Towards the end of March, President Donald Trump, surrounded by Republican lawmakers and TransCanada CEO Russ Girling, announced that his administration had decided to approve a key permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, effectively allowing the stalled project to begin moving forward once again.
”The bottom line: Keystone, finished," Trump said at the time.
Reality, however, presents a very different picture than Trump's rhetoric. Last week, TransCanada, the pipeline's developer, announced that it was still trying to secure customers for the oil that would be carried by the pipeline. And the project still needs approval from a Nebraska regulatory commission, which likely won't come until late November.
Taken together, those developments suggest that the pipeline — which activists, indigenous communities, and Midwestern landowners have spent nearly a decade fighting — might not be built after all.
