Summers: We Can’t Have ‘Strategy of Total Hostility to Fossil Fuels’ That We’ve Had, Canceling Keystone, Slowing Permits Were Mistakes

During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers reacted to OPEC+’s production cut by stating that “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.” And arguing that “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” but we’re moving in that direction.

Summers said, “Look, 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. We made a mistake in the Congress a few weeks ago when we didn’t pass the Manchin program of expanding permitting. We crucially need regulatory relief or we’re not going to 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, of even egregious favoritism towards Saudi Arabia that we saw during the Trump administration. We need to find a balance. And I think we’re making our way in that direction.”

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