There are many reasons the average news reader might not like Larry Summers. A longtime friend of convicted predator Jeffrey Epstein, Summers deregulated the banking sector as Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, helping to set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. While serving as chief economist of the World Bank, he put his name to a memo suggesting industries dump toxic waste in Africa because it was “underpolluted,” later claiming the memo was intended as “sardonic counterpoint.” In 2005, while president of Harvard University, he posited that women’s brains weren’t well suited for math and science.



Less discussed, however, is how Summers worked during the Obama years to torpedo America’s last best shot to make itself a low-carbon society. The issue has become newly relevant in the past few weeks: As reported last week by Bloomberg News, Summers is now serving as an adviser to Joe Biden’s campaign. With Biden the presumptive Democratic nominee for the November presidential election, Summers could soon find himself in a position to repeat his mistakes.

Summers’s tenure in the Obama administration featured a number of questionable choices. As the incoming head of Obama’s National Economic Council in 2008, Summers famously misled the president-elect about the size of the stimulus package that leading experts—including fellow transition team member Christina Romer—urged was necessary, and kept him from even seeing the trillion-plus-dollar figures they recommended to avert skyrocketing unemployment. The recession was more painful and prolonged as a result. As reported by another transition team member, Reed Hundt, in A Crisis Wasted, he also specifically shot down several proposals from elsewhere in the inner circle about how the recovery should look.

As during the Clinton administration, Summers was leery of moving too quickly to curb carbon emissions, urging a lenient timetable for polluters; any real reforms, he reasoned, would have to wait for legislation. Hundt also writes that Summers rejected his proposal to have Obama’s stimulus create a green investment bank and build energy efficiency infrastructure and high-voltage transmission lines. This Green Recovery and Investment Program, or GRIP, as it was known, would have been more extensive than the roughly 10 percent of the stimulus eventually spent on clean energy. Summers thought it would create too much debt. He rejected the concept of creating new institutions, preferring a strategy of spending as quickly as possible, and saw the sole goal of the recovery as boosting demand and gross domestic product with a quick injection of federal cash. Staring down the barrel of double-digit unemployment in December 2008, Summers said, “Our economic problem is that the country has too much debt.”

Summers’s early, regimented focus on boosting consumer demand, Hundt wrote, meant he “effectively rejected a grand strategy of investing enough in clean power to replace carbon power,” fearing it would lower demand for fossil fuels. Instead, any direct stimulus spending would be “timely, targeted, and temporary,” neither making long-term investments in job creation nor biting into turf controlled by the private sector—for example, broadband or electricity. The government’s only job when it came to the high-voltage transmission lines Obama had been interested in building, he said, “is to remove regulatory obstacles.” Mostly that approach meant any public works spending got used on so-called “shovel-ready” projects like road repairs. In 2014, Summers called for an infrastructure bank that would privatize more of the country’s essential infrastructure. “He has a deist’s conviction in a clockwork economy that runs efficiently without government intervention,” Hundt wrote—a troubling quality in an era demanding large policy shifts to fight global warming.