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…
