A Useful Delay on Keystone XL Shows What Little Leverage PM Harper has with President Obama

As the LA Times reports this afternoon, ongoing litigation that is challenging the proposed Keystone XL pipeline over the probable effects it would have on a key aquifer in Nebraska will create a delay of several additional months in the Obama administration’s deliberations on the Alberta-Texas pipeline, pushing a decision until after the US’s mid-term elections next November. That’s helpful politically to the president and DEMs for several reasons covered in the story, but there’s an additional effect I don’t mind at all: it shows that ham-handed nudging of the president by Canadian Prime Minister Harper and his ministers, which in one notorious instance slandered environmental groups in Canada and the USA, and efforts mounted by companies like TransCanada, haven’t amounted to much in the way of effective pressure on the administration. If anything, it makes Harper look weak in regard to oil policy, supposedly his strength. That, plus significant challenges to the pipelines out west, including from First Nations Canadians, should set Harper back on his heels, even as the 2015 Canadian federal election nears.

I’m pleased as an American who follows Canadian politics, and as someone hoping to see the Alberta tar sands–with their high cost to the environment, and whose end product would burn with high emissions–stay in the ground. I’m also pleased that it displeases PM Harper and the drill-baby-drill crowd in the US, frustrating their zeal to exercise rapacity toward natural resources and the environment.