U.S. president-elect Joe Biden has indicated plans to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline permit via executive action on his first day in office, sources confirmed to CBC News on Sunday.
A purported briefing note from the Biden transition team mentioning the plan was widely circulated over the weekend after being shared by the incoming president's team with U.S. stakeholders.
The words "Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit" appear on a list of executive actions supposedly scheduled for Day 1 of Biden's presidency.
Lots of Canadians are not okay with this:
Former TC Energy executive Dennis McConaghy is not surprised the project is among the first decisions by the new administration.
"I have consistently said Biden would indulge in this rescinding of the permit immediately because it's something he has to do largely to follow through for expectations of his political base and many of his donors," McConaghy told CBC's Kyle Bakx on Sunday.
The decision would likely lead to disappointment in the Canadian oilpatch, even after so many other setbacks for the project over the last decade.
"Ideally the project should have been completed and put into operation during the Trump administration," McConaghy said. "It's a very audacious thing that is being done here by the Biden administration."
Kirsten Hillman, Canada's ambassador to the U.S., said in a statement sent to The Canadian Press that the pipeline expansion fits with Canada's climate plan.
"The Government of Canada continues to support the Keystone XL project and the benefits that it will bring to both Canada and the United States," she said.
"Not only has the project itself changed significantly since it was first proposed, but Canada's oilsands production has also changed significantly. Per-barrel oilsands GHG emissions have dropped 31 per cent since 2000, and innovation will continue to drive progress."
Jazz Shaw at Hot Air gets into some of the specific fronts on this would be a wrecking-ball move:
This move would cause significant damage to the stakeholders in the pipeline, leading to possible liabilities for the federal government. They played by the rules and jumped through all of the required hoops to obtain that permit and then began investing heavily in the work based on their belief in the good faith of the United States government. It’s not hard to imagine them going to court to recover their losses and finding judges amenable to the idea. That would leave the American taxpayers holding the bill for this fiasco.
Let’s not forget that large sections of the pipeline are already complete, including portions that cross the border. What happens to all of that pipeline? Will it just be left to rust or will the federal government attempt to force the pipeline’s owners to spend even more money to rip everything out?
As I mentioned above, there are literally tens of thousands of jobs on the line here, ranging from the workers who are directly engaged in the construction of the pipeline to all of the supporting industries that make such work possible. Joe Biden is signaling that he’s ready to come into office and evaporate a huge number of jobs “on day one.” Wasn’t he only recently complaining about the number of people who are already out of work because of the pandemic?
Somebody who holds elected office in the United States needs to speak the plain truth about energy policy, and not just once. It needs to be driven home repeatedly.
Dense and consistently available energy forms are by definition far less expensive than diffuse and intermittent forms. The latter are not viable in the marketplace without government subsidization. And it's fine to use the former all we want. It is not putting the global climate in peril.
The above paragraph needs to be stated emphatically in debates between candidates, on the House and Senate floors, in television appearances and in columns and articles.
The entire climate alarmism movement has been nothing but a nauseating exercise in preening and self-congratulation over how much it cares about humanity in general, the lives of actual individual human beings be damned.
Let us just hope that the pushback and court cases that arise from this shut down not the pipeline, but rather Biden's blatant assault on human advancement.
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