Summers: The More Natural Gas We Produce, the ‘More Secure We’re Going to Be,’ We Need to Expedite Pipeline Permits

During an interview aired on Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers argued that we can’t view energy through the lens of “managing with a fire drill every time we have some oil price problem,” and we need to move as fast as we can on expediting “permitting pipelines or permitting more natural gas production or permitting more electricity transmission,” moving “to implement as many parts of a shift to renewables as possible.” And we have to recognize the more natural gas is produced, “the better we’re going to be, the more secure we’re going to be,” and the better the climate will be.

Summers stated, “Look, for over any reasonable horizon, over anything more than the next year, the way we’ve got to think about this is not managing with a fire drill every time we have some oil price problem, it’s reducing our fundamental dependence on unstable and problematic parts of the world for our energy. And that means Sen. Manchin’s (D-WV) permitting policies, whether it’s permitting pipelines or permitting more natural gas production or permitting more electricity transmission, need to move as rapidly as possible. That means we need to move to implement as many parts of a shift to renewables as possible. And that means we need to recognize that, whether the issue is energy security or whether the issue is climate, natural gas, despite being a hydrocarbon, is a good thing, not a bad thing. And the more of it we produce, the better we’re going to be, the more secure we’re going to be, and actually, because it will often replace coal, the less hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide we will be emitting into the air.”

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