Don't Be Fooled: Kamala Is A Zero-Carbon Green Radical

September 03, 2024 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

What is Kamala Harris’s position on any important policy issue? It’s not so easy to figure out. She studiously avoids interviews and reporters’ questions. Go to Harris’s official campaign website, and it’s almost entirely about raising money, without a word about what she stands for. Back when she was in the Senate (January 2017-January 2021), and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2019-20, she made many definitive statements on various subjects (all in accord with the radical left wing of the Democratic Party). Now, it’s silence. Unidentified campaign spokespeople imply that her previous positions are no longer operative; but what is the new position?

One example of this phenomenon that has received some attention this past week is Harris’s position on “fracking,” that is, drilling for oil and gas in solid rock formations via the hydraulic fracturing process. As reported in Forbes on August 30, back in 2019, at a CNN town hall, Harris stated rather unequivocally, “[T]here’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” But when, in her one interview since being nominated, CNN asked her on August 29 if she had changed her mind, she answered rather ambiguously “I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020,” and continued, saying that “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.” Forbes went looking for what Harris was referring to as what she made clear “on the debate stage in 2020,” and all they could find was a statement in the vice-presidential debate that Joe Biden “will not end fracking.” So is that Harris’s current position?

Not to minimize the importance of the issue of fracking, but frankly it’s a distraction. The point of the distraction is to divert your attention away from the more important information, which is that Harris is a zero-carbon green energy radical. We actually know in great detail where Harris stands on issues of energy policy, because she’s the Vice President in the Biden-Harris administration. There has never been a word indicating that Harris has objected to any of her administration’s energy policies, and indeed she has gone along with all of them. So we can just look to the policies of the existing administration, and we will know where Harris stands.

The summary is that the three-and-a-half years of the Biden-Harris administration have been an unrelenting war on the hydrocarbon fuel industries, featuring some hundreds of initiatives to restrict, hinder and delay production and use of energy from these sources. Accompanying this war has been a simultaneous creation of vast slush funds in the hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars to support useless “green” energy projects of well-connected subsidy farmers.

Let’s just have a review of a few of the more important energy-related regulatory initiatives of this administration:

• Just a few months ago, on April 25, the Biden-Harris EPA finalized four massive new rules designed to force the closure first of coal and then of natural gas power plants. I covered the subject in this post on May 1. The most important of the new rules is one going by the title “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” It’s over 1000 pages long, but the main idea is to set limits for carbon emissions from the plants that are sufficiently low, and decreasing, so that over time no fossil-fuel plants can comply and they all must close. The rules leave a theoretical out if a plant can implement a “carbon capture and storage” system, but those don’t exist today, and probably never will exist, in a form that can be deployed economically. (You may be thinking, didn’t the Supreme Court in 2022 in West Virginia v. EPA strike down the EPA rule that purported to force the closure of all fossil fuel power plants? Yes, they did. But the rules cited here are the Biden-Harris administration’s attempt to achieve the same goal with a slightly different regulatory approach and dare the Supremes to strike it down again. As with student loan forgiveness, they thumb their nose at the Supreme Court.)
• On October 6, 2022 I had another post covering a Report then just out by a guy named Joseph Toomey, who attempted to compile a comprehensive list of all the Biden-Harris regulatory initiatives to that point seeking to suppress fossil fuels. The Report is 35 pages long, and basically just lists all of the initiatives with a brief description of what they are about. Here’s a partial list of Toomey’s section headings, from my blog post: Canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline; Halting Lease Sales in Alaska’s ANWR; Placing a Moratorium on Drilling on Federal Lands; Rejoining the Paris Climate Accord; Proposing Energy-Inhibiting Budgets; Canceling Oil and Gas Drilling Leases; Initiating Punitive Government Investigations; Restricting Permian Basin Drilling Using Ozone Rules; Imposing Stricter Methane Emissions Rules. There are plenty more.
• Here’s another one from Toomey, also from my October 6, 2022 post, covering a subject that you may not be familiar with: [T]wo sections [of Toomey’s Report] are devoted to what Toomey calls the “refinery squeeze” — the collection of regulations and incentives that have driven a drop in US refinery capacity by about 5% just since 2020. It seems that multiple refineries have been incentivized to switch from refining petroleum to “biofuels” (i.e., ethanol), which takes their capacity down by some 90%. And then, the process of building a new refinery to replace lost capacity has become almost impossible. Toomey: “Observers cite onerous environmental regulations and permitting red-tape hurdles as the primary reasons for avoiding new refinery permit applications.”
• Then there is the Biden-Harris regulatory plan to suppress and ultimately eliminate the internal combustion engine car. I reported on that in this blog post of June 8, 2024. Massive new regulations on emissions and fuel economy standards (from EPA and NHTSA respectively), proposed in April 2024, had just gone final at the time of my post. The effect of these new rules: “The agencies know full well that they are forcing a transition to EVs that customers do not want. How fast must the forced transition be? This piece from Atlas EV Hub from March 25 estimates that EPA’s Rule by itself will force EV sales to be up to 69% of new vehicle sales by 2032.”
• The Biden-Harris administration has also dragooned every federal agency, even those with no remotely-related jurisdiction, to get into the climate game. Famous examples include the SEC and the Fed. The SEC’s massive and burdensome “climate disclosure” regulation, proposed back in 2021 and finally issued in March of this year, seeks to drive companies out of the fossil fuel business by making the disclosure obligations too onerous to deal with. The rule is probably unlikely to survive in the courts, but clearly Kamala Harris supports it, so once again it tells you where she stands.

And those are just highlights among hundreds of similar initiatives.

And finally, don’t forget the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, otherwise known as hundreds of billions of dollars, or maybe it’s trillions (uncapped, so nobody knows) of tax credits and subsidies to the “green” energy industries like wind and solar and batteries. Did Harris support it? Actually, as you may remember, the vote in the Senate was a tie, and Harris stepped in to cast the tie-breaking vote. So in fact, she is personally responsible for this piece of legislation, undoubted the single biggest waste of money ever enacted by Congress — and that’s really saying something.

At every turn, Kamala Harris has done everything in her power to further expensive, wasteful, and useless green energy and suppression of hydrocarbon fuels. By her actions, it is clear that she is a zero-carbon green energy radical.