The Kamala Harris campaign has flip-flopped once again on fracking, with a key official admitting the vice president is not advocating its expansion.
Harris’ struggles balancing her climate activism with a shift to the center on energy threaten her chances in Pennsylvania, where former President Donald Trump is pulling ahead in some polling.
Fracking is a hot-button issue in the must-win Keystone State, where it supports around 123,000 jobs and led to more than $41 billion in 2022 economic activity, according to the energy economists at FTI Consulting.
Running in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, Harris declared at a CNN town hall, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”
Now the Democratic nominee, the veep insists, “As president I will not ban fracking.”
So Politico asked Harris’ climate-engagement director, Camila Thorndike, how the team balances the veep’s recent statements in favor of fracking with the campaign’s heated rhetoric around climate change.
“Just to be clear, Vice President Harris hasn’t said anything that the administration hasn’t already said. She is not promoting expansion,” Thorndike responded. “And so voters who care about climate change understand that she is someone that not only movements can work with, but she has championed these causes, and that we know who she is.”
Thorndike’s remarks contrast starkly with Harris’, as the veep claimed at the debate, “I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, involves injecting liquid into the Earth to create cracks that open up previously inaccessible oil and gas reserves.
Sarah Phillips, a petroleum engineer and prominent fracking advocate in the Pittsburgh area, told The Post fracking is the only way to reach those reserves.
“Our shale here is less permeable than cement. It’s impossible to get to if we don’t frack. So it would decimate our entire industry if we didn’t frack,” she said.
Greg Kozera, a native of the Pittsburgh area who worked in the natural-gas industry for more than 40 years and is now an economic-development consultant, told The Post the Biden-Harris record on natural gas is complicated.
“She may be partially correct because it did help get that Mountain Valley pipeline done,” Kozera said of Harris’ touting the Inflation Reduction Act. “And the people of Virginia desperately needed that thing.”
But Kozera said he’s more confident in Trump to create a friendly regulatory environment for fracking in the region of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
“Of the two, I have to lean towards Trump because of his stand on energy. And I know that what he’s saying is the truth because he’s already done it. He’s been there,” he said.
But Kozera is less sure about Harris’ newfound friendliness to fracking after she spent her career advocating a ban.
“Maybe she’s figured it out, but I don’t know,” he said.
“She’s flip-flopped on enough stuff that I thought I’m not sure I can believe her yet. And that really worries me. If she follows what Biden’s been doing, he hasn’t done a whole hell of a lot to help the energy industry.”
In Pennsylvania, which is essential to almost any presidential path to victory, the way natural-gas workers interpret the Harris campaign’s mixed messaging may determine who wins the presidency.
Almost 80% of voters there believe natural-gas drilling is important to the state’s economy.