Alberta’s crude oil injected $110 billion into the Canadian economy in 2019. The 1,947 km Keystone XL Pipeline (KXL) extension burdens international borders, carrying dirty fuel to refineries on the Gulf Coast and posing an environmental threat that is “no longer socially acceptable”. Joe Biden’s presidential win grants him the power to terminate the $8 billion project at his sole discretion.
THE PIPELINE INDUSTRY: OUR DANGEROUS DEPENDENCE
Transmission pipelines’ popularity climbs as they earn a reputation of matching North America’s soaring energy demands. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association operates 119,000 km of pipeline, illuminating our guilty reliance on dirty fuel. Environmental risks accompany the industry’s expansion, which continues to dig deeper for the mass circulation of corrosive tar sands.
Preceding its contentious launch in 2010, the original Keystone Pipeline now transports 600,000 barrels of Canadian crude oil on a daily basis. The KXL extension intensifies this exploitation, running through 1,000 water bodies, disturbing environmentally sensitive areas, and harming sacred Indigenous land. The long-term livelihood of many will become unhinged, and in exchange crude oil transportation to America will rise to 830,000 barrels daily.
Public health and environmental abuse are relentlessly cited as grounds to halt this environmental cruelty. Already, Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the earth as a consequence of the extensive carbon emissions generated by extracting Alberta’s tar sands. Even still, it is unlikely for KXL alone to meet the United States’ crude oil demands of 7.5 billion barrels per year attributable to jet-fuel holidays, gas-guzzling vehicles, and electricity consumption.
“GREED KNOWS NO LIMITS”
Accelerating climate change calls for government action. Most administrations, including “environmental champion” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s, measure their value by long term national targets like those set out in the Paris Agreement. The troublesome threats posed by the crude oil industry are predominantly experienced on a local level and remain unaddressed. These injustices are buried deep beneath pipeline proposals that are marketed as the plummeting economy’s knight in shining armour.
We should be alarmed by the near-guarantee of the pipeline’s premature breakdown. The largely publicised concern of toxic run-off contaminating drinking water and livestock is the tip of an environmentally destructive iceberg. Crude oil contains exceptionally flammable elements, which destroyed 80 homes in 2018, leaving Merrimack Valley, Massachusetts in conditions comparable to a war zone. An earlier disastrous event in Michigan released 843,000 gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River. Locals were exposed to carcinogenic, toxic fumes, which caused “respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological symptoms”.
Local unnerve is disproportionately felt by Indigenous communities whose way of life is contingent on the health of their sacred land. Hundreds of densely populated tribal nations are disturbed by the KXL route. The communities already suffer from notorious rates of unemployment, poor health, and suicide. Completion of the pipeline heightens these concerns, but pipeline sponsor TC Energy seeks to buy out Indigenous support in exchange for an equity stake in the project. The First Nations alliance involved hopes to distribute the wealth gained by exploiting their land, easing the suffering of future Indigenous generations whose unemployment rate of 23% is gravely concerning.
However, economic prosperity alone does not promise cultural survival. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women database reports 529 unanswered cases stretching across the proposed Keystone XL route. TC Energy's vow to establish thousands of labour jobs will introduce masses of non-native men. 67% of violence against women is committed by men outside the Indigenous community.
“When men can talk openly about raping women and there are no consequences. It’s like I’m not safe here; my sisters are not safe here.”
Annita Lucchesi, Southern Cheyenne Woman
RISING POLITICAL TENSIONS
KXL continues to encounter a game of political ping-pong—denied by Obama in 2012, permitted by Trump in 2017, and now facing a future of uncertainty. Cancelling the project at this stage would require thousands of miles of pipe to be demolished. Even if Biden intervenes to stop this toxic pipeline, countries encountering economic devastation and unregulated production will continue to supply our fossil fuel addiction.
Trump hastily passed the executive order that authorises TC Energy to build across the Canadian-American border. A significant caveat of the order is its potential to be revoked or amended at any time—a decision solely up to the president. Famously, Trump is a climate nihilist. Coining climate change as an “an expensive hoax” and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, Trump’s environmental beliefs are the antithesis of his Democratic counterpart. Biden now has the opportunity to seek environmental justice for “the most destructive industrial project in human history,” and his aggressive environmental targets might be a saving grace for climate change and the Indigenous population.
Wafa holds a law degree from the University of Manchester, and is currently preparing to write the New York Bar Examination. Pursuing a career as an attorney, she is fascinated by U.S. politics, socially responsible stock trading, and advocating for human rights injustices around the world.