Tuesday’s presidential debate barely touched on the subject of climate change. But in the few minutes devoted to climate policy, Vice President Kamala Harris aimed at moderates by voicing full-throated support for domestic oil production.
In a state where natural gas helps power the economy, she pivoted from her 2019 call for a ban on fracking — extracting natural gas by creating cracks in the earth’s bedrock.
Harris’s moves show how some top Democrats have abandoned the idea of blocking oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters — which President Joe Biden once embraced — and shifting their rhetoric to appeal to swing voters.
“I will not ban fracking,” she said. “I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tiebreaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”
In the weeks leading up to the debate with former president Donald Trump, Harris’s campaign had tried to strike a balance by positioning the candidate as neither overwhelmingly opposed to drilling, nor wholly in favor of it. She did not highlight climate change or other environmental issues in her stump speeches. All the while, Trump pledged to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental regulations to spur more oil production and attacked Harris for her alleged “war on American energy.”
Forced to address the issue Tuesday night, Harris embraced the oil boom.
Harris emphasized the need for the United States to be an independent oil producer. She praised the Biden administration’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed with her tiebreaking vote. But in the same breath, she also bragged about the country’s record oil and gas production.
“We have invested over a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” she said.
Trump ignored the question and criticized the Biden administration’s record on auto manufacturing.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the vice president’s remarks reflect today’s political and economic reality. Fracking is the largest source of energy production in the country. Though wind and solar are growing quickly, and displacing coal, the shift to cleaner sources of energy remains a distant goal. And though the Biden administration pledged to stop drilling on public lands and cancel fossil fuel subsidies, his administration has not been able to do those things without support from Congress.
Meanwhile, the success of Harris’s campaign rests in swing states including Pennsylvania, where some voters’ livelihoods depend on the fossil energy industry.
“It’s a shift in rhetoric, not in policy,” Gerrard said. “The climate advocacy community is solidly in Harris’s camp — they realize Trump would be a horror show. Harris has a greater need to attract voters from states like Pennsylvania that rely heavily on fracking, and those votes are far more likely to be swayed by this rhetoric than the votes of the environmental community.”
For their part, many of the country’s largest environmental groups have not pressed Harris to commit to going further than Biden in limiting planet-warming emissions. But younger climate activists have — and they were disappointed by Harris’s comments.
Stevie O’Hanlon, a spokeswoman for the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, said the vice president’s support Tuesday for domestic oil production was “misguided” and predicted that it would not help her in Pennsylvania.
“It was a missed opportunity for her to draw a really clear contrast with Donald Trump and show young voters, who are wondering what the next president will do to protect our future and our lives,” O’Hanlon said. “The task isn’t that hard,” she added, because Trump “has made it so clear he will do exactly what oil and gas executives want him do.”
