This good news for Indigenous communities and environmentalists should be tempered with a broader point: These sorts of projects shouldn’t simply be a partisan ping-pong match.Keystone XL has been an on-and-off operation since its introduction. Before the results from the 2014 midterm elections went into effect—the Republican Party won a majority in the Senate—the chamber voted against approving the pipeline. Two months later, under Republican control, the Senate approved it. This prompted President Obama, after vetoing the Senate bill, to shut down the pipeline in November 2015; the following year, as his term concluded, he made a similar decision on DAPL. Yet the moment Trump took office, his first actions included executive orders that expedited the permit approval process for both pipelines. Now, Biden will flip the switch back to “off.”
It would help to have broader policies discouraging new fossil fuel infrastructure; after all, at this point in the climate crisis new gas or oil investments are generally a bad idea. As Alleen Brown wrote for The Intercept in November, the incoming administration has various options to flex its power over fossil fuel infrastructure as a whole, even with limited control of Congress. The best of these is the Financial Stability Oversight Council. The council, created in the wake of the mortgage crisis, is chaired by the secretary of the Treasury Department and is tasked with assessing economic risks and issuing resulting regulations. These regulations could start with a mandatory stress test for banks, focusing on the financial effects of climate change. The council could also enact policies making fossil fuel investments more costly or even limiting the amount that banks can invest in the industries. But like the permits, these regulations could be subject to change with a new treasury secretary.
It doesn’t require a deep knowledge of land-use applications and environmental review processes to grasp that, even after the permits are pulled, Keystone XL is not yet wholly dead. Starting his term by revoking the Keystone permit is an excellent way for Biden to indicate that he’s serious about his campaign’s climate commitments. But unless Congress can deliver legislation that further cements these plans—a tall task given that West Virginia senator and ardent pipeline proponent Joe Manchin will stand as the deciding vote on such bills—we’ll be left with temporary wins via executive order. It’s a step in the right direction, but it will ultimately mean little if we just spin right back around on Inauguration Day in 2025.