President Obama announced Friday morning 
that he has denied TransCanada’s permit application 
to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline in the U.S.
“The State Department has decided that the 
Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national 
interest of the United States,” Obama said. “I agree 
with that decision.”
Obama said America is a global leader on taking 
action on climate change, and approving Keystone XL 
would have undercut that leadership. Some crude oil 
needs to be left in the ground to keep the climate from 
warming further, and rejecting Keystone XL will help 
meet that goal, he said.
Among the reasons for rejecting Keystone XL, 
Obama said the pipeline would not make a meaningful 
long-term contribution to the U.S. economy, nor would 
it increase U.S. energy security or help to lower gas 
prices, which have already declined dramatically over 
the last year.
TransCanada said in a statement that it “would 
review all of its options in light of a permit denial for 
Keystone XL,” including the possibility of filing a new 
permit application for a pipeline.
“TransCanada and its shippers remain absolutely 
committed to building this important energy 
infrastructure project,” TransCanada CEO Russ 
Girling said in a statement.
State Department officials said at a news 
conference Friday that TransCanada is free to apply 
for a new permit to build a cross-border pipeline and it 
is up to the company to do so.
The $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline was slated to 
stretch 1,179 miles from east-central Alberta, Canada, 
to the Texas Gulf Coast. It would transport 830,000 
barrels of crude oil per day from the Canadian tar 
sands to refineries near Houston. Proposed in 2008, 
the 875-mile section between the Canadian border 
and Steele City, Neb., needed State Department 
approval because it crossed an international border.
Other parts of TransCanada’s Keystone Project 
between central Nebraska and Texas have already 
been built and are carrying tar sands oil to refineries 
along the Gulf Coast today. Environmental advocates 
have rallied against the unbuilt portion and urged the 
Obama administration to reject it, saying emissions 
from the production and burning of tar sands oil it 
would carry could worsen climate change.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 
calculated that the tar sands oil the pipeline would 
carry is highly damaging to the climate, emitting about 
1.3 billion more tons of greenhouse emissions over 
the pipeline’s 50-year lifespan than if it were carrying 
conventional crude oil. The production of tar sands oil 
releases 17 percent more CO2 into the atmosphere 
than the average barrel of crude oil produced 
elsewhere, according to the State Department.
“Construction of the Keystone XL pipeline would 
be inconsistent with stabilizing global warming below 
dangerous levels,” Penn State University climate 
scientist Michael Mann said. “I am pleased that the 
administration has made good on their promise to take 
seriously the task of acting on climate by rejecting the 
construction of the pipeline.”

The world is obviously not a place where features 
such as resources, people and economic activities are 
randomly distributed; there is a logic, or an order, to 
spatial distribution. Geography seeks to understand 
the spatial order of things as well as their interactions, 
particularly when the spatial order is less evident. 
Transportation is one element of this spatial order as 
it is at the same time influenced by geography as well 
as having an influence on it. For instance, the path 
followed by a road is influenced by regional economic 
and physical attributes, but once constructed the 
same road will shape future regional developments. 
Transportation is of relevance to geography for 
two main reasons. First, transport infrastructures, 
terminals, modes and networks occupy an important 
place in space and constitute the basis of a complex 
spatial system. Second, since geography seeks to 
explain spatial relationships, transport networks are 
of specific interest because they are the main physical 
support of these interactions. 
Transport geography, as a discipline, emerged 
as a branch of economic geography in the second 
half of the twentieth century. In earlier considerations, 
particularly in commercial geography (late 19th and 
early 20th century), transportation was an important 
factor behind the economic representations of the 
geographic space, namely in terms of the location 
of economic activities and the monetary costs of 
distance. These cost considerations became the 
foundation of several geographical theories such as 
central places and location analysis. The growing 
mobility of passengers and freight justified the 
emergence of transport geography as a specialized 
field of investigation. 
In the 1960s, transport had to be formalized as key 
factors in location theories and transport geography 
began to rely increasingly on quantitative methods, 
particularly over network and spatial interactions 
analysis. However, from the 1970s, technical, political 
and economic changes challenged the centrality of 
transportation in many geographical and regional 
development investigations. The strong spatial 
anchoring effect of high transportation costs receded 
and decentralization was a dominant paradigm that 
was observed within cities (suburbanization), but 
also within regions. The spatial theory foundations 
of transport geography, particularly the friction of 
distance, became less relevant, or less evident, in 
explaining socioeconomic processes. As a result, 
transportation became underrepresented in economic 
geography in the 1970s and 1980s, even if the 
mobility of people and freight and low transport costs 
were considered as important factors behind the 
globalization of trade and production. 
Since the 1990s, transport geography has 
received renewed attention with new realms of 
investigation. The issues of mobility, production 
and distribution became interrelated in a complex 
geographical setting where the local, regional and 
global became increasingly blurred through the 
development of new passengers and freight transport 
systems (Hoyle and Knowles, 1998). For instance, 
suburbanization resulted in an array of challenges 
related to congestion and automobile dependency. 
Rapid urbanization in developing economies 
underlined the challenges of transport infrastructure 
investment for private as well as collective uses. 
Globalization supported the development of complex 
air and maritime transportation networks, many of 
which supporting global supply chains and trade 
relations across long distances. The role of information 
and communication technologies was also being felt, 
often as a support or as an alternative to mobility. 
All of the above were linked with new and expanded 
mobilities of passengers, freight and information. 

Questões de CESGRANRIO - Inglês - Elementos gramaticais