Biden Cancels Keystone XL’s Pipeline Permit

Feb, 2021 - By SMI

Joe Biden, President of the United States of America is expected to cancel the US$ 9billion Keystone XL’s pipeline permit.

As one of his first actions as the President, Biden plans to cancel the permit of Keystone XL. This is among other plans of broad range of environmental protection activities that Biden looks forward to. This is for the second time that a president has taken a step towards environmental protection. Former president Barack Obama had denied the permit for these pipelines back in 2015 but during the reign of Trump, he reversed that decision and granted a permit.

Through the US$ 8 billion Keystone XL pipeline, 830,000 barrels of crude oil was expected to flow every day. To get the project in Biden’s good books, the company, on January 17, 2021 said it would buy enough renewable energy to equalize the pipeline’s power consumption by the year 2030. The Keystone XL developer suspended work on the pipeline and said that they are extremely disappointed with the decision Biden has made.

Activists, Native American Tribes, Environmentalists have fought to stop the construction of 1,210-mile-long pipeline since a decade. Barack Obama took a step back from the pipeline before adopting the Paris Climate Agreement and said that permitting the pipelines would do very little for the U.S. Economy and would instead lead to an increase in climate change. The pipeline continued to face rejection for several years until Trump approved the permit in 2017.

This is just one of the many plans of Biden to push the U.S. away from the fossil fuels resulting in climate change. The climate change plan Biden made during the campaign includes aims to get the U.S. to ‘100 percent clean energy’ by 2050. Biden also recommitted the U.S. to the Paris Climate Agreement.

Tara Houska, a citizen of Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe and prominent attorney said that she hopes Biden doesn’t just suspend one big project to keep his word made in the campaign and ignores other such projects later which will be opposite of climate leadership. She also said that The Biden administration should continue their climate justice claims by working towards suspending Line 3, Stop Keystone XL, and Stop Dakota Access Pipeline, now.