“As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash in a joint interview with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).
Bash followed up by citing Harris’s comments at a 2019 town hall in which she said “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” and asked why she had since changed her position.
“My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far,” Harris answered.
She went on to cite the recent boom in renewable energy jobs in the U.S., much of it in the wake of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, for which she cast the tiebreaking Senate vote.
“That tells me, from my experience as vice president, we can do it without banning fracking,” she said. “What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
Fracking, the process of extracting natural gas from bedrock by injecting pressurizing fluids, is a major employer in the southwest of Pennsylvania, which is likely to be a pivotal state in the November election.
Read more at TheHill.com.
