President Obama announced last Friday that his administration would reject TransCanada's application to build the Keystone pipeline, a major victory for the environmental movement. The tar sands oil of Alberta will likely find another route into the US. But the victory is nonetheless impressive. As Bill McKibben writes:
"This is huge. A head of state has never rejected a major fossil fuel project because of its climate impacts before. The President's decision sets the standard for what climate action looks like: standing up to the fossil fuel industry, and keeping fossil fuels in the ground."
Like many other matters, voters should attend to the implications of this for the presidential election of 2016. Not a single Republican candidate has indicated that global warming has anything like the significance it so clearly does.