Joe Biden is planning to cancel the permit for the $9bn Keystone XL pipeline project as one of his first acts as president, perhaps as soon as his first day in office, according to a source familiar with his thinking.
Donald Trump had made building the pipeline a central promise of his presidential campaign. Biden, who will be inaugurated on Wednesday, was vice-president in the Obama administration when it rejected the project as contrary to its efforts to combat the climate crisis.
The words “rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit” appear on a list of executive actions likely to be scheduled for the first day of Biden’s presidency, according to an earlier report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Biden had previously vowed to scrap the oil pipeline’s presidential permit if he became president.
The project, which would move oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to Nebraska, had been slowed by legal issues in the US. It also faced opposition from environmentalists seeking to check the expansion of Canada’s oil sands by opposing new pipelines to move its crude to refineries.
Briefly: All gas and oil pipelines are utterly irrelevant since advent of new zero-emission revolutionary technology.
