This was an ancestral burial ground for these people. Big Oil didn't care they only wanted to pay money for a moron in the White House to sign papers that leveraged power.
This is only one example of how Trump simply bulldozed the law to make way for his friends' bottom line. How would Trump like it if the country decided to run an oil pipeline through the graveyard of his family?
The Army Corp. knows better than this. I have worked on projects where I submitted environmental assessments with the Army Corp. conducting the work. This is outrageous. I want to know what Trump did to undermine NEPA because the Corp. knows better than this. What astounds me is that the Army Corp. highly respects Native American rights when it comes to the land. Whatever caused the Corp. to ignore the law must have been substantial otherwise it wouldn't have happened.
By Yun Li
A federal court ruled Monday (click here) that the Dakota Access Pipeline must shut down within 30 days, by Aug. 5, according to a copy of the brief obtained by USA Today.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia scrapped a key permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, and ordered the pipeline to end its three-year run of delivering oil out of North Dakota’s Bakken shale basin to its endpoint in Illinois. The decision marked the end of a yearslong legal battle over the Energy Transfer Partners-owned pipeline’s environmental damage to the Missouri River.
President Donald Trump granted the permit in 2017 over the objections of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and environmental activists, arguing oil spills could contaminate their water source and put their culture at risk.
The court ruled the pipeline be shut down pending a full environmental review ordered previously.
“The Corps had failed to produce an Environmental Impact Statement despite conditions that triggered such a requirement,” the court ruling said. “Although mindful of the disruption such a shutdown will cause, the Court now concludes that the answer is yes.”
“Given the seriousness of the Corps’ NEPA error, the impossibility of a simple fix, the fact that Dakota Access did assume much of its economic risk knowingly, and the potential harm each day the pipeline operates, the Court is forced to conclude that the flow of oil must cease,” the ruling said....
