Two years ago, President Biden signed into law the world’s biggest climate change spending plan named the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—at the time estimated to provide $370 billion in support for emissions reducing programs.
On Tuesday’s presidential debate stage, Vice President Kamala Harris touted the law for a completely different claim: it paved the way for more oil and gas drilling.
It was just one of many statements in which the Democratic presidential nominee made the case that, in addition to advancing clean energy technologies, she would foster domestic fossil fuel production. Early on, she went out of her way to say that she now supports fracking, a technology used to drill oil and gas wells, after asserting in 2019 that she favored a ban of it. She celebrated that the “largest increase in domestic oil production in history” had occurred during the Biden Administration. “We have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.
At the same time, former President Donald Trump tried to put his opponent on the defensive on the issue, saying that if Harris is elected, “oil will be dead” and returning to the issue unprompted at several points throughout the debate.
On a substantive level, the debate represents little departure from the longstanding contours of the policy debate in Washington. Biden has spent big and used the administration’s regulatory authority to advance clean energy while calling for more oil and gas production as those technologies continue to grow. Republicans, for the most part, call for policy that would be even more favorable to oil and gas.
But, rhetorically, Harris’ departure could hardly have been starker. Along with reversing her previous support for a fracking ban, Harris partly built her profile as California’s attorney general by targeting oil companies for investigation.
It’s an indicator how much the politics of energy and climate have changed over the past four years. The oil market has been turned on its head since the 2020 presidential election, when the price of oil had collapsed in the midst of the COVID pandemic and the industry seemed to be in dire financial straits. But Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine drove panic as fears rose that Russia, a key oil exporter, might cut supply. In response, Biden called on U.S. companies to produce more oil.
At the same time, instead of trying to pass a sweeping new climate policy platform, Democrats now need to play defense to protect the rules that they have put on the books over the past four years. A future Trump administration would target the reams of environmental regulation that have come from across the Biden administration. And all eyes would be on the IRA as some Republicans would try to end the law’s tax incentives for clean energy and claw back funding that has already flowed to federal agencies.
Indeed, in response to how she would address climate change, Harris offered little in the way of forward-looking vision. Instead, she touted the IRA, saying that it had created manufacturing jobs and driven investment in the American auto industry. “While I have been vice president, we have invested in clean energy to the point that we are opening up factories around the world,” she said.
And then there’s the political calculation that has everyone talking about fracking: Pennsylvania is a must-win swing state, and fracking played a key role in advancing drilling in the state’s Marcellus Shale. Supporting a ban on fracking is widely perceived as a dangerous position given the significant role of oil in the state’s economy.
But to focus too much on the fracking discussion would be to miss the forest for the trees. To start, presidents don’t have the ability to ban fracking unilaterally. And, more broadly, the oil industry is driven much more by markets than policy.
And it shouldn’t be lost on voters that the most important climate move Harris would take as president would likely be to continue to implement the laws that exist.