Rich Lowry of National Review Online explains why new President Biden’s decision about a new pipeline marks a slap at Canada.
Poor Justin Trudeau. The Canadian prime minister must have been relieved to be done with President Donald Trump, only to learn that Joe Biden plans to tell Canada to pound sand as one of his first priorities. …
… Biden wants to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline immediately, a pointless and economically destructive gesture meant to appease his party’s climate fanatics.
The multi-billion-dollar project to run from Alberta to Nebraska was first proposed years ago in the naive faith that two adjoining, friendly countries could cooperate on a big, mutually beneficial infrastructure project.
That was before the Keystone XL became a hate totem for the Left, which makes it sound like the pipeline might be the tipping point toward inevitable planetary destruction, among its myriad other alleged sins.
President Barack Obama denied a cross-border permit for the project in 2015. President Trump quickly reversed course. And now Biden is likely going to reverse Trump’s reversal.
It’s a symptom of our time that a major investment that deserves some stability in American decision-making has become a shuttlecock between outgoing and incoming administrations — and been caught in a nightmarish trap of litigation and red tape all the while.
It’s not clear why adding a new pipeline to an existing network built in previous phases of the Keystone project would be thought such a heinous environmental crime (Keystone XL is the fourth phase). Nor why this particular leg of pipeline is considered so threatening in a country that already has a couple of million miles of pipeline.
The charge is that Keystone XL, by making it easier for Canada to export its “dirty” oil from the oil sands of Alberta, will herald the beginning of a fossil-fuels apocalypse.
