Pipes for TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline sitting stacked in an Oklahoma storage yard in 2012. But two years into the process, then-Sen. Mike Johanns, a Republican, saw opposition brewing in his home state of Nebraska, through which the nearly 1,200-mile pipeline was supposed to pass. He advised Russ Girling, TransCanada’s chief executive, to change the pipeline’s route to defuse a fight with environmentalists and Nebraska landowners allied against the project. Instead, TransCanada chose to plow ahead. “Honestly, in all my years in government, I’ve never seen such an enormous miscalculation,” Mr. Johanns said earlier this year. “They made a lot of assumptions that this thing was going to skate right through the Obama administration.” On Wednesday, the State Department denied TransCanada’s request earlier this week to suspend its permit application for Keystone —a move that would have essentially punted the pipeline decision to after the 2016 elections. The Obama administration […]