White House National Economic Council director Brian Deese on Wednesday addressed the notion of increasing the use of domestic energy to stem the rising gas prices.
Deese argued on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that “no amount of domestic production we can do to reduce” global prices. He suggested the only way to fix prices would be “shifting to cleaner sources of energy.”
“[W]hat we’re trying to underscore is that in the short term, production comes back based on facilities and rigs that were in process previously or are close to production,” Deese outlined. “And in those cases, there is no constraint. There’s no federal constraint to bringing that production back online, and that’s why we’re seeing that production come back. As you say, it takes some time in some cases. But we’re seeing that production come back quite significantly. So, I think that’s the pragmatic conversation we should have about the very short term.”
“The medium and long term, I think … the path and the trajectory is clear — there is no amount of domestic production that we can do when we’re dealing with a volatile global commodity, where the price is set globally, there’s no amount of domestic production we can do to reduce or eliminate our vulnerability as a country to that volatility,” he continued. “The only way to do that is to reduce the energy intensity of the economy overall, which means shifting to cleaner sources of energy.”
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