'Major Victory for Nebraska Landowners' as TransCanada Drops Lawsuit, Switches Course

In a move that environmental activists and local landowners hope puts another nail in the Keystone XL coffin, pipeline giant TransCanada announced Tuesday it will withdraw lawsuits seeking to gain access to the property of landowners who oppose the project.
The pipeline giant said it was switching course and would file an application with the Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC) to seek approval for the Keystone XL route through the state—an approach it previously tried to avoid. Photo credit: netnebraska.org
Jane Kleeb, director of the advocacy group Bold Nebraska, called the decision "a major victory for Nebraska landowners who refused to back down in the face of bullying by a foreign oil company."
In a press statement on Wednesday, the pipeline giant said it was switching course and would file an application with the Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC) to seek approval for the Keystone XL route through the state—an approach it previously tried to avoid. The company said it is withdrawing its current eminent domain actions and is taking steps to terminate constitutional court proceedings in Holt County, Nebraska.
"After careful review, we believe that going through the PSC process is the clearest path to achieving route certainty for the Keystone XL Project in Nebraska," stated Russ Girling, TransCanada's president and chief executive officer. "It ultimately saves time, reduces conflict with those who oppose the project and sets clear rules for approval of the route."
But others said the development spells doom for the controversial pipeline project.
As Canada's Globe and Mail reports:
"The Canadian pipeline company that has been seeking U.S. approvals for the $8-billion pipeline for the past seven years said the new strategy is about avoiding a lengthy legal process in the Midwest state. However, opponents of the project said it was a clear signal the company—now laying off staff—needs to reduce its legal costs and is acting 'desperately' as it becomes less likely the pipeline will be approved while Barack Obama remains U.S. President."
"Last week TransCanada announced it will cut a fifth of its senior leadership positions and will soon begin laying off some of its rank-and-file employees. It cited low oil prices and regulatory delays stemming from environmental opposition to some of its projects as factors."
And the Wall Street Journal wrote that TransCanada is "trying to tap the brakes on the review process, hoping that by 2017 a potential Republican administration would approve the project or opposition to it would simmer down."
All Democratic presidential candidates oppose the pipeline.
On Twitter, Bold Nebraska's Kleeb put it another way:
TC knows they are about to get handed full rejection at federal level so didn't want to keep throwing money out the window with this lawsuit— Jane Fleming Kleeb (@Jane Fleming Kleeb)1443564104.0
"It has long been clear that TransCanada has no legal route through the state of Nebraska and no legal right to use eminent domain against landowners," she added in a statement. "Now they've recognized that they’ve lost in Nebraska and are desperately trying another tactic to see their risky pipeline built through our state. We are happy to continue this fight in the Nebraska PSC, but we are confident that it will never come to that."
"We know President Obama understands that this pipeline is all risk and no reward for Americans," Kleeb added. "We call on him to do the right thing now and fully reject the permit once and for all."
And Kleeb told the Omaha World-Herald that no matter where the fight takes place, "We have a hundred landowners who will continue to refuse to give up their land through eminent domain."
According to the Associated Press:
"[A spokesman] said TransCanada could apply to the Public Service Commission as early as Friday. Reviews by the commission generally take seven months to a year to complete and its decisions can be appealed in the state's district court system."
"Art Tanderup, a farmer and pipeline opponent whose land is on the proposed route, said he's confident the commission will not allow the pipeline to cross the Sandhills—a region of fragile, grass-covered sand dunes—or the Ogallala Aquifer, a major groundwater supply that lies beneath Nebraska and parts of seven other states."
In addition to trusting the commission's authority, Tanderup added that he is "confident President Obama will reject the pipeline before the PSC even has a chance to conduct a review."
Of course, the Keystone XL fight has implications beyond just one pipeline. As journalist Nick Cunningham wrote earlier this month at OilPrice.com, Canadian tar sands oil will be trapped without more pipeline capacity. "[W]ith the U.S. potentially closing the door on Keystone XL, the industry will have to find another way," he wrote. "Otherwise, less oil will be flowing from Canada's oil sands."
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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