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.

The House Republican leadership says it will delay approving the creation of a statewide health insurance exchange, in part to await the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court hearing on the constitutionality of the health care reform law which mandates the creation of the exchanges.

Rep. Mike Shirkey (R-Clark Lake) tells the Jackson Citizen Patriot, “There’s no interest in acting quickly on this particular bill.”

The legislation passed the Michigan Senate — which has a supermajority of Republicans — last week. Gov. Rick Snyder, also a Republican, has called on the legislature to pass the bills by the end of the year.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on the case brought by states — including Michigan — about the constitutionality of the law passed nearly two years ago. A ruling is expected in the summer of 2012, in the heat of the race for president.

Rachel Maddow had a segment about last weekend’s prayer rally at Ford Field that includes video footage of organizer Lou Engle saying more crazy and extremist things. Video below the fold.

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TransCanada, owners of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, have agreed to reroute the pipeline to avoid the Nebraska Sandhills, a particularly sensitive ecosystem.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Sen. Mike Flood, speaker of the Nebraska Legislature, announced on the floor that TransCanada Corp. would move the pipeline to another area of the state. Sources in Nebraska said it would likely be located farther east, nearer an existing Keystone pipeline that already carries Canadian tar sands oil into the U.S…

“We were at the Capitol building, they were in special session, and Speaker Flood stopped everything and said that everything was over, and TransCanada has voluntarily moved the pipeline out of the Sandhills of Nebraska,” said Todd Cone, a rancher who has been one of many battling the route through central Nebraska.

The Nebraska legislature was considering legislation that could have forced the project to be rerouted.

Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm appeared on CNN with Fareed Zakaria recently and pointed out that during her administration, all the tax breaks and wage concessions offered to businesses didn’t keep them from leaving for other countries.

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.”

A controversial prayer rally took place at Ford Field Friday and Saturday but many mainline Christian leaders protested the event, calling out organizers for their anti-Muslim, anti-gay and even anti-Catholic views.

The Detroit Free Press reports:

Organizers for Engle’s prayer event were expecting 50,000 to 70,000 people to show up, but the crowd size was markedly smaller than that, with much of the stadium unfilled. They also were heavily targeting African Americans in Detroit, but most of the crowd was white.

“Their message is not one of inclusion; it’s of hate,” said Jennifer Teed of Detroit, who opposed Engle’s prayer event. “I don’t see how that’s religious.”

She held up a sign that read, “All are people” and “Standing on the Side of Love.”

The protest against Engle featured Catholic, Baptist and Methodist pastors from Detroit, as well as gay rights and women’s activists. Chanting “Stop the hate” and “Spread the love,” the protesters said the prayer rally inside the stadium promotes division and intolerance.

“God did not call us to hate,” said the Rev. Charles Williams of Historic Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit.

Organizers of the rally have made many statements of an extreme nature in the past, including claiming that a member of the Michigan Senate gave them access to the chambers at the Capitol to declare a divorce decree between American and Baal.

Defenders of the Keystone XL pipeline have argued that the project is important for creating up to 20,000 new jobs in a struggling economy, but TransCanada, which owns the pipeline, said late last week that the number of permanent jobs would only number in the hundreds.

This is video of an interview on CNN with Robert Jones, VP of the pipeline for TransCanada:

Critics have argued that even the number of temporary construction jobs for the project have been inflated by the company.

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.