Within hours of his being sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden signed an ambitious series of executive orders to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, undo many of President Trump’s harmful handouts to Big Oil, protect our air and water and treasured public lands, and cancel the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — a dirty, risky project that has increasingly become a symbol of the American government’s willingness to acknowledge the scale of our climate crisis.
The Keystone XL pipeline would have further destabilized our climate by locking in the consumption of oil equivalent to 35 million passenger vehicles per year. When President Obama rejected its permit in 2015, he said that its approval would have undercut American leadership on climate change. At the time, his administration was in the midst of a series of actions aimed at slashing carbon pollution to meet the voluntary emissions goals under the Paris Climate Agreement. Six years later, our need for climate leadership is even more desperate. The policy changes made by the Trump administration pushed U.S. emissions higher, not lower, and at the rate that our world burns carbon, scientists now estimate we’ll have locked in a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius — the increase that the Paris Agreement aimed to prevent — in just seven years.
Although President Trump utterly failed to deliver on his campaign promise to get the pipeline built, President Biden’s order to cancel it was quickly met with considerable outrage from conservative commentators, donors, and politicians. Two separate contributors to Fox Business, along with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, falsely claimed revoking the pipeline’s permit would cost 11,000 jobs, even though TC Energy, the company building the pipeline, has said that it would create just 35 permanent jobs. It’s unclear even where the phony jobs number cited in support of the Keystone XL pipeline came from since pipeline President Richard Prior himself stated the cancellation would impact 1,000 temporary construction jobs.
Joe Biden is serious about creating jobs. Although it escaped the attention of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the same executive order announcing the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline began a process of reversing a Trump administration cars policy that would have eliminated 13,500 jobs. President Biden’s clean energy agenda aims to create ten million high-paying jobs in the United States while averting the worst of the climate crisis. The COVID-19 relief plan that he proposed includes direct payments to Americans and unemployment aid, and a second package will make investments in job-creating industries like clean energy and transportation. Three million jobs vanished during the Trump administration, but the right investments can create the good-paying union jobs with benefits that Americans need to thrive in the years ahead.
The Keystone XL pipeline was never intended as a jobs program for the United States. It was instead a project to flood the global market with some of the dirtiest oil on the planet at a time when scientists overwhelmingly agree we need to be cutting back on fossil fuels. When you’re on a sinking ship, the first step is to stop the water from pouring in. With lives and livelihoods on the line, every small action helps.
Canceling the Keystone XL pipeline was a necessary step. It’s also not enough. President Biden should reverse actions taken by the Trump administration that excluded consideration of climate change impacts from the construction of federal infrastructure projects including pipelines and silenced the voices of affected communities. If our reaction to the deadly impacts of climate change is to close our eyes and pretend as though nothing is wrong, we are headed for disaster.
