Vice President Kamala Harris purported to be in favor of fossil fuels on the debate stage on Tuesday night, but several of her talking points lacked key context or were contradicted by her record in the Biden administration.
The vice president reiterated on the debate stage that she no longer backs a fracking ban, stated that she favored energy independence and took credit for specific oil and gas-related provisions included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s signature climate bill that passed the Senate with Harris’ tie-breaking vote in 2022. While Harris tried to depict herself as a champion of energy independence and diversifying supply, her record as vice president and as a senator is full of actions that restricted American fossil fuel production.
ABC’s Linsey Davis, one of the debate’s moderators, asked Harris to explain her reversals on a number of topics, ranging from her past support for a fracking ban to her purportedly discarded view that illegal border crossings should be decriminalized.
“So my values have not changed. And I’m going to discuss every one — at least every point that you’ve made. But in particular, let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States,” Harris said in response. “And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”
As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris said there is “no question” that fracking should be banned, and she did not disown that position in the 2020 vice presidential debate against former Vice President Mike Pence as she suggested on Tuesday night. In the debate against Pence, Harris only went so far as to say that President Joe Biden would not ban fracking.
In the first weeks of the Biden-Harris administration in 2021, Biden signed a since-overturned executive order that effectively prohibited future oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters.
Meanwhile, the IRA mandated the federal government to hold 60 million acres worth of offshore oil and gas leases in order to hold more offshore wind lease sales. Ultimately, the Biden administration finalized the bare minimum 60 million acres for offshore oil and gas lease sales in its five-year leasing schedule in December 2023.
The IRA also allowed for the creation of a new tax on methane emissions that has been described by opponents as a de facto natural gas tax that would likely increase costs for consumers.
Onshore, the Biden-Harris administration has taken huge swaths of the federal estate off the table for oil and gas development. The administration has moved to block future oil and gas activity on tens of millions of acres of Alaskan land and canceled previously-awarded leases.
Moreover, federal data analyzed by the Western Energy Alliance shows that the number of onshore acres available for lease sales, the number of leases issued, and the number of acres issued through those leases all trended down under the Biden-Harris administration.
“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris continued in her response. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”
Nominally, it is true that U.S. oil production reached record highs while Biden was in office. However, as energy sector experts previously explained to the DCNF, this may be an achievement that happened in spite of the administration rather than because of it: fossil fuel production, especially on federal lands, takes years to come to fruition, meaning that some of the output happening today is the product of work done under the Trump administration.
The U.S. is still a net exporter of crude oil as of 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration, but the administration may be more sensitive to global price swings than they let on. Officials have loosely enforced sanctions against Iranian and Russian oil to keep prices stable ahead of the pivotal 2024 election.
The Harris campaign did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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