“My values have not changed” : When politicians make these types of statements, they often imply that they have changed their minds. This is the case of Kamala Harris, Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States for the November 5 elections, who explained on August 29, on the set of the CNN channel, which was no longer defending a total ban on the extraction of gas and oil using the technique of hydraulic fracturing (fracking).
METROme Harris made this commitment in late 2019, during her brief campaign in the Democratic primaries for the 2020 presidential election, and then remained low-key on the issue, supporting the position of waiting and seeing what President Joe Biden sees.. “As vice president, I did not prohibit fracking ; As president, I will not prohibit fracking »he told CNN.
How can we explain this change of direction compared to 2019? If she is to have any hope of winning the presidential election, Kamala Harris absolutely must win the key state of Pennsylvania, a hotspot for shale gas development. That is why she now maintains that any prohibition is useless.. “We can grow and develop a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking”he explained.
The adoption of the Inflation Reduction Law in 2022
The Democratic candidate thus joins an increasingly consensual position in the United States, supported in particular by John Kerry, who was Joe Biden’s climate envoy, and according to which science and technology will solve the climate crisis, in a country where The concept of sobriety does not exist. METROme Harris boasts that, as vice president, she provided the decisive vote to allow the adoption of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Joe Biden’s enormous energy transition subsidy plan. This is technically true, but politically false: the adoption of this text in the summer of 2022 is mainly due to the change of mind of the Democratic senator from West Virginia Joe Manchin, in particular in exchange for concessions for the construction of an oil pipeline to open until its status.
In fact, the climate issue was not discussed at the Democratic convention in Chicago. It must be said that environmental issues have cost the Democrats dearly. Joe Biden began by banning construction of the Keystone XL pipeline connecting Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and then rejected certain permits to drill on federal lands. Without being the cause, these measures were concomitant with the increase in the price of oil (linked to the Covid-19 crisis, and accelerated by the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022), in June 2022, provoking the anger of the population. . . At the pump, the price per gallon (3.78 liters) then rose to more than 5 dollars (4.50 euros); it has since fallen to $3.22.
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