It was — against all odds — an energy debate.
Just look at the statistics. The word “fracking” was mentioned 10 times. “Oil” came up seven times. Even “climate change,” which Donald Trump was not very eager to talk about, was mentioned four times. And while that may not seem like a lot for such a vast and globe-spanning problem, climate change came up only three times in all of 2016’s debates combined.
Even more than when talking about trade or inflation, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump used energy to make their economic vision concrete and meaningful to Americans. For Harris, that meant recognizing the scale of the country’s fossil fuel resources today while gesturing toward a cleaner and lower-carbon future that will produce (in theory, at least) lots of high-wage manufacturing jobs for America’s middle class. For Trump, the energy industry — and, really, the fossil fuel industry — is central to his fleshy, authoritarian vision of American strength. Seemingly any attempt to replace hydrocarbons with something cleaner or less polluting arises from nothing less than an elite conspiracy to weaken the country and sell out its people.
For such a stark contrast — and for such an outlandish contrast, to be clear — it was a surprisingly substantive debate. Which isn’t to say we learned much, especially about Trump. The Republican nominee was the same man we’ve seen for the past nine years, the same politician who has defined the extreme GOP position on global warming. Over the past near-decade, Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and has seemed to revel in emissions-increasing policies. That isn’t changing. Asked directly what he would do about climate change on Tuesday night, he did not address the question at all. Instead, he talked about how car factories are getting built in Mexico, and he claimed in a difficult-to-follow rant that Joe Biden is getting paid off by China.
About Harris, we learned far more. Harris struck a careful, moderate tone during the debate between the need for climate action and the ongoing importance of fossil fuel extraction. She spoke about the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate policy, but also discussed how it increased federal leasing for oil and gas. She spoke about climate change in terms of its higher everyday costs for Americans, and not — as Biden did — as an existential threat to the country.
“What we know is that [climate change] is very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or [it] is being jacked up.”
She bragged about the Biden administration’s oil and gas record in the same breath as she discussed its enormous investments in clean energy. American oil and gas production is at an all-time high — it is higher, in fact, than Saudi Arabia’s — but I can’t remember hearing a Biden administration official bragging about that.
“I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” she said.
In a way, Harris has essentially returned to Obama’s 2012 “all of the above” energy policy. That approach remains unpopular with climate activists, who think it did too much for the oil and gas industry; personally, I think it’s an open question whether Obama actually believed in the “all of the above” approach or was subtly trying to help renewables all along. But more importantly, the underlying policy context is totally different now than it was 12 years ago: With the Inflation Reduction Act in place, the government can more easily bless all forms of energy development because it is, in fact, helping clean energy take root.
What’s most important, though — and what I hope climate advocates do not overlook — is that Harris’s tack here reflects the broad state of American public opinion. While most Americans want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they do not seem to want an energy revolution: More than two-thirds of Americans believe the country should use a mix of renewables and fossil fuels, according to the Pew Research Center, and less than a third believe the country should rely “entirely” on renewables. In the same poll, most Americans said they oppose federal rules that would aim to make electric vehicles half of all new cars sold by 2032.
This is not to say that Americans are big oil lovers. Most Americans think the country should prioritize various forms of zero-carbon energy development over fossil fuels. And while Republican support for renewables has dropped over the past few years — and has fallen further over the past few months, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently — a generation gap has emerged wherein younger Republicans are much more likely to champion solar and wind than older party members.
Even among seemingly environmental-aligned demographics, greater support exists for fossil fuels than one might expect. Most Democrats say they would not “favor” expanding fracking or offshore drilling — but about a quarter of Democrats would favor more fossil fuel drilling. So would roughly 45% of independents and, of course, a large majority of Republicans, according to Pew.
Of course, these facts of public opinion sit uneasily with what we know about climate change, which is that greenhouse gas emissions — and fossil fuel development with it — should plan to scale down soon. The International Energy Association has said that the most likely pathway for keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius requires the development of “no new long lead-time upstream oil or gas projects.” This observation provides less guidance for American policy makers than it might initially seem, because it is really focused on the opening of new, massive oil fields like Guyana’s. (The IEA also says, in almost the same breath, that “continued investment is required in some existing oil and gas projects,” which could possibly justify ongoing extraction from Texas’s well-established oil and gas fields.)
But even then, the non-negotiable fact would remain: The world must move away from fossil fuels. And the American people are not generally ready to do that today. The country wants something closer to an “all of the above” strategy than it wants a Green New Deal.
That strategy brings climate policy out of the ideological realm and into the pragmatic. Americans, polling suggests, like renewables in part because they will let the United States reduce its dependence on foreign oil, a popular idea in and of itself and talking point of both parties going back decades.
When Heatmap polled more than 5,000 Americans last month, more than half said that a “strong benefit” of a given clean energy project would be its ability to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil and natural gas. Among respondents, those putative energy independence benefits were the No. 2 most popular reason to support clean energy; the only more popular rationale for backing a project was that it would cut utility bills.
Harris directly echoed that appeal on Tuesday. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said. “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.”
I can’t remember Biden making an appeal like this. When he talks about clean energy or the IRA, he tends to focus on its potential to grow the economy. Harris did some of that on Tuesday, bragging about the 800,000 new manufacturing jobs created during her vice presidency. But her focus on the national interest — and on the Biden administration’s appreciation of the ongoing fossil boom — was new.
Such an approach is unlikely to help her appeal to climate activists and advocates, who want the government to affirmatively begin to shutter fossil capacity. The Sunrise Movement, a climate activist group, criticized Harris on Tuesday for spending “more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future.”
What I’d advise those advocates to keep in mind is that their views are legitimately not very popular, and Harris is trying to win a very close election in a race that her team believes has potentially existential stakes for American democracy. She also remembers the 2020 primary, when she tacked left on virtually every issue — she promised to ban fracking, for instance — and still lost. (If that’s because many of the groups wound up backing Bernie Sanders in that primary, that only reinforces the view that she can’t win over those voters in the first place.)
Harris isn’t defying the left on every issue — she has resisted neoliberal dogma and pandered to the public’s views on price gouging, for instance, putting her more in line with the Democratic Party’s Elizabeth Warren wing. But unlike Biden, she refuses to pay an electoral price for backing left-wing policies. Indeed, she seems to believe that she cannot pay such a price and still win. If Harris is now bragging about her administration’s support for fossil fuels, if she is casting the Inflation Reduction Act as a law that helped fracking, that means climate activists have much more work to do to persuade the public on what they believe. The Democratic Party’s candidate will not do that persuasion for them. And in any case, activists are not going to convince the public to believe something in the next 54 days that they’ve failed to do in the past five years.
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