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In a demonstration this month against a pipeline pumping heavy Canadian oil to the U.S., actress and activist Jane Fonda raised a poster with the image of Joe Biden. He said, “President Biden, which side are you on?”
The message is that as a result of protests against the expansion of the Enbridge Line 3 project in Minnesota, Biden is receiving an increasing problem.
The president has put pressure on the campaign agents to intervene to stop the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure, but he is reluctant to take a hard-line approach.
On the first day he took office, Biden threw permission for the Keystone XL pipeline, a $ 8 billion totem project that would also take raw Canadian to the Gulf Coast refineries. abandoned This month.
But in other projects it has not been so decisive. Activists were expected to lead the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the direction of both the Line 3 project and the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) permits, which transport oil south of the Bakken shale in North Dakota. In both cases, his administration objected, and the courts ruled.
He also directed the dispute between Canada and Michigan over another pipeline in Enbridge, Line 5, as the Calgary company disbanded the state governor’s order to close it.
This approach has driven campaigns.
“Biden’s climate credibility is in line,” said Bill McKibben, founder of climate pressure group 350.org. “I think it’s pretty clear at the moment that only the federal government can do what needs to be done on line 3, in the DAPL and elsewhere.”
The President was presented on a platform to address climate change. However, he did take a few steps, such as joining the Paris climate agreement, proposing unprecedented federal aid for clean energy, and suspending new drilling leases in the federal territories. Entrepreneurs want to take a tougher line against the industry that promised a “transition”. away from ”.
The pipelines have become an incentive point between climate activists and the oil and natural gas industry. The former believes that the new projects will encourage greater production of fossil fuels at a time when the world should switch to cleaner energy sources in the coming decades. The latter continues to be essential for these projects to continuously supply affordable fuel. US oil demand averages 20m per barrel per day.
The success of TC Energy’s Keystone XL pipeline campaign has pushed it much further against other projects in the US.
“The idea was this: you can’t organize people around hundreds of coal plants, but you can choose something high-income that you could try to kill,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, director general of the Climate Policy Laboratory at Tufts University. Fletcher School.
Some campaigns have proven to be effective. The Atlantic Coastal Pipeline, which would carry natural gas from West Virginia wells to east coast services, was zanga last year, after lawsuits, costs went up. DAPL began work in 2017 despite intense protests, but its future is now in a new environmental review, after avoiding what the courts have ordered. turn off in the first year.
Last week the courts gave environmentalists another victory as they took a new approach in their efforts to disrupt the new construction. The Environmental Protection Fund argued that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) did not establish the necessary market demand for the Spire STL pipeline in the Midwest because it relied on contracts with an affiliated company to prove the need. The court accepted it.
“It’s more of an arrow shaking opponents,” said Paul Patterson, an analyst at Glenrock Associates. “It looks like more environmentalists are chasing the economy.”
Richard Glick FERC chair, who appeared against the initial certificate, he said the resolution stressed the need to re-examine how the commission assessed “new inter-state gas pipelines” with a “legal approach to assessing the legal need”.
Despite the reluctance, pipeline managers have argued that some cases have been given too much attention while they continue to build behind it.
“Most people are focused on shiny objects only,” said John Stoody, vice president of the Oil Pipe Lines Association. “There’s a huge amount of pipe development and construction going on in the U.S. every day.”
Over the five-year period from 2015 to 2019, 16,000 miles of oil pipelines and 44,000 thousand gas pipelines were built, according to the U.S. transport department – 8% and 3% increase, respectively.
Biden has tightened some environmental requirements affecting new pipelines. The Environmental Protection Agency says it will empower states to deny water quality permits to infrastructure projects – giving them an effective veto – after the Trump administration dilute their authority in that sense.
On line 5, the Army Corps of Engineers said last week that it would a more rigorous the environmental study, Enbridge said, will delay plans to upgrade the line.
“I think the licensing process will be increasingly rigorous and robust on the front line, allowing the risk to return to where it was before the Trump administration,” said Christi Tezak, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners. Obtaining permits would be more difficult, but they would be more legally sustainable when assigned, he added.
However, when it comes to taking a stand on individual projects like Line 3, Line 5 and DAPL, the President is on the right track. Government lawyers, who filed a lawsuit on June 23, said the Army Corps of Engineers had properly assessed the impact of the Enbridge Line 3 project and asked the court to remove the inconvenience from local tribes and environmentalists.
Previous administrations had similar dilemmas between environmental and community interests and the country’s energy security, Jaff said from the Climate Policy Lab.
“So far no one has done well,” he said. “What I would say about road administration is that they are trying to correct it well and correcting it well means that everyone will probably be unhappy.”
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