/enbridge-fined-tar-sands-oil-pipeline-inspections-kalamazoo-michigan-dilbit-spill. US EPA, Enbridge Spill Response Timeline- https://www.epa.gov/enbridge-spill-michigan/enbridge-spill-response-timeline. Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue letter- https://www.greatlakeslaw.org/files/glelc_enbridge_60_day_notice_letter.pdf. Anatomy of an oil spill –... Read more →

Property rights in wind – lessons from Texas oil, gas, and water law

Alan Alexander, a former student who continues to work with me on several projects, has just published a superb note, “The Texas Wind Estate: Wind as a Natural Resource and a Severable Property Interest.” Looking at Texas, a historic leader in energy law, the note draws lessons from management of other resources such as oil, gas, and water in proposing legal reforms for property rights in wind. This is an increasingly important area of the... Read more →

Some good energy policy news from 2010 – Michigan enacts PACE legislation

One of the energy policy successes in Michigan in 2010 was the passage of the Property Assessed Clean Energy Act (Public Act No. 270, 2010). Eric Jamison worked with the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center as a Clean Energy Fellow to develop and enact PACE legislation in Michigan, and offers this guest post on the recent success. On December 15, 2010, former Governor Granholm signed the Property Assessed Clean Energy Act (Public Act No. 270,... Read more →

Oil and Freshwater Don’t Mix: Transnational Regulation of Drilling in the Great Lakes

I've posted a new article on oil and gas drilling in the Great Lakes, examining the existing laws and policies and offering some pragmatic recommendations for reform. The article was presented at the symposium “Learning from Disaster: Lessons for the Future from the Gulf of Mexico” hosted by the Environmental Affairs Law Review of Boston College Law School last November. The article is titled "Oil and Freshwater Don’t Mix: Transnational Regulation of Drilling in the... Read more →