A federal judge moved Thursday to block President Donald Trump’s decision to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline without providing a reason for overturning the Obama administration’s ruling on the project.
Judge Brian Morris found that the Trump administration did not account for how a decline in oil prices might affect the pipeline’s viability.
The government’s analysis failed to address how greenhouse gas emissions might increase as a result of the project’s approval, he noted.
“The Department instead simply discarded prior factual findings related to climate change to support its course reversal,” he wrote.
Morris also cited a U.S. Supreme Court noting: “An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past.”
The Department of State issued a 300-page report in July finding that the Keystone extension could damage wetlands across parts of Nebraska, though most of the impact would be temporary.
The report was required after the Nebraska Public Service Commission voted in November 2017 to allow TransCanada to build the multi-billion dollar pipeline only on an alternative route.
The Trump administration prepared a new environmental assessment for the new Nebraska route.
Morris also dinged the Trump administration for failing to address the Obama administration’s moves to keep rising global temperatures at low levels for denying the pipeline permit.
Former President Barack Obama had nominated Morris in 2013 to fill a vacancy on the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana.
Obama vetoed a bipartisan bill in 2015 approving the 1,200-mile long pipeline.
Trump later signed an executive order approving both projects subject to regulatory review.
Activists cheered Morris’s decision. “Keystone XL would be a disaster for the climate and for the people and wildlife of this country,” Jackie Prange, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement Thursday.
The White House has not responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Trump or TransCanada, the company behind the project, could appeal Morris’s ruling to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Read more at Daily Caller
Obama wants to rule post-presidency ?
Perhaps
He’d like to rule past his grave as well.
The law of Obama
Is greater than the
CONSTITUTION ?
No
The CONSTITUTION is greater than
Obama
It is an over reach for this judge to require climate change be considered. That is a matter for the legislative and executive branches of government. Again, we have judicial legislation here.
However, this is an opportunity if the President Trump is smart enough to take it. That is doubtful. The climate change part of the ruling could be challenged by proving that man made climate change isn’t happening. All that would be necessary is to show the high correlation between solar output and the earth’s temperature history, the very low correlation between this history and recent carbon dioxide levels, and the failure of the IPCC climate models which the only thing global warming is based on.
How is this district judge in Montana even hearing this case? The pipeline does not cross any part of his district. Talk about forum shopping!
All of Obama’s appointed judges need to be total’y removed from the bench they are putting the demands of a bunch of Eco-Wacko Back to Nature freaks over the needs of the American People
Affect the pipeline’s viability? What the hell kind of ignorant comment is that? It isn’t up to any “judge’ to decide whether any business venture is viable or not. His responsibility is to the rule of Law. What do “greenhouse gas” ( whatever the hell that is ) emissions have to do with a pipe? He would do better to ban all vehicles as they create pollution. Ban the use of all Government building heating systems as they are all old and inefficient. My God some people are stupid.
Greenpiece isn’t viable so he should order them disbanded. His decision is right up there with the brain dead enviro-whacko judge in Canada who blocked a new pipeline because she didn’t think there was any “meaningful consultation” ( whatever that “legal” term means ). It is no wonder Americans and Canadians have lost so much respect for the legal systems.