Enbridge, the company that spilled at least 800,000 gallons of tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River system last year, has announced that it is suspending efforts to scrape the remaining submerged oil from the river bottom.

UPI reports that the company said it made a “seasonal decision” to stop cleanup for the rest of the year.

The EPA recovered about 18,000 barrels of oil from the surface. Officials said it was unclear how the remaining oil would affect the environment because there is no spill with which to compare the Enbridge leak.

For more than a year, crews have worked to get oil removed from the bottom of the waterways. Heavy crude, unlike conventional crude, sinks and mixes in with the sediment.

According to Enbridge crews have recovered most of the oil.

An approximately thirty mile long stretch of the Kalamazoo River has been off limits to the public since July 2010 because of the oil contamination.

Members of Occupy Detroit have worked with local businesses to secure a multi-story office building, a store front for sign-making, a warehouse, and a renovated 50-unit hotel that will serve as housing for protesters.

Occupy Detroit spokesperson Lee Gaddis said the group plans to pack up the Grand Circus Park encampment and move into donated space where it will be able to focus on political work.

“The weather is really crummy … and going to get crummier,” Gaddis said. “Our primary concern is the safety of the occupiers. Not everybody is prepared to do winter camping.”

The groups permit for camping in the park expires today, and occupiers are ready to move one, though they will stick around long enough to fulfill their promise to clean up the park completely, Gadis said.

Unlike the occupations in Oakland, and elsewhere, Occupy Detroit has enjoyed consistently positive relations with law enforcement.

“We have good relationships with the Detroit police and the Dept. of Homeland Security, nobody from Occupy Detroit has been brutalized or harassed by police,” Gaddis said. “Police here have more important things to do than harassing people for exercising their constitutional rights.”

Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.

EPA has set a Dec. 16 deadline for finalizing Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that would require coal- and oil-fired electric power plants to reduce mercury and other emissions by more than 90 percent.

Power plants are the largest source of airborne mercury emissions. When mercury settles into water it is converted by microrganisms into meythlmercury, an extremely powerful neurotoxin, which accumulates in fish and in those who eat fish.

According a recent Environment Michigan report that summarizes EPA data on power plant mercury emissions, in 2010, 80 percent of all airborne mercury pollution in Michigan came from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants.

DTE Energy’s coal-fired power plants topped the list of heaviest emitters. The company’s Monroe plant released 660 lbs. of mercury last year, and was the 14th largest emitter in the nation.

The Belle River power plant in China township emitted 335lbs, the St. Clair plant in East China Township released 236 lbs, and the Trenton chanel power plant released 172 lbs. According to Environment Michigan a drop of mercury is enough to make the fish in a 25 acre lake unsafe to eat.

When pregnant women eat mercury-contaminated fish, their children sustain permanent developmental damage and have reduced motor control, ability to pay attention and IQ.

According to a recent report issued by Environment Michigan, one in ten American woman now have blood mercury levels that are high enough to put their children at risk of brain damage if they become pregnant.

Schuette, however, has argued that the new rules are unacceptable because they would cause electric rates to increase.

“The new Michigan has to be about jobs and paychecks,” Schuette told the reported Sunday on data from the Department of Labor which shows that environmental regulation was only responsible for .3 percent of the layoffs in 2010.

And in fact, reducing the effects of mercury pollution may end up helping the economy.

According to EPA the nationwide implementation of new emission standards would avoid up to 17,000 premature deaths, 850,000 missed days of work, and 5.1 million days when people must restrict their activities each year, saving as much as $140 billion in health care costs each year.

A 2005 study by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that mercury-induced intelligence loss costs the U.S. $8.7 billion in lost productivity each year.

The State Department’s decision to spend more time considering a permit for TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline may boost the outlook for a competing pipeline planned by Enbridge, owners of the pipeline that burst in Calhoun County last year.

Over the summer Enbridge – the largest supplier of oil to the U.S. — announced plans to link existing and new pipelines into the “Monarch” line. The northern tier of the project would move tar sands crude and oil from the Bakken fields in North Dakota between the Chicago area and the oil storage hub in Cushing, Okla. The southern portion of the project involves a new line to move oil from Cushing to refineries around Houston.

By avoiding a new international crossing, this project could expand imports of tar sands crude without a State Dept. review. Enbridge says the project could be complete by the end of 2013.

Bloomberg reports that the State Dept. decision to order further study of alternative routes for the Keystone XL may help Enbrige win more customers for its new pipeline.

“Refineries can’t wait however-many months to make decisions about where they’re going to get crude,” Charles Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, told Bloomberg.

The Keystone delay, “definitely improves the prospects of the [Enbridge] project going forward,” John Auers, senior vice president of Turner, Mason & Co., a Dallas-based pipeline and engineering consultancy, said in an e-mail yesterday.

Producers decide whether to commit to shipping their crude on new pipelines based on the fees charged and their perceptions of whether the project will get built, Auers said.

Last year’s Enbridge pipeline rupture in Marshall spilled at least 800,000 gallons of Canadian tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River system and helped build opposition to TransCanada’s project which is slated to cross the sensitive Ogallala aquifer.

The Kalamazoo River remains closed to the public amid continuing cleanup of submerged oil.

A new law that prohibits the governor from adopting environmental rules that are stronger than federal standards will harm Michigan’s ability to protect the Great Lakes, environmental groups say.

This week the state Senate joined the House in approving such legislation.

Many environmental groups spoke out against the move:

“Federal water quality standards are designed to be the floor below which states are not allowed to drop,” said James Clift, of the Michigan Environmental Council. “This law assumes that rules written in Washington for waters in other states are good enough to protect our Great Lakes. They are not.”

“This legislation was not written by people who feel a stewardship responsibility to the Great Lakes, which contain almost 20 percent of the planet’s fresh surface water,” said Alexis Blizman of the Ecology Center. “We believe Michigan’s waters are best managed by Michigan. Not by Washington, D.C. bureaucrats.”

“Today’s action would eliminate Michigan’s ability to move quickly and proactively to deal with threats like the 1970s Lake Erie crisis,” said Dr. Grenetta Thomassey of the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council. “Water protection is a responsibility shared by the state’s governor, the legislature and the people of Michigan. We must not voluntarily give away control over our signature resource.”

If the Senate version is approved by the House and the governor signs it, the new law will go into effect in February.

Michigan workers who are hurt on the job could face reduced workers’ compensation benefits if legislation passed by the state House becomes law.

House bill 5002, introduced by Brad Jacobsen (R-Oxford), would overhaul the Worker’s Disability Compensation Act and change how benefits are calculated.

Since 1912 Michigan’s workers’ compensation law has guaranteed that people who get hurt at work will get medical treatment and income. Under the current law injured workers who take lower paying jobs are entitled to a benefit of 80 percent of the after-tax difference in income.

HB 5002 would change this formula and allow benefits to be reduced by wages “whether or not earned” — if a worker is thought to be capable of doing a job, the amount he would earn at that job is deducted from his benefits whether or not the job is actually available.

“It is a bad law,” said John Sims, a Marshall-based attorney who has represented plaintiffs and defendants in workers’ compensation cases over the last 34 years.

The 56-page bill was written by a representative of the Michigan Self-Insurers Association, he said, and created without input from the Workers’ Compensation Law Section of the state bar Association.

“It creates a virtual wage earning capacity,” he said. “The new law says that if we can think of a job that you can do, we can reduce your benefits by this hypothetical rate.”

There are other problems with the bill, Sims said. It allows employers to fire disabled workers for “fault” which is “whatever the employer wants to say it is.” It also bars injured workers from recovering legal fees when they sue to get employers or insurance companies to pay medical bills.

The law also requires that people who get disability benefits look for other employment.

“Ask state correction officers what would happen if they hunt for work someplace else,” said Sims. “At MDOC if you take another job you are fired — you’d loose a job that is paying 20 bucks an hour and benefits. Is that right?”

A booklet about workers’ compensation prepared for legislators by the Michigan Self-Insurers Association and the Michigan Manufacturers Association argues that HB 5002 is necessary because disability benefits keep people from working.

Like general assistance welfare benefits, workers’ compensation was never intended to support an individual over a lifetime. Rather, workers’ compensation was intended as a mechanism to provide a weekly wage replacement and medical care. The goal was to return injured workers to work.

Michigan can reduce workers’ compensation costs and can compete more effectively for jobs and business investments by removing incentives that encourage employees not to return to work.

Charles Owens of the National Federation of Independent Business / Michigan testified in support of the bill before the House Commerce Committee.

Owens said that his group feels it needs protection against employees that malinger after surgery and complain about pain just because they don’t want to go back to work.

“When an employee successfully receives workman’s comp payments that they are not entitled to because of false claims about pain, or they didn’t really injure themselves at work,” he said, “the word gets out and [attorneys] begin advertising for people to call them. Even though it may start with just a few employees it becomes a cottage industry.

Attorney Richard Warsh practices workers compensation law in Southfield.

He said he’s concerned about the part of HB 5002 that requires employees to use a company-selected doctor for the first 45 days (rather than the first 10 days) of their medical treatment.

“For most people this would mean that you are giving up your right to pick your surgeon,” he said. “You are being asked to go to industrial clinics … the level of care you are getting is lower and there is a pressure on these clinics to minimize the injury.

This is government dictating the health care that individuals receive, he said. “I can’t understand why Republicans and Tea Party people aren’t jumping up and down over this.”

The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Reforms, Restructuring and Reinventing which held a hearing on it this week.

“I decided to just get it on the table because I do know it could be a very contentious issue,” committee chairman and bill sponsor Sen. Mark Jansen (R-Gaines Township) said.

Jansen said that he is under no pressure to rush the bill through committee and will schedule another round of hearings for next week.

This week the Occupy Atlanta protesters found a way to protest economic injustice that may build allies within the local law enforcement community.

On Monday about two dozen activists with the group moved their tents to the suburban lawn of a home where a local policeman and his family are facing eviction.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that the group mobilized after learning that the five-member family may lose their home because the bank that holds their mortgage has decided to foreclose rather than allow them to refinance.

“This family is the perfect example of the fraud going on in the mortgage and banking industries,” said Latron Price, one of Occupy Atlanta’s organizers. “We plan to shed light on the foreclosure issue and we look to make a stand here.” …

Tim Franzen, one of Occupy Atlanta’s organizers, said the group had been seeking a good story to highlight the problems with the mortgage industry. He said Rorey’s husband, a law enforcement officer with DeKalb County, sent Occupy Atlanta an e-mail detailing their plight last week and within a few hours they formulated a plan to bring attention to the foreclosure.

“What I envision is a model of protest coming out of this,” Franzen said. “We plan to develop an occupy community in this neighborhood and maybe create something that can be duplicated nationally.”

Police officers have been pitted against Occupy Wall St. activists in many cities where they have been ordered to enforce rules against camping in public spaces, and in some well-publicized instances they have used force against demonstrators.

By working together to illustrate the problems of the mortgage industry Occupy Atlanta and the Rorey family may help build goodwill and common ground.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) is asking federal officials to protect Lake Michigan from coal ash pollution from the S.S. Badger car ferry which operates between Luddington, Michigan and Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the operators of the coal-powered car ferry operators hope to avoid U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules against dumping coal ash in the lake by placing the vessel on the national list of historic and cultural landmarks, and that a National Park Service advisory panel voted to approve the ferry’s nomination on Wednesday.

Coal ash contains mercury, arsenic, lead and other health-damaging heavy metals and the S.S. Badger dumps at least 509 tons overboard each year.

In letters to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Sen. Jay Rockeller (D-WV), who chairs the committee that oversees the Coast Guard, Durbin argued against exempting the vessels from EPA rules.

“We cannot let Historic Landmark status be used to evade the federal regulations we rely on to protect public health and the environment,” Durbin wrote to Salazar, who has the final say on the Badger’s application. “This Great Lake cannot take any more toxic dumping, no matter how historic or quaint the source may be.”

Last Friday the U.S. House approved an amendment to the Coast Guard budget that would allow the S.S. Badger to continue its current mode of operating for the life of the vessel.

Durbin asked Rockefeller to remove that amendment from the Coast Guard budget when it comes before his committee.

Members of Occupy Grand Rapids are planning to spend Friday protesting state plans to privatize careworker positions at the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans.

In a Facebook post the group says that it will gather from 4:00 – 7:00 pm at the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans on 3000 Monroe Avenue Northeast.

Lets stand up on Veterans Day. Lets stand up for our vets who deserve the best care we can offer. Lets stand up and say we will not be held hostage by these profits before people policies. Tell Snyder that we will not stand for experienced, hard working, public health care employees being replaced by inexperienced and underpaid workers. Caring for our vets is such an important job that it should be compensated with benefits and a fair living wage.

The Grand Rapids Press reports the state is trying to privatize 170 unionized caregiver postions at the facility, which is one of only two in the state for veterans.

A five-year contract worth nearly $6.6 million has been awarded to Grand Rapids-based J2S Group HealthForce. State officials have argued the move will save more than $4.2 million, an estimate union leaders dispute because of turnover, training and other costs.

A resident of the Grand Rapids home has sued to stop the privatization and an Ingham County judge issued a temporary restraining order against the shift. State leaders are challenging that court ruling.

Voters in Detroit have approved a set of city charter revisions aimed at protecting against the cronyism and corruption that have long plagued that city.

The Detroit Free Press reports that Proposal C, the ballot proposal to revise the city’s 1997 charter, passed by a nearly 20 point margin.

The revisions approved Tuesday include creating a Board of Ethics and Office of Inspector General to investigate alleged ethical or criminal violations. Also, the council now will be able to remove elected and appointed officials on the recommendation of the Board of Ethics.

The revised charter also requires lobbyists and contractors to reveal financial connections with elected officials.

It also includes council elections by district, which already had been approved by voters last year. The revised charter, however, requires candidates to live in their district for a year.

The revisions were drafted by a charter commission that was elected in 2009.

Mlive Detroit blogger Jeff Wattrick writes that the charter approval is the culmination of ongoing reform efforts that include the election of Mayor Dave Bing and the 2009 transformation of City Council.

… now Detroit has a new governing document that allows for an elected police commission, an independent Inspector General to investigate ethics issues, district elections for Council, and affords Council some advise-and-consent powers for key mayoral appointees.

All of which is the result of smart decisions by voters. Continued attempts to paint Detroiters as stupid, buffoonish, or incapable of handling their own affairs can only be the result of ignorance and bigotry.

More often than not, Detroit voters are getting it right.