Big Oil is using the coronavirus pandemic to push through the Keystone XL pipeline | Bill McKibben | Opinion | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/.../2020/apr/05/climate-crisis-villains-oil-industry-big-banks-pipelines
And then came the coronavirus epidemic – and the oil industry saw its opening. It moved with breathtaking speed to take advantage of the moment.
In Alberta, premier Jason Kenney, a pliant servant of the oil companies who had already set up a “war room” to fight environmentalists, invested $1.1bn of taxpayers’ money to TC Energy to fund construction through the year, and set aside another $6bn in a loan guarantee.
Meanwhile, on the southern side of the border, a series of states quickly adopted laws making it a felony to protest “critical infrastructure” like pipelines. (Last week South Dakota, a crucial link on the KXL route, made it a felony even to “incite” such protest.) And the Department of Health and Human Services issued a memorandum exempting pipeline construction from stay-at-home orders because such work was “critical” – that is, the department is asserting it is essential to build oil pipelines at the precise moment that the world is swimming in oil and that the Trump administration is boasting about getting Saudi and Russian autocrats to cut supply.
On Tuesday, TC Energy announced it was moving workers from across America into place in states along the pipeline route – although local reporters in Montana discovered they’d actually begun arriving 48 hours earlier, narrowly beating the state imposition of a quarantine.
On Thursday, JP Morgan Chase announced that it was leading a $1.25bn bond issue for TC Energy.