Joe Biden has added one more thing to his growing list of “day one” objectives after taking office. (How much work are they planning on dumping on this guy’s plate? He’s not a spring chicken anymore. Just saying…) Despite not uttering a peep about this on the campaign trail and repeatedly promising the voters in Pennsylvania that he wasn’t going to totally eliminate fossil fuels, Biden plans to rescind the construction permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on Wednesday. The number of jobs this will furlough, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars already invested in the project that could now be simply wasted, staggers the imagination. Oh, and he’s managed to tick off the Canadian government as well. (CBC News)

U.S. president-elect Joe Biden has indicated plans to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline permit via executive action on his first day in office, sources confirmed to CBC News on Sunday.

A purported briefing note from the Biden transition team mentioning the plan was widely circulated over the weekend after being shared by the incoming president’s team with U.S. stakeholders.

The words “Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit” appear on a list of executive actions supposedly scheduled for Day 1 of Biden’s presidency.

So much for “moderate Joe Biden,” eh? People have been warning for some time now that Uncle Joe’s “moderate” reputation was nothing but a smokescreen at this point and he has fully sold his soul to the liberal, socialist wing of his party. You can expect plenty more hits to the energy sector to come, all in the name of “saving the planet.”

Of course, there are questions as to whether Biden will even be able to get away with this and he will clearly face court challenges. There are long-established processes in place when making such a radical change to the permit process for massive projects like Keystone. The review process to finally gain approval stretched on for years before finally being resolved in 2017. Can all of that effort, all of the public hearings, all of those investigations and reviews simply be wiped away with one stroke of the pen?

This move would cause significant damage to the stakeholders in the pipeline, leading to possible liabilities for the federal government. They played by the rules and jumped through all of the required hoops to obtain that permit and then began investing heavily in the work based on their belief in the good faith of the United States government. It’s not hard to imagine them going to court to recover their losses and finding judges amenable to the idea. That would leave the American taxpayers holding the bill for this fiasco.

Let’s not forget that large sections of the pipeline are already complete, including portions that cross the border. What happens to all of that pipeline? Will it just be left to rust or will the federal government attempt to force the pipeline’s owners to spend even more money to rip everything out?

As I mentioned above, there are literally tens of thousands of jobs on the line here, ranging from the workers who are directly engaged in the construction of the pipeline to all of the supporting industries that make such work possible. Joe Biden is signaling that he’s ready to come into office and evaporate a huge number of jobs “on day one.” Wasn’t he only recently complaining about the number of people who are already out of work because of the pandemic?

In addition to all of that damage, Biden is managing to tick off the Canadians before he’s even taken the oath of office. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Biden in November to congratulate him and reportedly told him at that time that he wanted a meeting to talk about “potential irritants” between our two nations, including the need to complete the pipeline that would carry Canadian bitumen to refineries in the United States. Federal Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole called on Trudeau to pick up the phone and talk some sense into Biden immediately.

Joe Biden’s presidency hasn’t even begun yet and it’s turning into a crap show already. Looking through his list of early priorities, you should be prepared for much more of the same to come.