First Female President signs Executive Orders permanently halting construction of Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines

President McCarthy takes action to honor Native land, preserve clean water

San Francisco, CA — President McCarthy today signed a series of Executive Orders and Presidential Memoranda in keeping with her promises to honor tribal treaty rights and to guarantee the government provides clean drinking water to all denizens of the United States of America. These Executive Orders permanently halt the construction of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines.

With these Executive Orders, President McCarthy acknowledges the importance of the work of the Standing Rock Sioux Water Protectors, whose rallying cry, “water is life,” she quoted in her Inaugural Address.

“While some have argued that this pipeline work creates American jobs, they’re ignoring the reality that completing these pipelines would inevitably create American deaths,” the President opined. “Climate change is real. We cannot allow short-sighted, thoughtless grabs at temporary job creation to impede our ability and our commitment to protect our environment, not only for those who live there today, but for future generations. As we learned with the Keystone XL project, only 35 permanent American jobs would have been produced. And at what cost? A cost to our drinking water, to our, to our children’s future, to the safety and well-being of our people and our land.”

“We must always remember,” the President continued, “that a nation is not an abstraction. The nation is not a President, not a government, certainly not a corporation. A nation is an inextricable combination of place and people. By signing these Executive Orders, we’re taking a deeply necessary step to protect both.”

The President warned that “carbon energy is not America’s future.” The total lifecycle emissions from producing, transporting, processing and burning the products derived from the oil from the Dakota Access Pipeline, if completed, would amount to 101.4 million metric tons of CO2e per year, equivalent to 29.5 typical U.S. coal plants.

President McCarthy reiterated the necessity of working towards the Paris Climate Accords, and of creating “good jobs, permanent jobs in the high-growth sector of renewable energy.” In conclusion, the President offered her thanks to the members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, as well as their supporters: “For your tireless protection of our water, our nation is in your debt.”