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Keystone XL Fits Biden Agenda, Claims Canadian Pipeliner

By Cory Allen Heidelberger on 2020-11-24

Here’s a funny one: Canadian pipeliner TC Energy, formerly Transcanada, says its long-delayed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline fits perfectly with President-Elect Joe Biden’s plans to revitalize the American economy and energy sector:

The creation of union jobs and support by Indigenous investors will help convince U.S. President-elect Joe Biden that the Keystone XL pipeline fits into his “Build Back Better” agenda, an executive with TC Energy Corp. said Tuesday.

…“We’ve looked at the incoming Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan and the steps that we’ve already taken with Keystone XL, we believe, have positioned it very favorably, particularly as we bring jobs to the economy next year, a key platform for the U.S. government as we recover from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Bevin Wirzba, president of liquids pipelines, said during a webcast from the Calgary-based company’s investor day [“TC Energy Says Keystone XL Pipeline Fits Biden Agenda,” AP via Seattle Times, 2020.11.17].

Obviously Transcanada/TC Energy missed the part about getting millions of jobs from clean-energy projects, not the carbon-emissions hellholes of the Alberta tar sands. They’ve also missed the part about the economy ditching oil with or without President-Elect Joe Biden’s and climate czar John Kerry’s help:

In a report Tuesday, the influential advisory body called the International Energy Agency revised its forecasts for global oil consumption downward, warning that the market outlook is “even more fragile” than expected and that “the path ahead is treacherous.”

It’s the latest in a flurry of diminished forecasts from major energy players. On Monday, oil cartel OPEC slashed its expectations of oil demand, just as Trafigura, a large oil trading company, warned that another large oil glut is building.

And energy giant BP, which has grabbed headlines with its new carbon-neutral commitments, raised the possibility that the world might never again use as much oil as it did before the pandemic [Camila Domonoske, “Oil Demand Has Collapsed, and It Won’t Come Back Any Time Soon,” NPR: All Things Considered, 2020.09.15].

Nonetheless, Transcanada soldiers on, ignoring the perennial lack of a business case for Keystone XL and awarding over $1.6 billion in contracts last month to U.S. pipeline builders (none of them from South Dakota). Transcanada has also thrown a billion dollars at Canadian First Nations to get them to pretend piping tar sands oil across sacred lands is somehow sustainable. Transcanada sounds like it’s as good at deluding itself and others as the current idiot in the White House who illegally rushed their pipeline permit back to life.

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10 Comments

  1. jerry 2020-11-24 09:45

    Kinda like STD fits right into penicillin use.

  2. Mark Anderson 2020-11-24 13:27

    Come on, their Canadians, eternal optimists. Why else would you live in Canada?

  4. John Dale 2020-11-25 16:25

    Will there be a Biden agenda?

    I mean, it’s either Harris or Trump, right?

  6. mike from iowa 2020-11-25 17:25

    Bongowongo is as bat spit crazy as the rest of the right wing nutjobs who have zero credible ev idence about fraud and inflated opinions of themselves. Sounds like our resident troll, donut?

  8. John 2020-11-26 19:58

    The Biden administration’s going to have it’s hands full when gas goes to $3.50 – $4.00 a gallon late in 2021. COVID torpedoed drilling and demand. Energy stock indexes were at 40-year lows. The pendulum will swing back with a vengeance when demand returns. Sure the XL pipeline was / is a bad idea that doesn’t pencil out. It should be cancelled. But the coastal green hotheads will usher in a sweeping republican congress in 2022 if gas stays above $4.00 for long. Changing a century of fossil fuel energy policy will take time. We should all be for the fierce urgency of now – but smartly so we don’t regress in congress.

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