SEPTEMBER 2024 Debate

• The Harris campaign has made few public statements concerning energy policy. Her campaign aides have described her plan on controversial energy issues as one of “strategic ambiguity” and the topic of energy policy was not measurably present at the Democratic National Convention.
• Harris states that her current views are more centrist than the views she expressed during her 2020 campaign. During the debate, Harris stated her support for fracking and argued that she expanded the availability of leases for fracking by casting the tie-breaking vote on the IRA.  During her 2020 campaign, she supported a mandate requiring all new passenger vehicles sold be zero-mission by 2035, but a Harris campaign spokesperson recently clarified that she now does not support an electric vehicle mandate.
• Asked in July 2024 whether, as president, Harris would pursue policies like the Green New Deal that she supported as a United States senator, her campaign’s climate advisor said that she would focus on implementing the IRA. Her campaign does not appear yet to have made any public statements differentiating her positions from those of the Biden-Harris administration.
• On August 20, while the Democratic National Convention was in progress, Brian Deese, an economic advisor to the Harris campaign, published an essay in Foreign Affairs arguing that a Harris administration, if elected, should undertake a “Clean Energy Marshall Plan.” Under such a plan, Deese wrote, the United States would loan money to developing countries to buy U.S. renewable energy technologies to help transition away from fossil fuels and “halt global warming.” Deese is promoting the plan independently of his work as a Harris advisor, and the campaign has not commented on it.

• Vice President Harris endorsed a ban on hydraulic fracturing during her first presidential campaign in 2019. Fracking is a process used to extract oil and natural gas from bedrock. Harris challenged federal approvals of offshore fracking when she was attorney general of California. In 2020, after becoming President Biden’s running mate, she distanced herself from her prior positions and now says she no longer supports a ban on fracking. When asked about this change during the debate, Harris said we need to invest in diverse sources of energy to reduce reliance on foreign oil and that she “will not ban fracking.”
• According to The New York Times, U.S. crude oil production has risen to record highs this year, though experts say that is generally unrelated to actions taken by the Biden-Harris administration because most oil production has occurred on private and state lands. The current administration initially tried to restrict drilling on federal lands and waters by pausing all federal oil and gas lease sales to consider their impact on global warming. This decision was challenged in court, and authorization for the sale of oil and gas leases was included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

June 2024 Debate

• President Biden highlighted his support of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which the President said represented “the most extensive climate change legislation in history, in history.”
• According to the White House, the Inflation Reduction Act “has already spurred [as of February 2024] a clean energy boom, contributing to more than $360 billion in private sector clean energy announcements since President Biden took office.”
• Biden criticizes Trump’s withdrawal from the “Paris Peace Accord – Climate Accord,” which Biden “immediately rejoined” again after taking office.
• Biden stressed “The only existential threat to humanity is climate change,” and that Trump “wants to undo all that I’ve done.”
• Biden also highlighted the establishment of “a Climate Corps for thousands of young people” to “learn how to deal with climate, just like the Peace Corps.”

SEPTEMBER 2024 Debate

• Trump repeatedly emphasized his support for the fossil fuel industry, emphasizing his support of fracking and criticizing the Biden Administration’s revocation of a critical Presidential permit for the $9 billion Keystone Pipeline.
• Trump’s recent speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention touched on common energy themes in his campaign, including his support of the fossil fuel industry and opposition to government subsidies for renewable energy resources and electric vehicles.
• In his remarks, Trump implied that Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) spending—the “Green New Scam”—is a waste of taxpayer dollars and has fueled inflation. He continues to pledge to bring energy prices down by expanding drilling. His remarks acknowledged the need for more power generation to accommodate rising demand for electricity in the tech industry for data centers and generative AI.
• Trump in his speech also once again emphasized the importance of energy independence, calling for United States global “energy dominance.”
• Trump continues to support energy security, increased domestic energy production, reduced barriers to fossil fuel production, and reduced government support for renewable energy and other low-carbon technologies, including removing mandates related to electric vehicle production.
• At a campaign rally in May 2024, Trump promised to “end” the environmental impacts of offshore wind on “day one” by executive order but did not give any specifics about how he would do it.
• Former President Trump had revived the Keystone project after it stalled under the Obama administration, but it continued to face legal challenges that delayed construction. The Keystone XL pipeline was set to be an extension of the Keystone Pipeline System, a 2,687-mile pipeline that transports crude oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Opponents contested the XL project over concerns that the pipeline would cross the lands of Indigenous people and because burning oil sands crude could make climate change worse and harder to reverse.
• In his remarks, Trump said that he supports U.S. oil production and the Keystone pipeline, while the Biden administration “ended the XL pipeline.” On his first day in office, President Biden rescinded the construction permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Vice President Harris did not comment on the Keystone pipeline.
• The moderators began a question on climate change by reminding viewers that Former President Trump has said regarding the environment that we need clean air and clean water, while Vice President Harris calls climate change an existential threat.
• Trump responded by asserting the Biden Administration lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs last month due to auto plants being built in other countries and that he plans to levy tariffs on foreign auto imports. At the end of Trump’s presidential term in 2020, the trade deficit, the difference between how much the U.S. imports and how much it exports, was US$650B. According to The New York Times, that was lower than four years of the George W. Bush administration, and the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration.
• During the debate Trump stated that although he “is a fan of solar,” it takes up millions of acres of land and the Biden-Harris administration’s continued support of solar and its other energy policies “will destroy our energy sector.”

June 2024 Debate

• Former President Trump said he wants “absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever.”
• At the same time, Trump emphasized the use of “all forms of energy, all forms, everything” during his Administration.
• Trump stood by his decision to withdraw from “the Paris Accord,” stating it “was going to cost us a trillion dollars, and China nothing, and Russia nothing, and India nothing. It was a ripoff of the United States.”
• Trump did not respond to Biden’s claim that a new Trump administration would seek to stop the clean energy subsidies implemented by the Inflation Reduction Act.