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During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris not only walked back her 2020 vow to “end fracking once and for all,” but seemed to embrace the technology, bragging about record oil and gas production under the Biden administration’s watch.
It was a sharp blow to climate advocates, whose reactions ranged from outright dismay and bewilderment to deflated resignation. Was Harris saying this in a clumsy attempt to appeal to a wider range of voters? Or had four years in the executive branch genuinely moderated her views?
Either way, it displayed the treacherous nature of oil and gas politics, especially for progressives. Republicans can please their base simply by chanting “Drill, Baby, Drill,” as meaningless as the mantra might be. Democrats, however, must walk a fine and wavy and often contradictory line to avoid alienating environmentalists, their oil-state colleagues and the voting public.
The debate was held in Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s largest natural gas producers and both a beneficiary and a victim of what’s come to be known as “fracking,” a combination of horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing that targets previously unrecoverable oil and gas in shale formations. So it makes sense to see Harris’ about-face on the issue as a “sprint to the center” to appeal to voters in the battleground state. That was surely part of it, anyhow.
But this is where it gets tricky. The record-breaking energy production that Harris takes partial credit for has also harmed places like Pennsylvania and the San Juan and Piceance basins in New Mexico and Colorado, areas that are natural gas-rich but oil-poor. That’s because fracking freed up so much natural gas that it glutted the market; the price of the fuel crashed, and new drilling — which is where the jobs are — was brought to a near halt.
The record oil production in the Permian Basin has exacerbated the pain, because every barrel of oil pulled out of the ground has natural gas, or methane, mixed in with it, and that only adds to the supply, bringing prices further down and making new natural gas drilling unprofitable. Only about 14 drill rigs are operating in Pennsylvania now, less than one-third the number of a decade ago. Meanwhile, more than 300 rigs are drilling in the Permian Basin at any given time.
At the same time, those low natural gas prices are good for consumers, who appreciate having lower gas and electricity bills. It’s even good, in a twisted sort of way, for the environment: The decline in coal burning is mostly the result of cheap natural gas, which is why, a few presidential races ago, Democrats were all gung-ho about drilling as a climate solution. On the other hand, those low prices also harm the environment: The oil companies lack any incentive to pipe and market the fuel, and so they flare it instead, pouring yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
And thus a Democratic presidential candidate finds herself trying to appeal not only to the general public, which wants cheap oil and gas, but also to oil and gas state politicians, especially those of her own party, whose support she will need in Congress. For Harris to adhere to her earlier promise to ban fracking would draw the ire of the entire Democratic congressional delegation of New Mexico, a state that fills its coffers with oil and gas money. And it would alienate Rep. Mary Peltola, the drilling-friendly Alaska Democrat, who has received $16,400 in donations from ConocoPhillips and its employees, plus another $300,000 from the ConocoPhillips-supported Center Forward Committee PAC. Republicans generally get more money from fossil fuels than Democrats, but they don’t have a monopoly on it by any means.
Harris may also be trying to avoid Joe Biden’s mistake of falsely raising climate advocates’ hopes by making a promise — to end drilling on federal land — that he could not keep.
For many climate hawks, that failure has outweighed everything else Biden has done to rein in drilling and mining and mitigate their impacts: canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, restoring Donald Trump’s litany of regulatory rollbacks, targeting fossil fuel demand by promoting electric vehicles, incentivizing clean energy manufacturing and — to the chagrin of many environmentalists — expediting solar and wind development and battery-metal mining on public lands.
Biden tackled the supply side by issuing new regulations and withdrawing land from new drilling. And, although it went almost unnoticed, his administration leased fewer acres of public land to oil and gas companies than any other administration has in at least three decades — a sort of stealth approach to phasing out drilling on federal lands. In just one term, Biden has arguably done more to combat the climate crisis than any president before him, though it may take a decade or more to see tangible results — something that will only happen if those policies remain in place.
Harris has revealed few details about her energy and public-land plans, but based on her record as a prosecutor, senator and vice president, it’s reasonable to expect she will continue the Biden administration’s policies and even build upon them.
Meanwhile, Trump’s potential policies are muddled by his erratic rhetoric, which often seems like a random assemblage of whatever comes into his brain while he is speaking. Trump told Nevadans that he wants to open vast tracts of public land to real estate developers, not just for housing, but to construct film studios, and proposed building 10 “Freedom Cities” on public land, populated by folks who will be paid to have children. And he thinks the West’s water crises could be solved by turning on some mysterious “giant faucet” that would magically deliver oodles of Canadian water to California’s farms and forests.
Yet, judging from his first term in office, Project 2025, Trump’s own Agenda 47 and the Republican Party’s platform, it’s clear that his primary goal is to remove what he sees as regulatory burdens on corporations — i.e., dismantle the administrative state. That means eviscerating the many environmental and health protections passed by the current administration and weakening the various landmark laws enacted over the last 50 years, all for the sake of achieving “energy dominance,” whatever that is. It also means further slashing taxes on fossil fuel corporations and axing the Inflation Reduction and Infrastructure acts, including all the funding for cleaning up abandoned oil and gas wells and clean energy incentives.
No matter who wins in November, the petroleum industry will be just fine — at least for now. Under Trump, it may be able to use more of its profits to enrich its executives and stakeholders rather than paying taxes or mitigating the industry’s environmental impacts. But it still won’t end up producing more oil and gas or providing more jobs or lowering the prices at the pump. Nor will Harris’ policies have any meaningful impact on the climate in the short term; oil companies will continue to pump out hydrocarbons, and the world will continue to burn them. Politics is about patience. It’s not about the grand and beautiful pie-in-the-sky promises, but about the quiet and often maddeningly incremental steps and compromises that, hopefully, will pay off in the long term.
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