The vice president reiterated on the debate stage that she no longer backs a fracking ban, stated that she favored energy independence and took credit for specific oil and gas-related provisions included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s signature climate bill that passed the Senate with Harris’ tie-breaking vote in 2022. While Harris tried to depict herself as a champion of energy independence and diversifying supply, her record as vice president and as a senator is full of actions that restricted American fossil fuel production.

ABC’s Linsey Davis, one of the debate’s moderators, asked Harris to explain her reversals on a number of topics, ranging from her past support for a fracking ban to her purportedly discarded view that illegal border crossings should be decriminalized.

“So my values have not changed. And I’m going to discuss every one — at least every point that you’ve made. But in particular, let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States,” Harris said in response. “And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”

As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris said there is “no question” that fracking should be banned, and she did not disown that position in the 2020 vice presidential debate against former Vice President Mike Pence as she suggested on Tuesday night. In the debate against Pence, Harris only went so far as to say that President Joe Biden would not ban fracking.

In the first weeks of the Biden-Harris administration in 2021, Biden signed a since-overturned executive order that effectively prohibited future oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters.

Meanwhile, the IRA mandated the federal government to hold 60 million acres worth of offshore oil and gas leases in order to hold more offshore wind lease sales. Ultimately, the Biden administration finalized the bare minimum 60 million acres for offshore oil and gas lease sales in its five-year leasing schedule in December 2023.

The IRA also allowed for the creation of a new tax on methane emissions that has been described by opponents as a de facto natural gas tax that would likely increase costs for consumers.

Onshore, the Biden-Harris administration has taken huge swaths of the federal estate off the table for oil and gas development. The administration has moved to block future oil and gas activity on tens of millions of acres of Alaskan land and canceled previously-awarded leases.

Moreover, federal data analyzed by the Western Energy Alliance shows that the number of onshore acres available for lease sales, the number of leases issued, and the number of acres issued through those leases all trended down under the Biden-Harris administration.

“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris continued in her response. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”

Nominally, it is true that U.S. oil production reached record highs while Biden was in office. However, as energy sector experts previously explained to the DCNF, this may be an achievement that happened in spite of the administration rather than because of it: fossil fuel production, especially on federal lands, takes years to come to fruition, meaning that some of the output happening today is the product of work done under the Trump administration.

The U.S. is still a net exporter of crude oil as of 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration, but the administration may be more sensitive to global price swings than they let on. Officials have loosely enforced sanctions against Iranian and Russian oil to keep prices stable ahead of the pivotal 2024 election.

The Harris campaign did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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The state’s long-term and ongoing efforts to undermine energy production within its borders have effectively displaced, rather than reduced, fossil fuel production — and jobs related to that production — to other states and areas of the world while U.S. oil production is at record levels. California’s anti-fossil fuel push also has not moved the needle much on climate change, which alarmists continue to insist is accelerating at a dangerous pace, but it has raised energy costs for Californians, diminished grid reliability and disincentivized corporate investment that would create or maintain jobs in the state, energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In the first week of 2024, Chevron, a California-based oil major, announced that it is writing down its existing interests in California by more than $4 billion, a move largely prompted by the state’s burdensome environmental regulatory structure. Exxon Mobil, the largest oil company in the U.S., announced Friday that it is also impairing its California assets, similarly citing regulatory challenges in the state.

While the companies are writing down the value of their operations in California, they are making major plays to expand the scope and scale of their interests in states that are more amenable to energy production, especially Texas. Chevron and Exxon Mobil acquired Hess and Pioneer Resources, respectively, in late 2023. While the deals are not yet finalized, Hess and Pioneer each have considerable portfolios in Texas’ Permian Basin that made each smaller firm an attractive target for acquisition by major competitors.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is producing about 13.2 million barrels of oil per day, a number that stands as a record high, according to Forbes.

“For well over two decades now, politicians like Governor Newsom have hammered California’s conventional energy producers, both large and small, with excessive taxes, regulations, and threats of profit taking … Large companies can better withstand the onslaught of red tape, but smaller producers can ill afford the book the types of liabilities being saddled on the industry,” Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, told the DCNF. “Many companies have already moved out of the state, along with hundreds of thousands of residents as a result of these and other harmful policies … like a cap on profit margins, that hurt consumers by making conventional energy investments uneconomic. These types of policies have outsourced jobs to other states and increased California’s reliance on oil and electricity imports — all with little or no environmental benefit.”

California’s local oil and gas production provides about 50,000 jobs statewide, including 31,000 jobs in the San Joaquin Valley, a region that is generally less economically successful than other parts of the state, according to Californians for Energy Independence.

California was one of the leading states of the U.S. in terms of oil production in 2022, with operators in the state pumping more than 124 million barrels that year, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The state saw its local oil and gas production drop by nearly 30% over the course of the last four years, according to EIA data, a trend which Californians for Energy Independence attributes primarily to “state and local energy policies shutting down production.”

The state is widely considered to be on the leading edge of climate policy, according to Stateline. Away from the regulations focused on oil and gas production, the state has pushed aggressive electric vehicle and truck rules, filed a climate change lawsuit against Chevron and other oil majors alleging that they deliberately tried to mislead the public about the nature of climate change and enacted a landmark corporate emissions disclosure requirement.

With regard to the lawsuit against the large oil firms, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been openly hostile in his remarks about the defendants, painting them as liars.

“The state is home to well-understood, rich reserves of oil and natural gas that Democrat policies have rendered non-economic to produce. California’s ruling Democrats have destroyed tens of thousands of high paying jobs that would otherwise be employed in the oil and gas industry in efforts to take advantage of those resources,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas business who now consults and writes regularly about the energy industry, told the DCNF. “The supreme irony in all of this, of course, is that Newsom has created a situation in which his state now imports most of its oil from a fellow economic basket case — Venezuela — to meet its consumption needs that the US domestic industry could easily satisfy if it were allowed to access California’s own oil and gas resources.”

The current average per-gallon gas price at the pump that Californians pay is about $4.70, which is the highest such price in the country, according to AAA data. By comparison, the national average currently sits at about $3.09 per-gallon.

Beyond energy production and high fuel prices, the residential ratepayers in the state faced the second-highest average retail electricity rates in the entire U.S. in October 2023, according to the most recent monthly data published by the EIA.

“Extreme events driven by climate change are leading to increased demand for power and putting the electric grid at increased risk of outages — in California and beyond. Events include extreme heat and wildfires that threaten the grid with growing frequency and intensity,” a spokesperson for the California Energy Commission (CEC) told the DCNF. “Electrifying California’s economy and building a reliable, safe, affordable and clean electric grid are cornerstones of both our climate leadership and our economic plan for the future. The state is taking action on multiple fronts.”

Additionally, the state’s power grid has come very close to blackouts in recent years, particularly in September 2022, when California’s grid operator urged residents to turn up their thermostats during the late afternoon and evening hours to conserve energy for ten consecutive days amid a heatwave that strained the grid’s reliability.

“Reasonable people might expect that state governments would do as much as possible to make the lives of residents easier. Unfortunately, California’s government is doing just the opposite,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, told the DCNF. “That’s one reason why 75,000 people left California over the past year, according to the Census Bureau.”

Power supply adequacy is such an issue in the state that Newsom decided to refill the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility to protect against energy price spikes and blackouts in August; Newsom had previously made a campaign promise to shutter the facility. That same month, the CEC voted against shuttering three fossil fuel-fired plants in Southern California to keep them available in order to stave off blackouts if needed.

“The people of California deserve to know when their state-wide green agenda will begin to work, and by ‘work’ I mean when will both grid reliability and overall costs reflect the promises made by going green. California’s price at the pump and cost of electricity are among the highest in the nation, and only continue to increase, while the electric grid grows more unstable,” Daniel Turner, executive director and founder of energy advocacy group Power The Future, told the DCNF. “Green-backed elected officials including Governor Newsom have promised that going green will be a benefit, and yet the only result has been pain for the average Californian who is unable to flee the state like hundreds of thousands have already done … In no place where ‘going green’ has been implemented has it been a benefit to the people: not Germany, not California, not New York.”

Newsom’s office and the California Independent System Operator did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

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Both Shell and fellow U.K. energy firm BP opted against further cuts to oil production recently, in a bid to restore investor confidence as their renewable ventures struggled, according to Bloomberg. While the moves were met with criticism from climate-focused investors — activist investors and protestors attempted to storm the stage at Shell’s annual shareholder meeting in late May — the companies are likely to stay the course despite criticism, thanks to the reliability of oil and gas to drive profits despite the emergence of green energy, Dan Kish, senior research fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF.

“Smart energy executives looking at the long term recognize that politics are fleeting,” Kish said. “Politicians may be flighty and distracted by today’s shiny objects, but real business sense combined with a knowledge of engineering and physics shows that real energy makes good business because it is what people need and want.”

Shell CEO Wael Sawan described his company’s shift as a “fundamental culture change” during a Wednesday presentation intended to draw investors, especially American ones, to support the company, The Wall Street Journal reported. Shell performed poorly in 2022 compared to U.S. titans Exxon Mobil and Chevron in 2022, and Sawan has made playing catch up a priority.

BP made a similar decision, opting to increase investments in oil and gas while slowing its advancement toward green alternatives.

“At the end of the day, we’re responding to what society wants,” BP Chief Executive Bernard Looney said.

Ryan Yonk, senior research faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research, described many green investments and climate commitments as a sort of “green-washing” that companies are more likely to view as a “cost of doing business” as opposed to a genuine driver of profits, in a statement to the DCNF. BP saw shares surge more than 15% in the days following its February announcement that it would cut just 25% of its hydrocarbon output by 2030, as opposed to its original target of 40%, according to Reuters.

“The profitability of these types of endeavors is generally much lower than market-driven innovation and growth because they are defensive in nature and driven not by consumer demand but by either actual regulatory action or the expectation that it will occur,” Yonk said. “Fossil fuels are currently, and the evidence suggests they will be for the foreseeable future a significant and important part of energy production in the US and across the world.”

While political pressure may have pushed companies towards green projects in the past, the current political landscape is much more amenable to oil and gas, Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set off an energy crisis in both the U.S. and Europe, giving companies a “strong incentive” to pump more oil while providing them the political cover to be “more candid” about the necessity of such investments, Ebell said.

“The EU’s oil majors have an even harder time than America’s trying to remain politically correct while continuing to produce the energy the world needs and make sufficient profits to satisfy shareholders and invest in new production,” Ebell told the DCNF. “They are faced with the reality that renewables produce little energy at a high cost.”

While Shell re-committed to its target of net-zero emissions by 2050 in a Wednesday press release, it also said in a footnote that such a change was dependent on societal factors. There would be “significant risk that Shell may not meet this target” if society at large had not made a shift to net zero by then, the company said.

Shell and BP did not immediately respond to a DCNF request for comment.

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