With gas prices rising and the choir of critics growing louder, Obama senior advisor David Plouffe defended the president’s energy policy and said the administration has not ruled out opening the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
“What I’ll say is we’re not taking that off, that option, off the table,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union. “There are supply disruptions right now in places like Sudan. You still have oil not at its peak in places like Libya. Obviously the sanctions are working, the crippling sanctions the president has put in place are working in the Middle East and strangling the Iranian economy, but there is no doubt that what we have to do in this country, we have to use less oil.”
On Fox News Sunday, Plouffe said that the administration would only consider tapping into the strategic petroleum reserve to address supply issues, not to lower gas prices at the pump.
“I’m not going to get into any hypotheticals about something we may or may not do,” Plouffe said. “It’s really about the supply,” he said. “No one should expect there is any magic bullet out there that is automatically going to drop gas prices.”
When host Chris Wallace asked Plouffe to confirm that the administration would only consider using the reserves if there was an interruption in supply, not to lower gas prices, Plouffe responded, “that’s right… This has got to be about supply.”
Plouffe added that there are currently some supply issues. “There is some supply disruption right now.”
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