One of President Joe Biden’s first official acts upon taking office last year was to cancel construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
While that move was widely condemned by conservatives, even a former advisor to President Barack Obama now acknowledges that it was “a mistake.”
Summers says America has become “hostile as a country to natural gas”
According to the Blaze, that admission was made by Larry Summers during an interview last Friday with Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week.”
Summers, who served as the Obama administration’s National Economic Council director from 2009 to 2011, said Biden “made a mistake by canceling the Keystone pipeline.”
“We made a mistake by slowing down all kinds of permitting activity,” Summers continued. “We made a mistake by being hostile as a country to natural gas.”
The former Obama advisor didn’t just limit his criticism to the Biden White House, as he added “we made a mistake in the Congress a few weeks ago when we didn’t pass” a proposal from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D) to reform the permitting process for energy projects.
“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,” he stressed.
“So, the real lesson [of] this is we need a different kind of energy strategy than the one that we’ve had,” Summers insisted.
Summers went on to argue that America needs “a strategy that is balanced rather than an unbalanced strategy of total hostility to fossil fuels.”
OPEC is cutting oil production
Fox Business reported last week that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has announced plans to cut oil production by up to 2 million barrels a day.
Patrick De Haan is head of petroleum analysis at the website GasBuddy, and he told Fox Business that consumers should be prepared for steep hikes in oil prices.
“I had expected at least a good potential that the national average could fall under $3 a gallon, but I think OPEC just threw a bucket of cold water on that by signaling its intentions to be well ahead of any economic slowdown,” De Hann said.