“Joe Biden is not on the ballot,” Vice President Kamala Harris has taken to telling voters on the campaign trail in recent weeks. During her interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier last week, Harris went further to distance herself from the sitting president, stating, “My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency.”
But President Biden’s vice president is on the ballot, and her new spokesperson for energy and climate issues recently told an interviewer with Politico that, where banning hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – and other energy issues are concerned, Harris is playing from the Biden administration’s playbook.
“Just to be clear, Vice President Harris hasn’t said anything that the administration hasn’t already said” related to oil and gas to issues like banning fracking and leasing federal lands, Camila Thorndike, the Harris/Walz campaign’s new director of climate engagement told Politico Pro.
But, Thorndike says, Harris “is not promoting expansion” of drilling and fracking for oil and gas. Harris has repeatedly pointed to the fact that she did cast the deciding Senate vote for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, and that the bill included language instructing the Interior Department (DOI) to comply with the Federal Lands Leasing Act to restart the leasing program it had kept in suspension despite several court orders to conduct sales. But Harris has remained mum about the fact that DOI has not acted on the IRA requirement, keeping its leasing program in de facto suspension since. As a result, no one really knows what the next four years would hold in a Kamala Harris presidency on this key issue.
The same is true where fracking is concerned. Harris has been careful to stick to her tightly worded commitment that she would not “ban” the longstanding, well-regulated industrial process that has been in use since the 1940s but has carefully avoided taking or answering questions about whether she would seek to further limit the practice through regulation or executive orders.
When questioned by Politico, Thorndike only reemphasized the strict limits of the comments offered by her boss. “She’s just said that they wouldn’t ban fracking and the fact that anyone could look up is that the IRA required leases, and that was not something that she promoted,” Thorndike said, adding, “voters who care about climate change understand that she is someone that not only movements can work with, but she has championed these causes, and that we know who she is. Her record is so clear.”
That last part is a problem, though: Harris’s record really is quite clear on these pressing matters to voters, like so many in the key state of Pennsylvania, whose livelihoods depend on the oil and gas business. But the record doesn’t square with the campaign rhetoric.
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski called out Harris recently for promising not only to ban fracking during her brief 2019/2020 presidential campaign, but also to prosecute oil companies and their executives over emissions issues. “Archived material from Harris’s 2020 campaign found more than a dozen mentions of prosecuting Big Oil either for pollution or climate change. Citing climate change as an urgent threat, Harris said aggressive action was imminently needed,” Kaczynski wrote.
Later that same day, on CNN’s air with host Erin Burnett, Kacynski expanded on Harris’s campaign attacks on Big Oil. “She was making this extremely bold promise that she was going to take the US oil industry, possibly criminally prosecute them for their role in climate change,” he told Burnett. “She compared it to Big Tobacco, saying they knew the effects of climate change but they hid it from the public. Now, we saw there, fast forward to 2024, what are her and Tim Walz doing? They are touting the record domestic oil production from those same oil companies during the Biden-Harris administration.”
During the same discussion, Kaczynski also pointed to Harris’s promise in 2019 to eliminate the Senate filibuster rule to pass the Green New Deal legislation that she co-sponsored along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. Among a laundry list of other provisions, the Green New Deal would have banned not just fracking, but also leasing and drilling operations.
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