The New Yorker:

In his first hours in office, Joe Biden has settled—almost certainly, once and for all—one 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 Alberta’s 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 landscape. First Nations leaders, such as Melina Laboucan-Massimo and Clayton Thomas-Muller, along with Native-American leaders on this side of the border—including Tom and Dallas Goldtooth, of the Indigenous Environmental Network—put up strong resistance and joined forces with ranchers whose lands would be bisected by the pipeline. Organizers such as Jane Kleeb, in Nebraska, found small pockets of support within some of the “big green” environmental groups, much of it coördinated by the veteran campaigner Kenny Bruno. In the spring of 2011, the NASA climate scientist James Hansen helped orient the pipeline as a climate-related fight, pointing to the massive amounts of carbon contained in the Canadian tar-sand deposits and making the case that, if they were fully exploited, it would be “game over” for the climate. That brought the climate movement into the picture; a letter (full disclosure: I drafted it) went out in the summer of 2011, asking people to engage in civil disobedience outside the White House.

Go to link