Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
Vice President Kamala Harris lied about her radicalism on energy in Tuesday night’s debate with former President Donald Trump.
When the moderators with ABC asked Harris the rare skeptical question about her policy reversals, Harris said she “made that very clear in 2020: I will not ban fracking.”
“I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States, and in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the ‘Inflation Reduction’ Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” she said.
Even CNN’s resident “fact-checker” called the vice president’s comment on fracking a lie, even if it was pedantic. “Harris did not actually make clear in 2020 that *she* wouldn’t ban fracking as president,” wrote the network’s Daniel Dale on X. “In the comments she’s citing, from her debate with Pence, she just repeated that *Joe Biden* wouldn’t ban fracking.”
Harris did make clear in 2019, however, that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” In fact, Harris went even further than that in the infamous 2019 town hall on CNN.
“Would you ban offshore drilling?” the network’s Erin Burnett asked.
“Yes,” Harris said, “and I’ve again, worked on that.”
The Biden-Harris administration has meanwhile pulled every White House lever to regulate fossil fuels out of business. While the vice president tried to frame the incumbent regime as friendly to new oil and gas leases, data from The Wall Street Journal shows the Biden-Harris administration issued fewer acres for drilling than every president since Harry Truman in its first two years. The Washington Free Beacon also reported in June that the “Biden administration has approved more than 1,000 fewer oil permits in its first three years than the Trump administration did in the same timeframe.”
Americans, meanwhile, saw weeks of record-breaking gas prices under Biden’s tenure. Prices peaked in 2022 with a nationwide average that exceeded $5 per gallon for regular unleaded gasoline. Another avalanche of regulations enacted by the administration of a Bay-Area leftist who vocally supported the Green New Deal as a senator would almost certainly spike gas prices even higher — no matter how hard and fast the vice president runs from her prior record as a determined regulator-in-chief.