Keystone

Is Keystone dead?

Greens are ready to declare victory as TransCanada asks the Obama administration to pause its review of the oil pipeline project.

By Elana Schor

TransCanada on Monday asked the Obama administration to pause its review of the Keystone XL pipeline, a shift in strategy that could push the fate of the project past the 2016 elections and prompted gleeful environmentalists to declare victory.

“Clearly TransCanada has lost and they recognize that. It’s one of the great victories for this movement in decades," said Bill McKibben, whose anti-Keystone campaign galvanized a new vanguard of climate change activists under the banner of his group 350.org.

On MSNBC, the liberal talk show host Rachel Maddow declared: "Keystone is dead."

But TransCanada's gambit can also be seen as a bet on the outcome of the next presidential election.

Greens urged President Barack Obama to make it official and refuse the Canadian energy company's request for a hiatus — saying he should instead kill the Alberta-to-Texas project while he has a chance ahead of the United Nations’ climate conference in Paris that starts later this month.

"It’s time for the current umpire, President Obama, to reject this project once and for all, and go to Paris as the first world leader to stop a major project because of its effect on the climate,” McKibben added.

The project, under review by the State Department for more than seven years, has provoked a sharp political divide. Hillary Clinton and her Democratic presidential rivals all oppose the pipeline, while the GOP is uniformly championing it.

As recently as three years ago, the pipeline appeared to be on a glide path toward Obama's endorsement, despite protests that include the arrests of more than 1,100 anti-Keystone activists outside the White House gates. But its political difficulties in both countries have only mounted, including last month's defeat of Canada's most outspoken Keystone supporter, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The plea by the Calgary-based pipeline giant, which recently cut jobs amid swooning crude prices that have walloped Canada's oil patch, promises to further elevate Keystone as a presidential campaign issue. That's because TransCanada's request for a Keystone pause cites an obscure Nebraska regulatory process that won't be complete for another seven months to a year — potentially putting the Canada-to-Texas pipeline's future in the hands of Obama's successor.

Stopping the review of a permit for Keystone to cross the U.S.-Canada border "will allow a decision on the permit to be made later based on certainty with respect to the route of the pipeline," TransCanada CEO Russ Girling wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday.

The climate change activists who have fought the pipeline for more than four years cried foul at TransCanada's Nebraska turnabout, urging the administration to reject its request for a suspended review.

"This is nothing more than another desperate and cynical attempt by TransCanada to build their dirty pipeline someday if they get a climate denier in the White House in 2017," Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters, said in a statement. "President Obama and Secretary Kerry have all the information they need to reject this dangerous pipeline, and we are counting on them to do just that.”

Nebraska has long been the proving ground for the battle over Keystone, despite the Washington lobbying dollars spent by the pipeline's oil-industry backers and environmentalist opponents. TransCanada recently shifted its strategy to welcome a review of the pipeline's route by the state's independent Public Service Commission as it faced increasingly slim chance of winning the required permit.

The White House reaffirmed earlier Monday that it has no specific timetable for making a final ruling on Keystone, which faces vetting from Obama himself after State finishes its own review.

"Our expectation at this point" is that a decision will come before the president leaves office in 2017, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, "but when exactly that will be, I don’t know at this point."

A State spokesman said the suspension request has been received and is under review. If the department decides to maintain the current course of its Keystone review, it is expected to have nearly completed a "national interest" review that would put the pipeline on Obama's desk for a final ruling — although State is not obligated to say publicly when its internal review has finished.

Keystone's supporters billed TransCanada's move as the only viable option for a company facing the loss of billions of dollars already invested in Keystone after a review that's lasted more than seven years.

"It is clear President Obama was going to deny the permit" for the pipeline, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), one of Keystone's most vocal Capitol Hill backers, said in a statement.

Nebraska's PSC received TransCanada's application for Keystone review last month. The pipeline company faced legal challenges from anti-Keystone landowners that threatened the viability of its previous approval from the Republican governor.