Judge halts Keystone XL pipeline work

A federal district judge in Montana has blocked progress on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, saying the Trump administration’s justification for approving it last year was incomplete. The decision is a major victory for environmentalists and indigenous rights groups.

Judge Brian Morris of the District Court for the District of Montana overturned President Trump’s permit for the Canada-to-Texas pipeline, which the president had signed shortly after taking office last year.

“Morris’s ruling repeatedly faulted the Trump administration for reversing former President Obama’s 2015 denial of the pipeline permit without proper explanation”, wrote Timothy Cama in The Hill. “He said the State Department “simply discarded” climate change concerns related to the project.”

Cama added, “The Trump administration had tried to argue that federal courts didn’t even have the right to review Trump’s approval, saying that it extended from his constitutional authority over border crossings. The court rejected that argument.”

Morris concluded that the State Department hadn’t properly accounted for factors such as low oil prices, the cumulative impacts of greenhouse gases from Keystone and other pipelines and the risk of oil spills.

“The major spills that occurred between 2014 and 2017 qualify as significant.”, Morris added. ”The department would have evaluated the spills in the 2014 [environmental review] had the information been available.”

The judge also cautioned that the State Department hadn’t properly justified the reversal of its 2015 decision, first rejecting the pipeline under the Obama administration, before then approving it in 2017 under Trump.

“The department’s 2017 conclusory analysis that climate-related impacts from Keystone subsequently would prove inconsequential and its corresponding reliance on this conclusion as a centerpiece of its policy change required the department to provide a ‘reasoned explanation,’ Morris said, citing court precedent on similar policy changes.

“The department instead simply discarded prior factual findings related to climate change to support its course reversal.”

Morris also took issue with the State Department’s conclusions re the pipeline’s impacts on endangered species and suggested the department may need to redo its cultural resource examinations along the pipeline’s route.

The Sierra Club, one of several litigants against the pipeline, welcomed the court’s decision.

“Today's ruling makes it clear once and for all that it's time for TransCanada to give up on their Keystone XL pipe dream,” Sierra Club senior attorney Doug Hayes said in a statement.

“The Trump administration tried to force this dirty pipeline project on the American people, but they can’t ignore the threats it would pose to our clean water, our climate, and our communities.”

TransCanada had planned to start construction on the 1,179-mile pipeline early next year, but this decision would seem to throw those plans into doubt.

Neither TransCanada nor the State Department have responded to requests for comment thus far.

(Image courtesy Farron Cousins/desmogblog)