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In his first hours in office, Joe Biden has settledâalmost certainly, once and for allâone of the greatest environmental battles this country has seen. He has cancelled the permit allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to cross the border from Canada into the United States, and the story behind that victory illustrates a lot about where we stand in the push for a fair and working planet.
To review: Keystone XL, a project of the TransCanada Corporation (now TC Energy), was slated to carry oil from Albertaâs tar sands across the country to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. President George W. Bush approved the original Keystone pipeline, and it went into service, early in the Obama years, without any real fuss. A new XL version, announced in 2008, was larger and took a different course across the heartland. And, this time, there was opposition. It came first from indigenous people in Canada, who had watched tar-sand mines lay waste to a vast landscape. First Nations leaders, such as Melina Laboucan-Massimo and Clayton Thomas-Muller, along with Native-American leaders on this side of the borderâincluding Tom and Dallas Goldtooth, of the Indigenous Environmental Networkâput up strong resistance and joined forces with ranchers whose lands would be bisected by the pipeline. Organizers such as Jane Kleeb, in Nebraska, found small pockets of support within some of the âbig greenâ environmental groups, much of it coördinated by the veteran campaigner Kenny Bruno. In the spring of 2011, the