What Harris Says About Fracking from Day to Day Matters Not: Everything She's Done Demonstrates Her Opposition

Guest Post by Don Ritter, Former Lehigh Valley Congressman.

Kamala Har­ris says that she won’t ban frack­ing, but that doesn’t mat­ter. The Biden-Har­ris ad­min­is­tra­tion has sty­mied fos­sil fuel en­ergy pro­duc­tion for four years through reg­u­la­tion with­out such a “ban.” You can kill frack­ing with­out ban­ning it.

In Penn­syl­va­nia, for ex­am­ple, plans for two new nat­u­ral gas power plants were shelved be­cause of state and fed­eral pol­i­cies that seek to re­strict emis­sions, which may well be harm­less.

The ad­min­is­tra­tion and their con­gres­sio­nal al­lies gave pref­er­ence to the de­vel­op­ment of ex­pen­sive, in­ter­mit­tent and un­re­li­able so­lar and wind gen­er­a­tion.

Tril­lions of dol­lars of tax­payer-funded grants, loans and sub­si­dies are en­vi­sioned to “in­cen­tivize” the Biden-Har­ris tran­si­tion to green. The ad­min­is­tra­tion’s oddly named In­fla­tion Re­duc­tion Act pro­vides a hefty Green New Deal down pay­ment of $400 bil­lion.

Con­gres­sio­nal Dem­o­crats have been no­ta­bly quiet about the com­mit­ment of the Biden-Har­ris En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency to sti­fle — by reg­u­la­tion — fos­sil fu­eled power plants and gas-driven cars. This reg­u­la­tion pro­ceeds apace as elec­tric power grids warn of com­ing black­outs be­cause al­ter­na­tives to coal and nat­u­ral gas — so­lar and wind — can’t gen­er­ate suf­fi­cient amounts of elec­tric­ity and most con­sum­ers are re­ject­ing elec­tric ve­hi­cles as too ex­pen­sive and im­prac­ti­cal.

Re­cently, the Har­ris cam­paign’s Cli­mate En­gage­ment Direc­tor, Camila Thorn­dike, said that her can­di­date “is not pro­mot­ing ex­pan­sion” of fos­sil fuel drill­ing and ​frack­ing. “She just said that she wouldn’t ban frack­ing.”

In other words, frack all you want, but good luck us­ing the oil and nat­u­ral gas ex­tracted. That’s cer­tainly the mes­sage the Cli­mate En­gage­ment Direc­tor was send­ing to the thou­sands of ac­tiv­ists she has mo­bi­lized for the Har­ris cam­paign as she likely an­gles for a po­si­tion in her boss’s ad­min­is­tra­tion.

The cam­paign at­tempted a walk-back of Thorn­dike’s com­ments but ques­tions re­main. Does Har­ris sup­port “the ex­pan­sion of frack­ing” in Penn­syl­va­nia and else­where … or not?

And what about con­gres­sio­nal Dem­o­crats, nor­mally re­li­able votes for the Biden-Har­ris en­ergy/​cli­mate agenda? Do they sup­port the con­tin­ued pro­duc­tion and use of fos­sil fu­els as de­manded now and into the fu­ture by the Amer­i­can peo­ple or will they use gov­ern­ment power to re­move fos­sil fu­els from our econ­omy?

Another ques­tion re­lated to frack­ing is whether to per­mit the con­struc­tion of new pipe­lines, which are es­sen­tial to the trans­port of nat­u­ral gas and oil.

Pipe­lines are far more ef­fi­cient and safer than mov­ing fu­els by truck or rail. The fu­ture of frack­ing would be lim­ited with­out ex­pan­sion of in­fra­struc­ture nec­es­sary to carry oil and gas to do­mes­tic and for­eign mar­kets.

On Day One of the Biden-Har­ris ad­min­is­tra­tion, the con­struc­tion of the Key­stone XL pipe­line was ter­mi­nated. A ques­tion for vot­ers: would a Pres­i­dent Har­ris and con­gres­sio­nal Dem­o­crats al­low new, and nec­es­sary, oil and gas pipe­lines to be built?

Biden-Har­ris ad­min­is­tra­tion con­straints on the fos­sil fuel in­dus­try have been nu­mer­ous: Devel­op­ment of the Arc­tic Na­tional Wild­life Ref­uge was ter­mi­nated de­spite frack­ing’s tiny en­vi­ron­men­tal foot­print. Drilling on fed­eral lands in oil and gas-rich New Mex­ico was cur­tailed.

Per­mits for four new liq­ui­fied nat­u­ral gas ex­port ter­mi­nals were paused, al­though the ac­tion was even­tu­ally over­turned by a court. Per­mit­ting new re­fin­er­ies is near im­pos­sible. The list goes on.

U.S. oil and gas pro­duc­tion has gone up un­der Biden-Har­ris, but largely be­cause of fed­eral leases granted by the pre­ced­ing Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion, leases on pri­vate prop­erty and by max­ing out on ex­ist­ing equip­ment.

The pres­ent ad­min­is­tra­tion and the pros­pect of an anti-fos­sil fu­els Har­ris pres­i­dency have de­pressed new pro­duc­tion in­vest­ment. As a re­sult, the big en­ergy com­pa­nies are dis­trib­ut­ing their record prof­its to share­hold­ers in­stead of in­vest­ing in new frack­ing ca­pac­ity.

The na­tional se­cu­rity im­pli­ca­tions are se­ri­ous. For one thing, Euro­pean al­lies need U.S. oil and gas. Closer to home, the pres­ent ad­min­is­tra­tion, in an ef­fort to blunt the in­fla­tion­ary ef­fects of its en­ergy pol­i­cies, de­pleted the Stra­te­gic Pe­tro­leum Re­serve to dan­ger­ously low lev­els. The na­tional se­cu­rity risks of such an en­ergy pol­icy are huge.

All this, while our ad­ver­sar­ies in China, Rus­sia and Iran and the en­ergy-hun­gry Global South are mov­ing full steam ahead on the pro­duc­tion and use of fos­sil fu­els. Their in­creases in green­house gas emis­sions dwarf our own re­duc­tions.

If a po­ten­tial Har­ris-Walz ad­min­is­tra­tion and con­gres­sio­nal al­lies won’t per­mit frack­ing on fed­eral lands in Alaska or New Mex­ico, if they won’t per­mit new pipe­lines and re­fin­er­ies and LNG ter­mi­nals, if they con­tinue to reg­u­late-to-death fos­sil fuel power plants, if they are bent on spend­ing tril­lions of tax­payer dol­lars to push wind and so­lar over fos­sil fu­els, if they con­tinue with the pres­ent “whole-of-gov­ern­ment” ap­proach to get rid of fos­sil fu­els — be­ing “against a frack­ing ban” is mean­ing­less.

This post republished from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with permission of the author, Don Ritter, a former Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Ritter also led the National Environmental Policy Institute.

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