Former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and director of the National Economic Council under former President Barack Obama Larry Summers said Friday during an interview with Wall Street Week that the Biden administration’s steps to shut down the Keystone XL oil pipeline and slow oil permits were mistakes.
Summers’ comments were in reference to the news that OPEC will cut 2 million barrels of oil a day and possibly throwing the globe into recession.
“We made a mistake by canceling the Keystone pipeline. We made a mistake by slowing down all kinds of permitting activity. We made a mistake by being hostile as a country to natural gas,” he said.
He also said that Congress made a mistake in not passing a Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) bill that would have expanded oil permitting.
A both-and approach
Summers seemed to favor a both/and approach to energy that would continue to embrace fossil fuels until renewable sources of energy were ready for mass production, rather than a hostility to fossil fuels that will cause scarcity and hardship for people until renewables are more accessible.
Summers said:
We crucially need regulatory relief, or we’re not gonna get renewables online fast, and we’re not going to get the transmission lines that are necessary for renewables to become a large part of our energy fast. So, the real lesson [of] this is we need a different kind of energy strategy than the one that we’ve had. We need a strategy that is balanced rather than an unbalanced strategy of total hostility to fossil fuels, or God knows the kind of total strategy of favoring fossil fuels that we had … even egregious favoritism toward Saudi Arabia that we saw during the Trump administration.
Summers seems to think that the powers that be are moving in the direction of increasing access to fossil fuels, even though there is scant evidence of this.
Going to get worse
It seems to me that the only way we are going to move in the direction of producing the oil and gas we still currently need is by replacing the entire Biden administration with Republicans.
Democrats mistakenly believe they are saving the world by forcing “green energy” on the public, but they are actually destroying what the country has built because of fossil fuels–economic prosperity and technological advancements that make life comfortable for even the average-to-low income person in the U.S.
It’s going to get worse as the industry tries to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of electric ones that don’t work as well and strain the already shaky power grid in many areas. Wind and solar energy are unreliable, and the greenies don’t like nuclear because there’s a minuscule risk of meltdown.
We need a few hundred more Democrats like Summers to force their party to reverse course now, or the next few years are going to be hell.