Trump administration hands another permit over to Keystone XL

The notorious Keystone XL pipeline moved that much closer to construction today. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management just granted permission for the proposed tar sands pipeline to cross about 46 miles of federally managed land in Montana—a small stretch of its nearly 1,200-mile route from northern Canada to Nebraska, where it will connect with pipelines serving oil refineries along the Gulf Coast of Texas. Environmentalists, landowners, and Indigenous rights groups have fought the pipeline for more than a decade due to its unavoidable (and potentially catastrophic) impacts on waterways, endangered wildlife, Indigenous communities, and, of course, the global climate—but the Trump administration appears dead set on barreling the risky project through anyway. The good news: KXL still has multiple permit hurdles left to jump, and legal challenges by environmental groups like NRDC continue to make their way through the courts.