Environmental groups sued President Trump Thursday over his decision to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, citing the president’s defeats on immigration and healthcare as reason for optimism in getting a judge to reject Trump’s pipeline decision.
“He was defeated — twice — when he tried implementing a Muslim ban; he was defeated when he tried to take healthcare away from 24 million Americans, and he will be defeated once again as he tries to force this pipeline on the people who have already seen its rejection,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “This movement has already defeated the Keystone XL pipeline, and we will do so once again.”
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Montana nearly a week after Trump approved the project to bring crude oil across the border from the Canadian oil sands to refineries 1,100 miles south on the Gulf Coast.
The lawsuit, filed by the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and several others, follows a lawsuit filed Wednesday by American Indian groups.
The main thrust of the environmental groups’ legal arguments stems from the basis by which the administration approved the pipeline. The lawsuit says the decision was a rushed job spurred on by an arbitrary 60-day deadline set into motion by a White House executive order. And the court must remand the decision back to the State Department for a review that accounts for the climate change impact in approving the pipeline.
“In an effort to comply with Donald Trump’s arbitrary 60-day decision deadline, the State Department relied solely on an outdated and incomplete environmental impact statement, which fails to properly account for the pipeline’s threats to the climate, water resources, wildlife and communities along the pipeline route,” the groups said in a separate statement.
The tribal groups, including the Indigenous Environmental Network, representing a number of tribes, made similar arguments in their Wednesday court filing.
Both lawsuits are seeking an immediate injunction.
The environmental groups say that the administration’s decision also violated the Administrative Procedures Act, besides the National Environmental Policy Act, and wants the court to “declare” that the State Department “violated the APA by reversing, without a reasoned justification, the State Department’s earlier determination that Keystone XL would not serve the United States’ national interest and that TransCanada should not be granted a cross-border permit.”
The groups also want a separate court injunction “prohibiting any activity in furtherance of the construction or operation of Keystone XL,” which would block the project indefinitely.
