“I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday night in her debate with former President Donald Trump. The second part of that statement is true as far as it goes, but the first part remains an open question.
Certainly, Harris has been an aggressive opponent of fracking throughout her national political career. It is a process she promised to ban during her presidential run in 2020.
Her breathtaking flip on the issue since being installed as the Democratic Party’s nominee in late July came without any detailed explanation of how that miraculous conversion came about and smells a lot like a politician pandering to voters in the crucial state of Pennsylvania. History abounds with naïve Americans who accepted the promises of political candidates at face value only to watch them do the exact opposite once elected.
Harris also claimed she cast “the deciding vote to increase drilling” at one point in the often-chaotic debate. That received no response from Trump, but it appears to be a repeat of the reference she has previously made to the fact that she cast the tie-breaking vote in her role as president of the Senate to pass the Orwellian Inflation Reduction Act, which even President Joe Biden recently admitted was misnamed. That bill contains language designed to lead to increased leasing and drilling for oil and gas on public lands. But the Biden-Harris Department of Interior, led by lifelong anti-oil-and-gas activist Deb Haaland, has consistently chosen to ignore the law.
Indeed, the Bureau of Land Management’s own data demonstrates that the leasing of federal lands during the Biden-Harris regime has been a small fraction of even the low levels seen during the Obama-Biden era.
As is unfortunately typical of presidential debates, the ABC moderators chose not to focus to any real extent on energy-related issues. When they did pose a question at least tangentially related to energy, it was slanted in a way to set up Harris to launch an attack on Trump — as when David Muir asked Trump about climate change by couching the question in terms of Trump’s belief that climate-change theory is a hoax.
Trump basically avoided the question, instead bridging it to a discussion of his plans to reinvigorate America’s domestic oil-and-gas industry. When he had finished, Harris recited all the standard claims of the climate alarm lobby, which is exactly what we should have expected her to do. In the end, it was an unserious question posed by biased moderators that did nothing to advance the debate and little to inform the public about what Harris would do differently than her current administration has done over the last four years.
More than once, Harris repeated her mantra that, whatever she says about fracking or climate change or any other issue: “My values haven’t changed.” Many believe that is a coded message to her ideological supporters that they should not worry about all the position changes she has made since being anointed as the nominee, because she does not really mean them.
Leftist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders essentially endorsed this tactic last Sunday on “Meet the Press,” when host Kristen Welker asked: “She [Harris] has previously supported Medicare for All, now she does not. She’s previously supported a ban on fracking, now she does not. These, Senator, are ideas that you have campaigned on. Do you think that she is abandoning her progressive ideals?”
“No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals,” Sanders admitted, adding: “I think she is trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”
In the end, the debate did not offer much real information as it relates to energy matters. Voters know what a Trump presidency would look like where energy is concerned – they’ve already enjoyed a taste of U.S. energy independence during his prior term. Where Harris is concerned, they are left to decide which version of the vice president to believe – the one flip-flopping on so many issues or the one whose progressive ideals have not changed?
This really doesn’t seem all that hard, does it?
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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