Mixed reception
Trump announces at White House that he has approved the Keystone XL pipeline
Canada’s hotly debated, longdelayed Keystone XL pipeline received its elusive U.S. presidential permit from Donald Trump on Friday, eight years and six months after the initial application for it to cross the American border.
The president made the announcement at the White House.
He was accompanied by the president of TransCanada Corp., the Calgary-based pipeline company that has wrestled with lawsuits, resistant landowners, protesters and Washington Democrats.
“You’ve been waiting for a long, long time,” Trump said to TransCanada’s Russ Girling. “It’s a great day for American jobs and a historic moment for North America and energy independence. This announcement is part of a new era of American energy policy that will lower costs for American families ... reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create thousands of jobs.”
That doesn’t guarantee the pipeline gets built.
That’s because the removal of one big obstacle in Washington hasn’t done anything to eliminate other ones still sprinkled around the American Midwest, where opponents still hope to drown the project in protests and lawsuits.
The likely epicentre of the coming battle is Nebraska, the very place where opposition to Keystone began, years ago. TransCanada must still reach deals with some landowners there, it lacks a state permit and faces possible court challenges there and in South Dakota.
The markets demonstrated their skepticism by yawning at Friday’s news: TransCanada’s share value crept up barely one per cent, and hasn’t increased from its October price before Trump was elected.
Keystone opponents swiftly linked their cause to the broader anti-Trump movement.
“This isn’t game over, it’s game on,” Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, said in a statement that insulted Trump. “Now we have a president who is deeply beholden to the oil industry and will do anything they ask, so this approval is no surprise ... Put your tiny hands in the air, Trump, and back away from the climate.”
Trump, meanwhile, has been eager to talk about projects like Keystone. His young presidency has been consumed lately by problematic issues: an unpopular health reform and Russian election-meddling. Even as he made the Keystone announcement, reporters in the Oval Office shouted questions about the potential collapse of the health bill. At that very moment, networks were carrying a congressional committee announcement that Trump’s former campaign manager would be questioned in its Russia probe.
Trump says he wants to move onto jobs and the economy.
Keystone XL would mean thousands of temporary construction jobs and a permanent, annual boost in tax revenues for communities along the route, which would stretch from Canada to an already completed southern portion now pumping oil to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.