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Larry Summers was the treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and the director of the National Economic Council under former President Barack Obama, and even he thinks President Joe Biden’s war against oil and gas pipelines is ridiculous.
“It’s kind of insane that we have trucks and trains carrying oil all over this country rather than constructing pipelines,” Summers said, which would “permit accessing more resources” and allow for “cheaper, safer transmission.”
But Biden cares little for safer or cheaper transmission. Pipelines have become the big target for environmentalist zealots, and those zealots are the ones who get to dictate energy and climate policy in the Democratic Party now. It’s why California has water shortages, regular rolling blackouts, and out-of-control wildfires.
It is also why Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, along with putting a moratorium on oil and gas leases on federal land. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said there should be no pipelines. The Biden administration has stalled permits for pipeline infrastructure, despite the fact that pipelines are safer, are more efficient, and result in less pollution than other modes of fuel transportation.
Of course, not all pipelines are bad for the Biden administration. Biden brokered a meeting between the Taliban and Turkmenistan to build a pipeline that would go from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India. And, of course, Biden did all he could to protect Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, unilaterally lifting sanctions to help encourage Germany to become more dependent on Russian energy. He reimposed the sanctions only after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The idea that pipelines are unsafe and must be shut down in the U.S. while being promoted for terrorist thugs and authoritarian regimes is, to borrow Summers’s quote, “insane.” But this is what Democratic energy policy looks like now. Putin and the Taliban can get benefits from building pipelines. Americans get high prices, inefficiency, and more pollution.
