“Let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania,” Harris said, speaking from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Harris continued, “I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”
Harris vowed to ban natural gas extraction during her failed 2020 presidential campaign. At a CNN town hall in September 2019, she stated, “There’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.”
Kamala Harris: "There’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking" #ClimateTownHall https://t.co/uRwmVeFb0e pic.twitter.com/Kifg574uj1
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) September 4, 2019
The vice president now cites her statement “Joe Biden will not end fracking. He has been very clear about that,” from the 2020 vice presidential debate as the moment she made it clear she supports fracking.
Former President Donald Trump forcefully pushed back on Harris during Tuesday’s debate: ““If she won the election, the day after that election, they’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead. Fossil fuel will be dead.”
“If she wins the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said.
The Republican nominee claimed, “She has a plan to not allow fracking in Pennsylvania or anywhere else.” Harris denies this.
An August 2024 report from the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion has found Pennsylvanians support for fracking has grown by 9 points since 2012. In 2022, 48% of Pennsylvanians said they were in favor of natural gas extraction with 44% opposed, a 5-point decline since 2012.
Despite their mixed feelings, Pennsylvanians are near-unanimous about the importance of fracking to the Keystone State’s economy. The poll found 86% of Pennsylvanians believe natural gas is important for the state’s economy.
The New York Post interviewed several Pennsylvania energy workers who remained skeptical of the vice president’s sincerity after Tuesday’s debate.
“I don’t believe anything Kamala Harris says,” Western Pennsylvania-based service supervisor Scott Ivey told the Post. “I don’t want to get too political, but I believe she’ll regulate it so hard that it’ll be impossible to frack once she gets in.”
Sarah Philips, a Washington County-based petroleum engineer, cited the Biden-Harris administration’s stonewalling of Mountain Valley Pipeline to support her skepticism of Harris. Democrats “want net-zero [carbon] by 2050, which inherently is anti-fracking,” Phillips said to the Post.
Harris’s new position has earned her criticism from some on the left. David Sirota, a screenwriter and former Bernie Sanders aide, argued in Jacobin that there was “no reason” for her to support fracking.
Sirota contends that “the idea that a fracking ban is political poison in Pennsylvania is a fantastical tale fabricated by a national press corps that refuses to let public opinion data get in the way of fossil fuel propaganda and a manufactured narrative.” The Nation published a student-reported piece similarly making the case that her reversal on fracking is “unnecessary.”
Despite the claims of some on the left that her shift is unnecessary, the Harris camp wants to avoid testing the proposition that taking an anti-fracking stance could be a difficult sell in a state that’s second only to Texas in natural gas production.
