Why Harris Is Backpedaling on Fracking

Shortly after the Iowa caucuses—a moment that feels almost unfathomably long ago in this presidential race—Tom Philpott wrote about the peculiar role that corn-based ethanol plays in national politics. Because ethanol is important to Iowa, and the Iowa caucuses are important in the primaries because of their early date, candidates from both parties tend to declare their allegiance to federal ethanol subsidies.

But ethanol subsidies are a pretty inefficient way to encourage energy production. Solar panels generate 100 times as much energy as corn per acre, Tom wrote. Installing them in place of cornfields would open up more land for growing actual food, while reducing pesticide and fertilizer runoff into waterways and reducing the destruction of Iowa’s soil layer. But the tangled history of Iowa corn, federal subsidies, and the primary schedule go back so far at this point that it’s very hard to start a serious political discussion about what better policies might look like.

I thought back to Tom’s piece this week, as news emerged that Kamala Harris was walking back her prior opposition to fracking. As California attorney general, she sued the Obama administration over its fracking approvals off the state’s coast, and in the 2019 Democratic primaries she promised to ban the practice, but her campaign is now telling the press that she would not in fact ban it.

Fracking is somewhat similar to ethanol, actually, in terms of its place in American political narratives. Fracking pollutes groundwater, has fueled a huge spike of planet-warming methane, and isn’t very profitable: The expensive practice is a “sorry bet for job creation,” TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote in 2019. But much like ethanol in Iowa, for almost two decades fracking has played an outsize role in states that play an outsize role in the presidential election—specifically, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Ohio, which Trump has twice won comfortably, probably won’t decide the 2024 election. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, very well might. “Many strategists in both parties believe Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes could wind up being the decisive state,” Axios reported in May. And so far, the polling in Pennsylvania has suggested the race is neck and neck. So it’s not particularly surprising that Harris is backpedaling on her fracking opposition, presumably aiming to win Pennsylvania voters.

As with ethanol, though, there’s something a bit tragic about this political pandering. While Pennsylvanians are the ones Harris hopes to win by backing fracking, they’re also the people most likely to be harmed by fracking. As Colin Jerolmack has repeatedly written for TNR, even landowners who have made money leasing their land to drillers have sometimes come to regret it—either because they regret losing control over their own properties or because of the effect on local groundwater. (In one community, he wrote, “private water wells became laced with carcinogenic chemicals and contained methane concentrations so high that running faucets could be set on fire.”) Grist’s Jake Bolster reported last week on the industry’s troubling habit of dumping fracked wastewater—which has been found to contain toxic compounds—on Pennsylvania roads, with the cooperation of some state authorities. As of 2021, the last time a major poll was conducted, not only did a majority of Pennsylvanians want to see more regulation of the fracking industry, but a majority actually wanted to “end” fracking in the state (25 percent wanted it done “as soon as possible,” and 30 percent favored a gradual transition).

So why is Harris reversing her position on fracking if Pennsylvanians want it gone? One reason may be that many of the voters who oppose fracking (for example: the 79 percent of Democrats who want fracking to end) will vote for her either way. The people the party is anxious about winning, on the other hand, might be the ones who’d be turned off by a proposed ban. For example, 43 percent of independents in the 2021 poll said fracking should not end or be phased out.

At the end of the day, ethanol and fracking—which defy any rational cost-benefit calculation—persist for the same reason: American democracy isn’t particularly democratic.

Good News/Bad News

There’s a growing consensus that carbon capture doesn’t work very well—and, per Amy Westervelt’s analysis of internal documents, that fossil fuel companies probably knew that to begin with. That’s bad news in one sense, but the growing consensus also builds the foundation for better ideas and policies going forward.


Wildfires like the Park Fire now threatening four counties in California can also contaminate the water supply beyond the immediate burn range in several ways. A new multimedia report in The Washington Postexplains how.

Stat of the Week
73%

That’s how much of the world’s coral is now bleaching due to heat, according to The Guardian’s latest report on the ongoing mass bleaching event.

What I’m Reading

Do bigger highways actually help reduce traffic?

The answer is “no.” MIT Mobility Initiative fellow David Zipper explains why widening highways doesn’t solve the problem these proposals are hoping to solve:

These projections have a fatal blind spot: They fail to consider how humans respond to changing conditions like new vehicle lanes. When people see cars traveling freely over a recently expanded highway, they will recalibrate their travel decisions. Some will choose to drive at rush hour when they would have otherwise driven at a non-peak time, taken public transit, or perhaps not traveled at all. When a roadway is widened, Marshall said, “You might have less congestion at first, but it quickly goes away.”

Such behavioral adjustments will continue until traffic is as thick as it was before, when the roadway was narrower. The only difference is now there will be more cars stuck in traffic, emitting even more pollution.

This phenomenon is known as induced demand.

Read David Zipper’s full story at Vox.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.