Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is promising to cancel the intensely controversial Keystone XL pipeline after he enters the White House in January.
“The policy director for Biden’s campaign said Monday that cancelling Keystone XL was the right decision in 2015, when Biden, then vice-president, attended a White House event where then-president Barack Obama cancelled the permit,” CBC reports. “The emphatic statement from Biden’s campaign ends months of ambiguity, as Biden had not joined other Democratic candidates in pledging to revoke the permit.”
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“It’s still the right decision now. In fact, it’s even more important today,” Stef Feldman told the national broadcaster. “Biden strongly opposed the Keystone pipeline in the last administration, stood alongside President Obama and Secretary [of State John] Kerry to reject it in 2015, and will proudly stand in the Roosevelt Room [of the White House] again as president and stop it for good by rescinding the Keystone XL pipeline permit.”
“Hell ya! Go @JoeBiden, thanks for standing with the people over big oil,” tweeted Bold Nebraska founder Jane Kleeb.
“When Biden wins, KXL is finished, dead in the water, stake-in-the-heart dead,” added Kleeb, who also chairs the Nebraska Democratic Party, in an email to CBC. “Biden just provided the last nail in the KXL pipeline coffin.”
A spokesperson for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland responded that KXL “is a good project that will create jobs for Canadians, and it fits within our climate plan.”
Commodities economist Rory Johnston, managing director at Price Street in Toronto, maintained Canada will need two new pipelines over the next five to seven years, in spite of the massive hits the fossil industry has taken from the Saudi-Russian oil price war and the economic crash brought on by the global pandemic—and notwithstanding the almost ridiculously low price of competing renewable energy and energy storage options.
“In terms of the bellwether of the political appetite for support for the oilsands south of the border, I think it’s obviously problematic,” he told CBC. “The fact that this is coming up—again—as a major political issue in a major American presidential election speaks to just how polarizing opinions are about the Canadian oil patch,” and “that’s a bigger problem than any one pipeline.”
