Native tribes in what are now Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are calling on federal officials to deny a loan gas-fired power plant on the shore of Lake Superior. The Chippewa Tribes — including the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Michigan, the Fond du Lac of Minnesota, and the Bad River and Red Cliff of Wisconsin — located across the northern third of those states criticized both the location of the Dairyland Power Cooperative’s proposed Nemadji Trail Energy Center and the fact that the cooperative is trying to build a gas-fired power plant at all.
“There is no version of physical reality on Mother Earth” in which building a methane gas-fired power plant serves the public interest in light of the need to cut climate pollution and protect the environmentally sensitive lakeshore, the tribes said. “As our shared climate rapidly continues to destabilize, it is unconscionable that Dairyland Power Cooperative has not canceled its request for a $350 million public loan and permits,” the tribes said in their letter to the USDA. “In short, this location was never the place, and now is obviously not the time, to build new fossil fuel infrastructure of any kind.” (AP)