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Few who follow the issue closely were shocked by the announcement. “I’d have been surprised if he approved it,” said Rob Merrifield, a former Conservative MP who was until recently Alberta’s trade commissioner in Washington. “I’d given up on this administration two years ago. I told the prime minister that.”

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But some were taken aback by the timing. “At some level I was kind of stunned,” said Bill McKibben, a former writer for the New Yorker who became one of the leading figures in the anti-Keystone fight.

“We had hoped for a little while now that this was coming, but I remember back when we started in 2011 everyone, and I mean everyone, said that it was a completely hopeless fight, that this was a done deal, that there was no possible way we could stop it.”

In many ways, though, the debate about Keystone hasn’t been about Keystone, the actual project, for several years now. In the U.S., the proposed pipeline, designed to bring Alberta oil to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast, became a proxy for a larger fight: about climate change, yes, but also about the role of environmentalism in the Democratic Party. It became, in its own way, a shibboleth: a test by which believers in the climate fight could pick out politicians with a common cause.

The question now, is whether — with the Keystone victory behind them — U.S. environmentalists will double down on the oilsands or if they’ll move on to other battles. In other words, will the Keystone be a one-off, a symbolic win for the environmental movement, or is it a sign of more trouble to come for Alberta oil?