The following OpEd by ConservAmerica Fellow Alina Clough appeared in Real Clear Energy:
Vice President Kamala Harris’ natural gas policies are undeveloped at best and dangerous at worst. The presidential candidate has long attracted the support of climate activists for her hardline stances on environmental issues. Despite flip-flopping on many of those positions on the campaign trail, progressive environmentalists appear confident that she will return to her more extreme roots if elected, targeting natural gas exports and domestic use in the name of fighting climate change. Unfortunately, Harris’ hostile positions on natural gas are not only counterproductive for the planet, they’d also cripple Ohio’s economy and energy security in the process.
Harris’ posture towards natural gas throughout her political career has been anything but consistent. As a senator and 2020 presidential primary candidate she leaned heavily on her record as co-sponsor of the Green New Deal with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, including supporting a ban on natural gas fracking. More recently, however, her campaign reversed this position in a bid to win Pennsylvania’s support, as Trump reminded the state just how much it could harm their economy. Fracking as a policy issue frequently divides Democrats, centrists favoring its energy security and economic benefits, and further left progressives like Harris against it in their bid for phasing out all fossil fuels.
Even if Harris does back down on full-out bans, her stance on natural gas has always been more punitive than even fellow Democrats can stomach. During the Biden-Harris administration, Harris helped advance the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export pause, which tried to block the approval of permits for exporting the fuel before it was struck down by a federal judge. Her own colleagues, Senate democrats, protested the decision as sloppy policy, akin to “throwing a match in a bale of hay,” with Senators Bob Casey Jr. and John Fetterman sounding alarms about the thousands of jobs the decision could cost. Despite the pushback, Biden and Harris doubled down on the decision, citing praise by progressive environmental groups as evidence the policy was solid.
Harris’ campaign has retained the endorsements of those same environmental groups by those same environmental groups, despite the extremely recent lip service she’s paid to centrist Democrats in the hopes of staying in Pennsylvania’s good graces. Still, the potential for anti-natural gas policies to cripple state economies is hardly confined to Pennsylvania’s borders. Ohio’s dependence on natural gas is as much about state GDP as it is about jobs and families’ energy bills.
Banning fracking would cost Ohio 700,000 jobs, many of them significantly better-paying than the state average. A growing number of Ohioans work in the natural gas industry as the industry has expanded, with shale jobs increasing 7.8% in the past several years and salaries increasing as well. A ban would also hurt those outside of the natural gas industry, costing the average Ohioan $5,625 in cost-of-living increases in just a few years, alongside a $245 billion loss in state GDP, $119 billion loss in household incomes, and $20.6 billion loss in state and local tax revenue for Ohio.
What then, is Harris’ aggressive anti-natural gas policy good for? Not much, as it turns out. Despite being promoted for environmental purposes, natural gas bans would do far more harm than good for the planet. Despite the state’s natural gas production growing 900% in recent decades, now accounting for 30% of the country’s natural gas supply, Ohio’s emissions have continually decreased across the board, including a 16% reduction in CO2 since 1990. This is in no small part because natural gas is a cleaner fuel source than other comparable options available to electric power plants like oil and coal, meaning less emissions with the same stable power.
While purely renewable energy might sound good on paper, the technology simply doesn’t exist for the country to run on, meaning a natural gas ban would result in a return to dirtier sources of energy. Vice President Harris may be trying to temper her most extreme positions on the campaign trail, but the substitutes are no better for the environment, the economy, or for Ohioans.
Alina Clough is a fellow with ConservAmerica. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
This OpEd appeared in Real Clear Energy on September 18, 2024.