Kamala Flip Flops on Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking)

Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ claim that she no longer supports a ban on fracking contrasts with what she said five years ago. Just before she dropped out of the 2020 presidential race in 2019 and joined President Joe Biden’s ticket, at a CNN town hall, she made it clear that she very much supports banning hydraulic fracturing (fracking}. She said, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking and starting with what we can do on day one around public lands, right?” “And then there has to be legislation, but, yes, that’s something I’ve taken on in California. I have a history of working on this issue.” That same year, she cosponsored Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which also includes a ban on fracking. “Climate change is real, and it poses an existential threat to us as human beings, and it is within our power to do something about it,” she said. “I am supporting the Green New Deal.”  The reality is that banning fracking would impact billions of dollars in revenue, destroy thousands of jobs and drive up the cost of everything, as the Department of Energy estimates 95 percent of all new wells are hydraulically fractured. 

The major environmental groups are silent on their preferred candidate’s flip-flop to embrace fracking. The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and the Sunrise Movement have not acknowledged the switch. Further Senators Bob Casey and Martin Heinrich from Pennsylvania and New Mexico, respectively, two states that benefit from fracking, are also silent on the flip flop. A fracking ban does not sell well in working-class areas, especially in Pennsylvania, which is the second largest natural gas producing state after Texas.

Where is Harris on banning plastic straws made from petroleum and banning offshore drilling? She has supported banning both in the past. Will she also flip-flop on these issues or stay the course? Does she still support a carbon tax, which would drive up the cost of 80 percent of the energy used in the United States? How about the billions of dollars for electric school buses she has so passionately supported in the past, now that the real costs and performance of them has become exposed?

As President Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris strongly supported every anti-energy order from the White House. Harris’ campaign wants Americans to believe that she has simply changed her position on a major issue facing our economy 100 days before an election. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris has not undergone a primary where she would be put to the test to explain where she stands on all the issues on which she has flip-flopped. Besides fracking, she no longer supports abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, no longer supports mandatory gun buybacks, and no longer supports banning private health insurance. Further, she also has avoided interviews with reporters where she could be asked her stance on issues. Harris has been gifted the nomination on a silver platter by President Joe Biden and has not had to earn it by taking her case to Democratic primary voters where she would have been forced to go on record on these issues so that primary voters could hold her accountable.  Since energy availability and reliability are so central to the nation’s economy, inflation and household budgets, as well as critical to our national security, these questions deserve answers. 

The Biden-Harris Record

The Biden-Harris administration has used every regulatory tool available to curtail oil and gas production. Days after taking office, President Biden imposed a moratorium on new lease sales on federal lands. After this was blocked in court, his Administration slow-walked drilling permits and auctions. The Environmental Protection Agency tightened methane regulations, increasing production costs and making some wells uneconomic. The White House also directed federal agencies to incorporate climate estimates in environmental reviews so they can block fossil-fuel projects solely because of carbon dioxide emissions.  

The Biden-Harris administration has also sought to reduce demand for oil and gas with rules that effectively mandate more electric vehicles, bar new natural gas power plants, and phase out natural gas appliances. It has paused permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects. It has also incentivized renewable energy through the Democrat-passed Inflation reduction Act to make fossil fuels less competitive.  Meanwhile, in order to justify enormously expensive regulations, it raised the “Social Cost of Carbon” from about $4 per ton to over $190 per ton.  The higher the social cost of carbon, the more the Biden-Harris administration can argue that its policies stifling production and use of energy from fossil fuels make economic sense. 

The Biden-Harris administration’s Environmental Protection Agency will be putting out new regulations for existing gas power plants after the election, which will likely force them to close. It has floated designating Texas’s Permian Basin in violation of ozone standards, which would require substantial reductions in production, driving up energy prices. Does Candidate Kamala Harris support these pending rules, as she has all the other regulations of the Biden-Harris administration?

President Biden has committed to a carbon free electric grid by 2035, which is still about 60 percent powered by natural gas and coal. So far, the Biden-Harris administration has not been successful in forcing enough intermittent wind and solar power on the grid to scale back much of the current fossil fuel contribution, no less provide enough new capacity to deal with the onslaught of new demand on the grid from artificial intelligence data centers and the new demand from the Biden-Harris regulations and standards impacting electric vehicles, heat pumps, and electric appliances. In fact, despite building more wind turbines under the subsidies in the Biden-Harris climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, wind energy dropped last year for the first time since 1998, and recently hit a 33 month low.  A Harris administration will have 4 years to do the work that will make the U.S. power grid expensive, unreliable and similar to the electric supply of third world countries. That will ruin the U.S. economy that needs inexpensive and abundant energy to grow. 

Conclusion

Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris is flip-flopping on many issues that she strongly supported during the Democratic primary leading to the 2020 election, where she was very unpopular with Democrat voters. Now, she has been handed a gift by President Biden so that she does not have to state where she stands on many important issues and can have her campaign conveniently flip-flop on them. She has avoided undergoing a primary, where she was not very popular in 2020 and she is currently avoiding one-one interviews. However, her record during the Biden-Harris administration is clear. She supported all of Biden’s regulations and executive orders. She voted for the Inflation Reduction Act that had no Republican vote. Is her switch on issues now just an election year ploy to get elected to the U.S. Presidency to spend the next 4 years doing all she can to destroy the current U.S. energy system and thereby the U.S. economy?