Make sure your locally sourced credentials have the following:

• export OS_NO_CLIENT_AUTH=True
• export HEAT_URL=(Your heat endpoint including your tenant ID)

The heat-api log may provide clues to the issue, which may be incorrect auth settings in /etc/heat/heat.conf

Hi

I am use standalone everyday here are my settings:

$ env | grep OS
OS_NO_CLIENT_AUTH=True
OS_REGION_NAME=RegionOne
OS_PASSWORD=***-not-this-***
OS_AUTH_URL=http://10.0.0.39:5000/v2.0
OS_USERNAME=admin
OS_TENANT_NAME=demo
OS_VOLUME_API_VERSION=2
$ env | grep HEAT
HEAT_URL=http://10.0.0.75:8004/v1/e80f6867c5b74ad49a75964fff4f4686

Make sure to get the tenant_id correct for the tenant name that you are using. So for my tenant of "demo" it's tenant_id is "e80f6867c5b74ad49a75964fff4f4686" (which is part of the HEAT_URL).

Also you will have to figure out the public cloud's region that you want to work with.

So here is a debug session:

 heat --debug stack-list
 DEBUG (http) curl -g -i -X GET -H 'X-Auth-User: admin' -H 'User-Agent: python-heatclient' -H 'X-Auth-Key: ***-not-this-***' -H 'Accept: application/json' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'X-Auth-Url: http://10.0.0.39:5000/v2.0' http://10.0.0.75:8004/v1/e80f6867c5b74ad49a75964fff4f4686/stacks?
 INFO (connectionpool) Starting new HTTP connection (1): 10.0.0.75
 DEBUG (connectionpool) "GET /v1/e80f6867c5b74ad49a75964fff4f4686/stacks HTTP/1.1" 200 14
 DEBUG (http) 
 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 22:19:07 GMT
 connection: keep-alive
 content-type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
 content-length: 14
 x-openstack-request-id: req-ca132cbc-24ae-4e08-afd2-ff3191318901

 {"stacks": []}

 +----+------------+--------------+---------------+--------------+
 | id | stack_name | stack_status | creation_time | updated_time |
 +----+------------+--------------+---------------+--------------+
 +----+------------+--------------+---------------+--------------+

One last thing is, what public cloud are you trying to talk to?