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No Keystone XL in 2019, Says TransCanada/TC Energy

Here’s another great example of how Donald Trump never really delivers on his big talk.

On April 10, Trump made a show of signing two executive orders (hey, have you noticed how rarely he ever signs actual legislation, approved by Congress, the way the Founding Fathers intended to take place in the democracy they created instead of the monarchy from which they seceded) that he said would speed up pipeline construction:

In the latest move by the Trump administration to boost fossil fuels and cut back on regulations, President Donald Trump announced two executive orders on Wednesday that are aimed at cutting “unnecessary red tape” for American energy companies by making it difficult for states to block projects by using the Clean Water Act.

“My action today will cut through destructing permitting delays and denials,” Trump said at the International Union of Operating Engineers International Training and Education Center in Crosby, Texas [Meredith McGraw and Tessa Weinberg, “Trump’s Executive Order Paves a Smooth Path for Oil Pipelines,” ABC News, 2019.04.10].

But Trump’s “action” had zero effect on TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline. TransCanada (pardon me, TC Energy—see below) announced today that Keystone XL won’t get laid this year:

TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta into the U.S. was first proposed in 2008, rejected by then-president Barack Obama in 2015, approved by President Donald Trump in 2016 and again in March, but remains on hold awaiting court rulings in Montana and Nebraska.

The court delays mean the project will not be able to start construction in the U.S. this year, Paul Miller, president of liquids pipelines, confirmed during an afternoon conference call with financial analysts.

The project could still be unfinished if a new federal government is elected in the U.S. in 2020, he added, but it’s hoped all permits and approvals will be in hand by then and a new administration won’t affect bringing the project on stream [Dan Healing, “TransCanada Shareholders Agree to Drop ‘Canada’ from the Name,” Global News, 2019.05.03].

After President Barack Obama killed Keystone XL for very good reasons three and a half years ago, all the Don’s hoarse shouts and the Don’s Just-for-Men can’t put Keystone XL together again.

Oh yeah: 99.6% of investors at today’s TransCanada shareholder meeting in Calgary voted to change the company’s name to TC Energy, to better reflect the company’s continent-spanning operations and to stop crimping United States Republicans’ message that Keystone XL promotes “North American” energy and is thus worth surrendering American property rights to a Canadian corporation:

The Calgary-based energy company officially relinquished its long-standing TransCanada moniker on Friday in favour of a new name that reflects its growing reach in Mexico and the United States.

Speaking at the company’s annual meeting, CEO Russ Girling insists the company isn’t shifting its strategy, nor planning to relocate out of Canada.

…TC Energy has been aggressively expanding its business across the continent in recent years, building oil and natural gas pipelines across North America, particularly after the 2016 takeover of Houston-based Columbia Pipeline Group.

Slightly more than half of the company’s earnings flowed from the United States last year, while about half of its employees work outside Canada [Chris Varcoe, “With a Snazzy New Name, TransCanada Stays Put and Faces Familiar Pipeline Woes,” Calgary Herald, 2019.05.03].

Call the black-snake charmer whatever you want: TransCanada is still selling a pipeline that South Dakota doesn’t need… and their oil pressure is dropping.

22 Comments

  1. Debbo 2019-05-03 21:31

    It’s mere coincidence that TC is a name more conducive to marketing in the USA, mere coincidence. Oh, and equally true is that pipelines never leak. Ever. Trust TC.

  2. Roger Cornelius 2019-05-03 21:35

    Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

  3. jerry 2019-05-04 01:40

    In the meantime, those Russian pipes gather rust to self destruct. This deformed snake was never meant to be born and it’s good to be aborted so we don’t row and wade through the muck it would produce.

  4. jerry 2019-05-04 02:17

    trump is the third republican president to use treason to get elected to he white house.

    Nixon taught them all how to get’r done against LBJ. Probably old marines and soldiers like myself, could have avoided Vietnam without using bone spurs as an excuse to shirk duty. But republican treachery wins over honor in an open society. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461

    Reagan pulled the same kind of trick with Iran against Carter and that still sticks with us today. Remember, just after the election, the hostage situation was “solved” It only took guns and drugs to make it happen. Nancy was late “Just say no to drugs” should have been said to here husband.

    trump and Putin show that the plan works well to keep Americans poor and under served. trump cannot keep his word on anything to the American people that is meaningful, only despair and the gimmickry of a manipulated economy that is serving only companies like this one.

  5. Buckobear 2019-05-04 06:39

    Although “Keystone XL won’t get laid this year,” seems like we’re still the ones getting f***ed.

  6. mike from iowa 2019-05-04 07:50

    TC is still doing prep work, amirite? Drumpf says he would renegotiate the KXL pipeline so America gets moar money and then he started in on making TC use more American steel and bragging about 28000 construction jobs

  7. John Dale 2019-05-04 08:32

    “never really delivers” – only a Sith speaks in absolutes. :)

    So, we’re criticizing Trump for not building the pipeline? I shudder to think what kind of flak he’d take if he was able to build it. Of course, as you state, it is not Trump, it is Canadian stock marketeers white washing the identities of American investors selling out their neighbors. That’s right, “limousine liberals and conservatives by day” are camped-out right next to us in our communities, taking profits from these projects through foreign stock exchanges, and we don’t even realize it.

    Is that treason?

    I think you’re right we don’t need this pipeline since DAPL can probably carry the load for awhile. Trump is going to win another term .. just like last time, that’ll be the time to shove it through.

    Until we can start shipping iPhones, drones, and Internet infrastructure for broadcasting pipeline construction from the asteroid belt, I’m afraid that burning dinosaur juice is the only option.

    Change my mind,

    John

    “Some people think I don’t know how to do SEO. The truth is, I choose not to.”

  8. leslie 2019-05-04 11:32

    Fantastic. Pivot from fossil fuels might save humanity.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/ben-wittes-five-conclusions-mueller-report/588259/

    Trump’s abuse of power in SD should be in Mueller’s report evidencing criminal obstruction and impeachable conduct.

    Firing Comey, who took HRC out at the knees a week before the election, for refusing unethical loyalty, and refusing to join the “no collusion” refrain, and creating bullying Rod Rosenstein to create a pretext paper trail. This was an abuse of power: a sustained demand for a wholly self-interested investigative outcome; a willingness to disrupt a crucial institution to get that outcome, to retaliate against an official who would not deliver it, and to set the entire apparatus of the White House to lying about the reason for the action; and the recruitment of senior Justice Department officials to create a pretextual paper trail to support it.

    This is impeachable conduct.

    After Trump is out of office, “Substantial evidence indicates that in repeatedly urging [White House counsel] McGahn to dispute that he was ordered to have the Special Counsel terminated, the President acted for the purpose of influencing McGahn’s account in order to deflect or prevent scrutiny of the President’s conduct toward the investigation.”

    Trump’s “repeated efforts to get McGahn to create a record denying that the President had directed him to remove the Special Counsel” would have “the natural tendency to constrain McGahn from testifying truthfully or to undermine his credibility” if he told the truth. This crime requires Trump specifically intended obstruction of justice. After the news broke that Trump had sought to get … Don McGahn to fire the special counsel, Trump sought to get McGahn to deny the story. He also sought to get him to create an internal record denying the story. McGahn refused.

    “Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s effort to have Sessions limit the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct.”

    The President asked Corey Lewandowski to convey a message to AG Jeff Sessions to … reassert control over the special counsel’s investigation, make a speech in which he would declare that the president didn’t do anything wrong and that the special counsel’s investigation of him was “very unfair,” and to restrict the special counsel’s investigation to interference in future elections. In other words, the President tried to get a private citizen to lobby the attorney general on his behalf for substantive outcomes to an investigation in which he had the deepest of personal interests …. Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe because he had an actual conflict of interest in the matter …. the attorney general was ethically barred from “unrecusal”.

    Ditto the effort to get Sessions to investigate Hillary Clinton.

    Paul Manafort, in which Trump dangled the possibility of a pardon and praised Manafort’s bravery for not “flipping,” and in which his private counsel (Juliani?) allegedly suggested that Manafort would be taken care of. Notably … Mueller concluded that Manafort had breached his plea deal by failing to cooperate and by lying to investigators. So the reality here may well be that the president’s obstructive conduct did, in fact, obstruct the investigation. The president hinted that Manafort should not “flip” and that he would take care of him—and Manafort acted in a fashion consistent with his relying on those assurances … is criminal.

    It is also a grotesque abuse of power for impeachment purposes. The spectacle of a president publicly and repeatedly urging witnesses not to cooperate with federal law enforcement and entertaining the notion of using his Article II powers to relieve them of criminal jeopardy or consequences if they do not cooperate is one of the most singular abuses of the entire Trump presidency.

    This led to/from actions like undoing Obama’s determination against KXL.

  9. John Dale 2019-05-04 12:46

    Focusing on Trump ignores the root cause of the problem.

    The rules of the game have been established by both parties in the last 50 years.

    “New world order” is a pretext to genocide, and all is fair in love and war.

    The tactical shifts like DAPL and Keystone XL are symptomatic, emblematic, and unstoppable.

    When the right to free speech, thought, assembly are successfully taken, a new dark age will be quickly ushered in. Our fights should not concentrate on energy, environment, but culture and human rights (which are admittedly intertwined).

    Trump, Bush, Obama – they are all symptoms.

    At our own peril, ignore that global banks pit us against one another. Global banking culture is an affront to humanity.

    Trump is on the field of play, outspoken against criminal cartels, representing a cartel of his own, engaged in an epic titanic battle beyond the comprehension of most. We hear proverbial mortar blasts (twitter, MSM), but we really have little understanding of the strategic ramifications of various signals coming from Washington and what Trump’s long game has become (destruction of the Federal reserve and the preservation of his family).

    There are truths about resource consumption that are immutable and tragic. Until we can drop panels from orbit, harvested and manufactured on the trip back from the asteroid belt, we should only use EV to the extent it can be optimized and researched. Otherwise, kiss the black hills goodbye as uranium manufacturers scramble to power the plants that will be needed to power cars at scale (egads!). I think there is a hidden tiger in the woods with EV, anyway – humans are sensitive to EMF. Electric motors emit a lot of that. Add in 5G and everyone will have a new pet brain tumor to name. The global banks will push brain tumors like the pet rock – useless but profitable.

    The truth; a tough pill to swallow regardless of one’s political dispositions.

    What’s to be done?

    PROTECT FREE SPEECH.

  10. Charlene Lund 2019-05-04 12:47

    Does anyone know if there is a deadline to the permits granted by the SDPUC? I am hoping KXL will run out of time to build when the permits expire.

  11. John Dale 2019-05-04 12:53

    Mining interests, owned and operated by global banking cartels, have calendars, secretaries, coordinators, and cash.

    They know the dates, and they know your dates. They have recon from every email account, household, bank account, blog, website, legality, and newspaper.

    Until they are surveilled as much as we are, or until we can address the asymmetric information capabilities, there is little to be done.

    One example of an action that can be taken: If I can manage, I’m going to test water and publish the results. I believe history has a right to know the moment we lose access to naturally clean water, should that ever occur (maybe it has happened already, but my newspaper hasn’t reported it, perhaps because global banks have hooks in them, too).

  12. mike from iowa 2019-05-04 16:08

    Debbo, can’t wait for ammosexuAls to start calling TC wanting to order interchangeable barrels for their favorite single shot Thompson Center Contender rifles. To be a fly on that wall.

  13. John Dale 2019-05-04 16:58

    Debbo – I didn’t even know that existed before you said something, but I would love to have one of those! :D

  14. mike from iowa 2019-05-04 18:52

    Leslie, Mueller said he didn’t charge Drumpf because he wasn’t sure there intent to commit a crime, which is the same thing Comey said of HRC and wingnuts came unscrewed from reality.

    This from Fact Check is interesting if you like doublespeak from Barr. https://www.factcheck.org/2019/05/barrs-testimony-in-context/

  15. leslie 2019-05-04 19:50

    MFI, thx, your cite provided, if I am following:

    Leahy: And Mr. Mueller found the written answers to be inadequate, is that correct?
    Barr: Uh, I think he wanted additional, but he never sought it.
    Leahy: And the president never testified.
    Barr: Well, he [Mueller] never pushed it.

    Remind me what Comey said.

    Drying out any yet, across the state line? Looks like J. Kornman will not be declaring you an alien anytime soon:)

  16. mike from iowa 2019-05-04 20:11

    On the cusp of being able to till garden and rain/thunderboomers are in forecast. Little Sioux River has been at flood stage or close for a month. Record for duration and record high flood levels.

  17. jerry 2019-05-05 03:06

    Happy Cinco De Mayo, without the Mexican victory over France, the South may have won the American Civil War!!

  18. chris 2019-05-05 12:23

    Hey, that’s Al Swearengen with the rifle @ 1:50!

  19. mike from iowa 2019-05-05 12:27

    OT but history repeats itself. Yesterday’s Kentucky Derby was the second race in three years where the orange colored, second place holder was awarded first prize.

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