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In her first media interview as the Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris stretched the facts on her past stance on fracking and the number of clean energy jobs created by recent legislation:
- Harris said she doesn’t want to ban fracking, maintaining that she “made that clear on the debate stage in 2020.” Not exactly. She said in the vice presidential debate that year, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”
- Harris claimed the Inflation Reduction Act has been responsible for $1 trillion in clean energy investments and more than 300,000 clean energy jobs. But not all the funding has come from the IRA, and her jobs figure is an estimate based on announced projects.
Harris’ interview with CNN’s Dana Bash aired on Aug. 29.
Fracking
Asked if she would ban fracking — a position she supported in 2019 — Harris said she would not and maintained she “made that clear on the debate stage in 2020.” Not exactly. She said in the vice presidential debate that year, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”
CNN’s Dana Bash asked Harris about her comment in a September 2019 CNN town hall, when she was running for the presidential nomination and was asked by a climate activist if she would commit to a federal ban on fracking because of environmental concerns for local communities. Harris answered, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, so yes.”
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a technique that uses water, sand or chemicals to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations.
In the Aug. 29 interview, Bash asked, “Fracking, as you know, is a pretty big issue, particularly in your must-win state of Pennsylvania. … Do you still want to ban fracking?”
Harris answered: “No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking. As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”
Pressed on the issue, Harris repeated: “In 2020, I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024, and I’ve not changed that position nor will I going forward.”
But in the October 2020 debate — when Harris was Biden’s vice presidential running mate — Harris stated Biden’s position, not her own, saying: “Joe Biden will not end fracking. He has been very clear about that.”
She later reiterated that “the American people know that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact. That is a fact.”
In this week’s interview, Bash asked if there was “some policy or scientific data” that changed Harris’ mind. She responded: “What I have seen is that we can — we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
Green Jobs
Harris claimed the Inflation Reduction Act has been responsible for $1 trillion in clean energy investments and has created more than 300,000 jobs. But not all the funding has come from the Inflation Reduction Act, and her jobs figure is an estimate based on announced projects, not jobs that have been created to date.
“The Inflation Reduction Act, what we have done to invest, by my calculation, over 10 — probably a trillion dollars over the next 10 years, investing in a clean energy economy,” Harris said. “What we’ve already done creating over 300,000 new clean energy jobs.”
Harris has used the $1 trillion figure before, but her total included two other bills, as E&E News reported earlier this year.
E&E News, Jan. 22: “When the VP references the roughly $1T historic climate investment, she is referencing all of the clean energy, resilience, environmental justice, and innovation funding that is part of our historic effort to address the climate crisis, increase resilience, advance environmental justice, and build a clean energy economy,” a White House spokesperson told E&E News.
As we’ve written before, the Inflation Reduction Act included an estimated $369 billion over the next 10 years for climate change and “energy security.” E&E News writes that “in addition to the IRA, the number includes: $54 billion from the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 that went toward manufacturing, research and development; more than $530 billion of new spending in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; and funding increases the administration secured at EPA and the departments of Energy, Transportation and Commerce.”
As for Harris’ reference to clean energy jobs, the Harris campaign referred us to a report by Climate Power — an organization that advocates clean energy. In a June 20 report, Climate Power wrote that more than 300,000 jobs were “announced or [have] moved forward” since the Biden administration’s “climate and clean energy investments became law in August 2022.”
“Since August 2022, companies have announced or moved forward with projects accounting for more than 312,900 new clean energy jobs for electricians, mechanics, construction workers, technicians, support staff, and many others,” Climate Power said in its report.
The Harris campaign also referred us to the U.S. Department of Energy’s annual U.S. Energy and Employment Report for 2023 and 2024. In those reports, the DOE said the U.S. added 114,000 clean energy jobs in 2022 and 142,000 jobs in 2023. But not all of those 256,000 new jobs over the last two years were because of Biden’s policies. The reports said the jobs were due “in large part” to the administration’s policies, without providing any estimate for the number of jobs created by the bills signed by Biden.
“[A]s investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act really start to gear up, I expect we’ll see this growth [in 2022] accelerate over the next few years,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said of the 114,000 clean energy jobs created in 2022.
There were 28,000 more clean energy jobs created in 2023 than in 2022, an increase of about 25%.
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