After a tortured half-decade-long process, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline on Monday asked the Obama administration to suspend its permit application, plunging the project into a state of open-ended uncertainty.
The proposed project is a $6 billion steel straw that would double the flow of oil from Canada’s tar sands to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. It would also tip the earth toward catastrophic global warming, activists say, and for that reason they’ve fought off approval for years, turning a routine review into a political acid test.
In September, Hillary Clinton came out against the pipeline, after initially indicating support. That put added pressure on the White House to kill the project or risk undermining President Barack Obama’s own high-profile efforts to forge a global response to climate change.
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Now, it seems, TransCanada, the Canadian company behind the pipeline, is temporarily pulling out amid low oil prices and the risk of a permanent rejection. Officially, however, the company is suspending its application only because the company is going through a state-level review process in Nebraska.
“In order to allow time for certainty regarding the Nebraska route, TransCanada requests that the State Department pause in its review of the Presidential Permit application for Keystone XL,” the company said in its request, according to the the Wall Street Journal. “This will allow a decision on the Permit to be made later based on certainty with respect to the route of the pipeline.”
Activists celebrated the suspension of the pipeline, which many saw as a state-sponsored step toward global suicide. It’s designed to slurp the tar sands of Alberta, a repository of heat-trapping carbon so large it could tip the earth toward catastrophic climate change, they say. Tap it and “it’s game over for the planet,” in the words of James Hansen, the former NASA climate scientist.
“Clearly TransCanada has lost and they recognize that,” said Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and a key architect of the movement against Keystone XL. He called TransCanada’s retreat, “one of the great victories for this movement in decades.”








