The Biden Administration is on track to close down another oil pipeline. After shutting down the Keystone Pipeline System, next on the Biden agenda is the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,172-mile-long underground oil pipeline from northwest North Dakota to an oil terminal in southern, Illinois. The pipeline delivered its first oil in May 2017.
The pipeline’s construction was the target of months-long protests by environmental activists and Native American tribes, which became confrontational and violent as demonstrators clashed with law enforcement.
The future of the pipeline depends on its permission to continue pumping oil through pipes on federal and Native American lands. Standing Rock Sioux Tribe leaders wrote President Biden urging him to order the Army Corps of Engineers to halt the pipeline operations.
The calls became more urgent after the D.C. Circuit court found that the Army Corps didn’t do an adequate study of the pipeline’s impacts on the environment. However, the oil is still flowing after a U.S. Appeals court allowed operations to proceed pending further mediation and environmental impact studies.
One key player in this new struggle in America’s energy future is President Biden’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior, Rep. Debra Haaland. During her confirmation hearing, she faced what must have been uncomfortable questions from Republican North Dakota Senator John Hoeven.
Senator Hoeven asked Haaland about the potential harmful consequences of shutting down the pipeline. The senator observed that several Native American Tribes also receive tax revenue from the pipeline. Haaland, by the way, is a Pueblo Native American.
She admitted that “If something shuts down, then jobs can be lost, and I understand that, so thank you for sharing that with me.”
She noted that she “doesn’t know the specificity of every job” that will be lost if the pipeline project is shut off. However, she said she would be “more than dedicated to being briefed on that issue” if confirmed.”
Whether or not any briefing would result in actually doing something about the loss of oil industry jobs, Haaland didn’t say.
Senator Hoeven’s state is the country’s number 2 oil-producer after Texas. North Dakota regulators had already approved a permit to expand the pipeline, which created around 12,000 jobs during its construction as well as millions in the forms of tax revenue.
President Biden has not yet publicly commented on the pipeline. His surrogate, Vice President Kamala Harris, is on record expressing support for shutting down the flow of the fluid that powers American industry and transportation.
While a U.S. senator, Harris joined Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren in a federal court brief claiming that permitting the Dakota Access pipeline to continue operating during the environmental review gave federal agencies the momentum and precedent to violate Native American’s treaty rights and sovereignty.
On the other hand, sovereignty doesn’t mean independence and immunity from federal laws. The federal government can just as easily grant permission for a commercial oil company to lay pipelines on a tribal reservation as it can in any other “sovereign” state. That permission is subject to a load of permitting and environmental mitigation regulations — which is the foundation of the current court struggle.
