Vice President Kamala Harris can’t give a genuine answer about her opposition to fracking because she knows doing so would cost her the election.
In July, less than four months before the election, the Harris campaign revealed the Democrats’ new presidential nominee suddenly had a change of heart about the technology that revolutionized American energy. How convenient. The policy reversal came in the form of a campaign spokesman’s statement to Beltway outlets such as The Hill and Politico. The statement called former President Donald Trump’s claims that she would ban fracking “false.” Trump, however, was only quoting Harris from her own first presidential campaign in 2019.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris said at a CNN town hall.
The network’s Erin Burnett followed up with the related question: “Would you ban offshore drilling?”
“Yes,” Harris pledged. “And I’ve again, worked on that.”
Even if the vice president no longer supports bans on fracking or offshore drilling, she doesn’t have to in order for a Harris administration to regulate fossil fuels out of business.
The platform the DNC passed last month still endorsed President Joe Biden’s “second term” more than a dozen times. The Freudian slip might’ve been an embarrassing miscue, but it was also a tacit admission that Harris is a vehicle for continuing Biden’s policies despite her running as a “change” candidate. Harris finally published her own issues platform on her campaign website this week, but portions of the platform were merely copied and pasted from Biden’s page.
While the Biden-Harris administration never banned fracking or offshore drilling, that doesn’t mean they didn’t try. Harris will just pretend they didn’t to win Pennsylvania, the most important swing state in November based on the spending from both campaigns.
The Biden-Harris administration deployed nearly every tool in the White House arsenal to thwart cheap and reliable energy production in the form of fossil fuels. Biden launched a presidential assault on American energy on his first day in office, when he rained down executive orders killing the Keystone XL Pipeline along with opportunities for oil and gas drilling on public lands.
The new president then signed a moratorium on new leasing and drilling permits on U.S. lands and waterways on day two, and he did not resume oil and gas leases until June 2022, after a federal court struck down the illegal moratorium. By the time leases did finally come back on a limited basis, Biden’s Department of the Interior had raised the cost of drilling with a 50 percent spike in royalty rates to top off a cascade of new regulations.
In his first two years in office, Biden issued oil and gas leases for fewer acres than every president since Harry Truman, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Free Beacon reported in June that the “Biden administration has approved more than 1,000 fewer oil permits in its first three years than the Trump administration did in the same timeframe.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board also outlined the myriad ways the Biden-Harris administration has used “every regulatory tool to curtail oil and gas production.” The list includes tighter methane rules from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), taxpayer subsidies for government-preferred power sources to artificially compete with fossil fuels, and instructions for federal agencies to calculate climate risks in decisions to effectively block projects based on CO2 emissions.
“The EPA has also proposed regulations that would force existing gas power plants to close,” the Journal’s editorial board reported. “It has floated designating Texas’s Permian Basin in violation of ozone standards, which would require substantial reductions in production. Does Ms. Harris plan to finish these rules? She would have to go further to achieve the Administration’s goal of a carbon-free electric grid by 2035.”
Americans, meanwhile, saw weeks of record-breaking gas prices throughout 2022. At one point the nationwide average exceeded $5 per gallon for regular unleaded gasoline. Another avalanche of regulations from an administration run by a Bay-Area leftist who vocally supported the Green New Deal as a senator would almost certainly spike gas prices even higher.
