Kandi White is the Native energy and climate campaign coordinator at the Indigenous Environmental Network and a 2016 Grist 50 honoree. Katherine Todrys is a human rights lawyer and the author of Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice.
In June, TC Energy, the company that sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline, announced it would terminate the project. The news followed a decade-long fight by Indigenous activists, ranchers, and environmentalists, as well as President Biden’s decision in January to rescind the cross-border permit granted by the Trump administration.
Activists celebrated the death of Keystone XL, which would have carried crude oil from the Canadian tar sands in Alberta to Nebraska, but 2.6 million miles of oil and gas pipelines still run across the U.S., under plains and forests, through lakes and rivers. In June, the Dakota Access Pipeline marked the dubious milestone of having been in service for four years. It moves 570,000 barrels of oil daily from the Bakken oil fields in the northern plains — around 40 percent of the deposit’s oil output. Energy Transfer, which bu... Read more