Eco-Extremists Won’t Stop With The Keystone Pipeline

One theory as to why Team Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline on Day One of his presidency is that the project had garnered so much notoriety.

Keystone, the reasoning goes, had become a cause célèbre for the environmentalist left, and the Biden administration had to throw them a bone by terminating it, but that doing so doesn’t give us a window into how he will actually govern over the next four years.

No doubt this is what leaders of the various unions who endorsed Biden are currently telling themselves.

There is an obvious flaw in this reasoning.

If Biden is willing to quash a major pipeline project like Keystone (midway through construction and at the cost of damaging America’s relation with our ally, Canada) simply because environmentalists have succeeded in making the pipeline infamous, what’s to stop them from making other pipeline projects similarly well known and with the same object in mind?

Well, it seems as if that is exactly what they’re doing. Last week, we discussed a victory for Enbridge Line 5, which moves 540,000 barrels of Canadian petroleum products per day from Wisconsin. to Sarnia, Ont.

Gretchen Whitmer has declared war on Line 5 and is both trying to halt its operation, on the grounds that it is a danger to the Straits of Mackinac, and trying to stop the construction on a tunnel under those straits whose object is to make its operation safer.

Michigan’s department of energy has, nevertheless, granted a construction permit to build the tunnel.

Gov. Whitmer’s war goes on, however, and the possibility that she’ll succeed has started to make Canadians nervous.

Trudeau’s minister of natural resources, Seamus O’Regan (a committed environmentalist), and Ontario’s Conservative Premier Doug Ford have both put out statements in support of Line 5. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole recently wrote an op-ed defending it.

Why would a Liberal Minister set out to defend a pipeline alongside Conservative politicians? Because, beyond the jobs it supports, Line 5 supplies about half of the petroleum needs of Ontario and Quebec! Losing it would be a disaster for Canada, and even Trudeaupian Liberals know it.

And now another front in this war has developed. Ilhan Omar, the hard-left congressional representative from Minnesota, has appealed directly to Joe Biden to kill Enbridge Line 3, which transports those same petroleum products from Alberta to Wisconsin, crossing through the congresswoman’s home state.

In an open letter (of course), Omar said “I joined millions of Americans celebrating your announcement to withdraw permits for the Keystone XL pipeline.”

She asks Biden to do the same to Line 3, currently in the process of being replaced with a larger pipe. She continues, “Under even the best-case scenarios for climate change, we cannot afford to build more fossil fuel infrastructure.”

If Team Biden really is operating under the assumption that killing Keystone has bought them some environmentalist goodwill, and that they don’t have to sacrifice any more pipelines or jobs on the altar of Mother Gaia, they’re in for a rude awakening.

Mother Gaia’s minions are insatiable. And their chief weapon is publicity.

Read more at The Pipeline