"My values have not changed." When political leaders say things like this, it often suggests that they have in fact changed their minds. Such is the case with Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for US president in the November 5 election, who explained on August 29, on the set of CNN, that she no longer advocates a total ban on oil and gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing (fracking).
Harris had made this commitment in late 2019, during her short-lived campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and then kept a low profile on the subject, supporting the wait-and-see stance of President Joe Biden: "As vice president, I didn't ban fracking; as president, I won't ban fracking," she told CNN.
What is behind this turnabout compared to her 2019 position? If she hopes to win the presidential election, Harris absolutely must win the key state of Pennsylvania, a hotbed of shale gas development, so she now argues that any ban is unnecessary. "We can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking," she said.
The Democratic candidate has joined an increasingly consensual position in the US, carried notably by John Kerry, who was Biden's climate envoy, and according to which science and technology will solve the climate crisis, in a country where the concept of moderation does not exist. Harris has boasted that, as vice president, she provided the decisive vote to enable the adoption of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden's massive energy transition subsidy plan. This is technically true, but politically false. The passage of this text in the summer of 2022 was mainly owing to the U-turn of West Virginia's Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, in exchange in particular for concessions on the construction of a pipeline to open up his state.
In fact, the subject of climate change did not come up at the Democratic convention in Chicago. It must be said that environmental issues have cost the Democrats dearly. Biden began by banning construction of the Keystone XL pipeline linking Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, then denied certain drilling permits on federal lands. Although not the cause, these measures coincided with the surge in oil prices (linked to the Covid-19 crisis, and accelerated by the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022) in June 2022, provoking public anger. At the pump, the price per gallon (3.78 liters) rose to over $5; it has since fallen back to $3.22.
Harris has found herself in a paradoxical situation: She has had to claim the policy of energy transition while bragging about drilling more oil than ever, in the name of national independence. "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," she said at a rally in Philadelphia on September 12. The world's leading oil producer, well ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia, the US has been breaking production records under the Biden administration, above 2019 levels.
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