Liam Denning, Columnist

Keystone XL Couldn’t Survive a Changed Climate

The pipeline project belonged to a bygone era for oil and politics.

January 20, 2021 at 6:40 PM EST

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

These protests paid off.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America

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In purely chronological terms, the opposite of a “Scaramucci” could arguably be called a “Keystone.” The Keystone XL pipeline expansion was first proposed almost 13 years ago. On Wednesday, newly installed President Joe Biden killed it. Again.

This one looks like the actual death knell. Certainly, the message from the market to TC Energy Corp. — the Canadian company that wanted to build Keystone XL — is to just walk away; the stock isn’t notably bothered by the pipeline’s latest demise. Such sanguinity speaks to how the world has changed since July 2008; a mere Keystone, yet so many Scaramuccis, ago.

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