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