Fmr. Obama Treasury Counselor Rattner: We Discouraged Opening New Refineries Due to Misjudged ‘Transition Away from Gasoline’

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Steve Rattner, who served as counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, stated that there is a bit of “schizophrenia” in our energy policy where “We’ve been discouraging oil companies from maintaining refineries or opening new ones. Because we theoretically are going to transition away from gasoline.” But the problem is, there was a “misjudgment as to how long of a transition it was going to be and what we needed to do to make the transition work.”

Rattner stated that “refining capacity has gone down” due to refineries shutting down since the pandemic, but “the rest of the ones that are left are running at full capacity.” And “As much as can be refined is being refined.”

He later added, “The problem is that, of the five [refineries that have shut down], one had a fire, one had some kind of explosion. You cannot simply — these are not simply things you can turn on like a car. It takes months, it costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And by the way, this is, again, a little bit of the schizophrenia. We’ve been discouraging oil companies from maintaining refineries or opening new ones. Because we theoretically are going to transition away from gasoline. But we, again, made a misjudgment as to how long of a transition it was going to be and what we needed to do to make the transition work.”

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