Judge Brian Morris of the United States District Court for the District of Montana has ordered a temporary halt to construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, ruling that the Trump administration did not consider the previous State Department's concerns before giving it the go-ahead two days after entering office.
But the pipeline had only been in limbo during the Obama administration because President Obama had also overruled State Department studies and even his own Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, by declaring it needed more analysis, before oddly promising a "fast track" an extension to it. Yes, he agreed to build a Pipeline From Nowhere - and said so without realizing his new pipeline from the phantom pipeline was through Indian burial grounds.
Judge Morris said the State Department disregarded the State Dept. report that the State Department was forced to do again after President Obama didn't like the first one showing no environmental risk, and that latest report was good enough for the US District Court in Montana.
“An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past, any more than it can ignore inconvenient facts when it writes on a blank slate,” Morris’s judgment stated, and environmental lawyers cheered, but the public is not cheering. A modern pipeline is absolutely safer than railways or tankers. As for claims by environmentalists that the Ogallala aquifer will be at risk, here is the new pipeline:
It does cover 400 miles of the aquifer, but there are already 20,000 miles of pipeline there.
Credit: PennWell MAPSearch
Why worry about 400 miles of pipeline when 20,000 are already there? There is no legitimate reason, it's scientization of politics. The only rationale for continuing to block this is 'pipelines will eventually leak' but that is like saying we should stop all trains because trains eventually crash.
