That Debate Showed Why Dems Shouldn’t Tack Rightward—Ever

At the presidential debate Tuesday night, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump competed over who liked fracking more. The answer is obviously Trump, but that may not have been clear to the casual viewer: Asked about the climate crisis at the tail end of the night, Harris took the opportunity to brag about the fact that the Biden administration has overseen record levels of oil and gas production and that the Inflation Reduction Act opened more leases for fracking. “I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” she boasted.

Harris’s campaign so far hasn’t looked like the campaign of someone who has thought much about the climate crisis. It hasn’t been a big part of her vice presidential tenure or a major issue in this election, even though there’s a destructive hurricane hurtling toward the Gulf Coast, this is very likely the hottest year on record, and both California and New Jersey are currently on fire. To state the obvious, burning fossil fuels creates greenhouse gas emissions, like carbon dioxide and methane, that cause temperatures to rise. Ever-expanding oil and gas production of the sort Harris bragged about last night is plainly incompatible even with the Biden-Harris administration’s own modest climate goals. Democratic presidents have long been content to ignore that fact. That’s entailed swallowing and repeating Republican talking points (and lies) about U.S. energy production. To hear both parties tell it, oil and gas—and fracking, in particular—has been an unmitigated success story whereby private-sector dynamism has powered America toward its long-held dream of energy independence, creating untold profits and jobs along the way.

There’s a more compelling and correct story that Democrats could tell about fracking: that fossil fuel companies thought it was too expensive to be worth doing until the federal government poured billions of dollars’ worth of funding into basic research and tax breaks. The industry depends on tens of billions of dollars per year in local, state, and federal subsidies. Despite all that support, fracking companies—none more so than those in Pennsylvania!—spent over a decade burning through their shareholders’ money, unable to turn a profit. All that meant they had to come begging for a bailout during the pandemic so they could keep poisoning the country’s air, water, and politics. Now those same executives are trying to figure out how to fire workers through automation and gin up demand for plastics we don’t need, and that keep showing up in our blood, brains, and placenta. The government has invested real resources into creating the shale boom; now it’s time to redirect those energies into building a twenty-first-century energy economy.

But leading Democrats, including Harris, seem incapable of talking about the downsides of fossil fuel production. All they can manage is gesturing vaguely at the need for some ill-defined “transition.” And insofar as they attack Big Oil, they do so by claiming companies aren’t producing enough oil to make gasoline cheaper—which isn’t exactly how that works.

The rest of last night’s debate, moreover, should be a cautionary tale for how stupid and dangerous it is for Democrats to keep taking on Republicans’ talking points as their own. Harris emphasized throughout the debate just how much tougher Democrats are than Republicans on immigration: that they’re the party that fought to pass a draconian immigration bill earlier this year, which would have made it more difficult to seek asylum in the United States and would have poured money into ICE prisons and deportation flights. Even without that bill, the Biden administration has worked to shut down the southern border and raise barriers for asylum-seekers.

Democrats, that is, now sound a lot like Republicans when they talk about immigration. So what do Republicans sound like? Building on baseless, racist lies spread in recent days by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, Trump intoned last night that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs—the subject of right-wing memes that could have been plucked out of Der Stürmer. The end result of trying to beat Republicans at their own game—describing what were once considered far-right slogans like “Build the wall” and “Drill, baby, drill” as some kind of sensible middle ground—is to drive the GOP somehow even further to the right, recklessly raising the temperature of our politics and the planet alike.