BIG FALSE – President Joe Biden took office on day one, including the revocation of the permit that President Trump granted to the Keystone XL pipeline to TransCanada. The new proposed route for the pipeline would have cut through parts of eastern Montana.
President Biden’s decision to revoke the March 2019 permit has drawn strong criticism from some of Montana’s elected officials. Let’s break down some of the claims.
On January 20, the inauguration day, Governor Greg Gianforte sent a letter to the incoming president congratulating him and asking him to reconsider the executive action.
In the letter, Governor Gianforte made the following allegations: the pipeline has dual congressional support in Montana, thousands of U.S. jobs will be lost, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that will support local schools and communities.
In 2015, Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester, along with several other Democrats, voted with Republicans to overrule President Obama’s veto of a bill approving the construction of the pipeline. The veto dominance was unsuccessful, and ultimately failed with a 62-37 vote.
In May 2016, the state of Montana filed lawsuits in support of TC Energy, dubbed TransCanada, in their lawsuit against the Obama administration.
The demand is therefore true: the pipeline does have support from members of both parties in Montana.
The following statement is something that GOP US Senator Steve Daines recently reiterated. Both Daines and Gianforte claim that revoking this permit will ‘kill American jobs’. This is actually a fairly common claim among supporters of the pipeline project, and while it is true, there are some important contexts to consider here.
The TC Energy group has already said they will have to eliminate more than 1,000 jobs after the permit was revoked. In 2014, the U.S. State Department released a report estimating that the total number of jobs created by the project would be about 42,000. However, the same report conceded that many of these posts were temporary, adding that more than 16,000 of them would be contract-based. It is also important to understand that a lot of construction work relies on temporary projects anyway.
According to the State Department report, if the proposed project were to go into effect first, it would require only 50 employees in America, of which 35 were permanent employees, and 15 temporary contractors.
As for the final claim that millions of dollars will be lost on local revenue, the Department of Foreign Affairs also addresses this in its report. They say that property tax revenue during operations will be significant for many provinces. For reference, the proposed pipeline would have passed through 27 provinces, including six in Montana. The total estimated property tax that would be in effect from the pipeline’s first full year was approximately $ 55.6 million spread across the 27 provinces.