September 11, 2024
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Presidential debates feature fracking, while climate change is largely ignored
Donald Trump largely ignored climate change during Tuesday’s presidential debate, while Kamala Harris voiced support for both fossil fuels and increased clean energy spending.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during the presidential debate with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 10, 2024.
Privacy Policy Vice President Kamala Harris finally addressed climate change legislation she blatantly avoided during the campaign, proving she will not ban fracking.
“As vice president of the United States, I never banned fracking. In fact, I voted in the runoff on an inflation-busting bill that would have opened up new fracking rights,” Harris said during a debate with former President Donald Trump in Philadelphia on Tuesday night.
“My position is that we need to invest in diversified energy sources to reduce our dependency on foreign oil,” she continued. “We have seen the largest increase in domestic oil production in history, recognizing that we cannot be overly dependent on foreign oil.”
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Harris was responding to Trump’s claim that if he wins the election, “fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one.”
Harris supported a ban on fracking in 2019 but has since reversed her stance on the drilling, a major issue in gas-rich Pennsylvania. Much of the path to winning the presidential election is through winning battleground states.
The debate, hosted by ABC News at the National Constitution Center, may have been the only chance Americans will have to hear the candidates go head-to-head on policy before the November election.
Harris dominated much of the debate, mocking the size of Trump’s audiences, his past bankruptcies, his inherited fortune and his status on the international stage.
Climate change took a backseat to issues like abortion and geopolitics, but Harris tried to portray herself on the debate stage as a supporter of both fossil fuels and increased spending on clean energy.
She praised the Biden administration’s historic investments in clean energy, linking it to “opening up manufacturing around the world,” noted the increase in climate-related extreme weather events, and highlighted Trump’s denial of climate change.
“The former president said climate change is a ‘hoax,’ but what we know is that it’s very real,” she said.
The debate was a chance for Harris to win over undecided voters. The New York TimesA Siena College poll released a few days ago showed that 28 percent of voters felt they needed to know more about her before November, compared to just 9 percent who said they needed to know more about Trump.
Another Marist College poll released Tuesday found that 30% of voters said the debate would help the presidential election a lot or quite a bit.
Trump used the debate to address the same climate issues he has frequently used throughout his nearly decade-long political career, arguing that climate change policies will destroy jobs and destroy manufacturing, and that the Anti-Inflation Act is primarily a concession to China.
He also made dire predictions about a Harris administration.
“Oil is going to die, fossil fuels are going to die,” Trump said. “We’re going to go back to wind power, we’re going to go back to solar power, which takes an entire desert to produce the energy. Have you ever seen a solar farm? By the way, I’m a big fan of solar power, but it takes 400 to 500 acres of desert soil.”
Harris noted that oil and gas production has surged to historic levels under the Biden administration, and she also criticized Trump for making conspiratorial claims about energy, urging viewers to tune into one of his rallies and see for themselves.
“He’ll talk about how windmills cause cancer,” she said.
During his campaign, Trump promised to return gasoline prices to $2 a barrel and to tame inflation by dramatically expanding oil and gas drilling.
But because oil and gas prices are determined by global markets and largely outside the president’s control, economists say drilling more would do little to combat inflation.
Meanwhile, Harris made little mention of the Biden administration’s climate change record, which includes the largest climate spending package in U.S. history and historic investments in clean energy that have created thousands of new jobs.
When she talks about the Inflation Control Act during the campaign, she typically mentions more of its health care provisions, such as price caps on certain drugs.
Harris recently released her policy platform, and the section on energy and climate does not offer any specific new ideas that diverge from Biden’s approach. But on Tuesday, she noted the importance of climate policy to a key demographic: young voters who were key to Biden’s victory in 2020.
“We know we can actually do something about this,” she said of climate change. “Young people in America care deeply about this issue.”
Source E&E News Posted with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News delivers news that matters to energy and environmental professionals.
