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January 20, 2021
Among the 17 executive actions that President Joe Biden made during his first day in office was signing an executive order canceling the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The order, which was signed on Wednesday afternoon, will end construction on a 1,209-mile pipeline that was designed to carry oil from Canada through multiple states to the Gulf Coast in Texas.
Based on reports that the new administration would cancel the permits, construction on the pipeline was reportedly suspended before the order was signed, according to the Associated Press. “As a result of the expected revocation of the Presidential Permit, advancement of the project will be suspended,” the Canada-based company said in a statement.
Indigenous leaders and environmentalists are urging President Joe Biden to shutdown some of America’s most controversial fossil fuel pipelines, after welcoming his executive order cancelling the Keystone XL (KXL) project. Activists praised Biden’s decision to stop construction of the transnational KXL oil pipeline on his first day in the White House, but they stressed that he must cancel similar polluting fossil fuel projects, including the.
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In his first hours in office, Joe Biden has settledâalmost certainly, once and for allâone of the greatest environmental battles this country has seen. He has cancelled the permit allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to cross the border from Canada into the United States, and the story behind that victory illustrates a lot about where we stand in the push for a fair and working planet.
To review: Keystone XL, a project of the TransCanada Corporation (now TC Energy), was slated to carry oil from Albertaâs tar sands across the country to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. President George W. Bush approved the original Keystone pipeline, and it went into service, early in the Obama years, without any real fuss. A new XL version, announced in 2008, was larger and took a different course across the heartland. And, this time, there was opposition. It came first from indigenous people in Canada, who had watched tar-sand mines lay waste to a vast lands
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January 21, 2021
Pipe is stacked at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline on March 22, 2012 in Cushing, Oklahoma. Credit: Tom Pennington/Getty Images
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American efforts to curb climate change have long avoided measures that would rein in the production of oil and gas, instead relying on reducing consumption of fossil fuels in power plants and automobiles. This dichotomy allowed the nation to catapult into place as the world’s top oil and gas producer, even as domestic greenhouse gas emissions declined.