Charged Conversations - Energy Policy Under a Kamala Harris Administration

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to charged conversations, and I'm your host, Brigham
account on this week's podcast, what might energy policy look
like under a Kamala Harris administration. Over the last month,
we've seen a seismic change in the American political landscape
never before, I guess, at least not in modern history,

(00:22):
as a presidential candidate who received the nod from all
of their party delegates to the primary election process decided
to bow out, leaving their vice president as the nominee.
You know, thinking about this a little bit, and again
not that I want to get political, because we want
to talk about energy, but that primary process is the

(00:45):
way that we vet candidates, right, I mean, it's that
open party primary system where we really get to know
a candidate see if they have what it takes to
obtain their party's nomination. So we're certainly living in an uncharted
I think this fact is for certain. And as President
Biden's exit as the Democratic nominee has left us with

(01:08):
a whole lot of questions. Who is Kamala Harris and
what is she about? Well, in today's episode, we'll delve
into her energy positions and policies. So I guess first
step is we can infer a bit about her thinking
from previous statements that she's made during the two years
that she was a US Senator from California and then

(01:31):
when she herself was running for the presidential nod in
twenty twenty. And we can also look at the Biden
Harris record over the last four years, and maybe to
a lesser extent, she was elected as the Attorney journal
in California. So there's a little bit of a record there.
Let me point out this is not a political podcast,

(01:53):
and you'll hear several different viewpoints as we're trying to
figure this out. So first I was doing some research
and I came across Liz Peak, opinion contributor to The Hill,
and her question is who is the real Kamala Harris.
I delved into this with a little bit of intrigue,

(02:15):
and I guess the point that she makes is that
if Kamala Harris loses to Donald Trump, Biden will claim
that once again the elite party brokers and his party
were wrong. After all, she points out that the party
brokers told Biden that he shouldn't run in twenty sixteen,
and they pushed Hillary Clinton to the front of the line,

(02:37):
and she lost to Trump. They said that Biden would
drag down the party in the twenty twenty two midterms,
but the Democrats outperform. They insist, did he not run
for reelection? And look what happened? Democrats know and she
makes Liz makes this point that Harris is not a
good candidate, and it looks kind of foolish pretending otherwise.

(02:57):
And Obama, she points out, likely knows this, which is
why he's only tepidly endorsed Harris after much back and forth.
And the point I made was that he's reportedly furious
for Biden short circuiting the possibility of a many primary
or an open convention, and Democrats have been left in

(03:21):
a bind. So, just as we know, Axios, which dubbed
her the borders are in twenty twenty one, just ran
an article claiming that she'd never been given that responsibility
and title and so it's kind of hard to figure
out what she is. Gov dot Track, a group that

(03:41):
tracks legislators voting records, recently removed a twenty nineteen web
page which showed that Kamala Harris was that year's most
liberal US senator and according to the voting record in
twenty nineteen more liberal than Bernie Sanders. Now, it's pretty

(04:02):
straightforward that Liz doesn't think very much of either Biden
or Harris, But what she points out is that the
whole fiasco serving Joe Biden's fitness to serve for another
four years, which rewarded the primary process to ensure the
incumbent a smooth ride of the nomination, has now made

(04:24):
it nearly impossible for any significant challengers to compete, and
that had the Democratic Party allowed a more robust primary contest,
voters might have actually have seen Biden's shortcomings and picked
a more popular moderate like Michigan Governor Gritchen Whitmer or
Arizona Senator Mark Kelly to lead the ticket. So here

(04:46):
we are, Liz says, the truth is that Harris's Bernie
Sanders lipstick a solid spokesperson for the progressive left, embracing
the Green New Deal before Americans saw billions of dollars
being thrown at fulfilling unpopular electric vehicle mandates. There's a
reason why Democrats close ranks in twenty twenty. According to

(05:09):
Liz and Tonight, Sanders the candidacy, and even though he
was leading in the poll at that time. Well what
was the reason, Well, he was just too far left
win a national election. So perhaps so too. It's Kamala
Harris skipping over the non energy aspects of moortion on

(05:29):
demand California propositions decriminalizing crime. She opposes fracking and offshore drilling. Yeah,
we've seen news clips that have come out over the
last week or so talking about how she would like
to ban fracking. Period. She's an enthusiastic supporter of the

(05:50):
kinds of these new green deal projects that have been
linked in California and in other places to hire electricity
prices in brown out. Speaking of California, California residents spend
on average about two hundred and seventy seven dollars per
month on electricity. That's over thirty three hundred dollars a

(06:12):
year and forty three percent higher than the national average.
So let's look at another person. Let's talk to David
Blackman here. David Blackman is a senior contributor to Forbes magazine,
and again, under full disclosure, he's not a Camalis supporter.

(06:33):
But that's okay because we'll hear from the other side too.
He points out that Harris has led a set of
energy policies, what would they look like and look to
be fair? The vice president's never really been involved in
formulated enacting energy policy. Isn't know what the vice president
does typically unless you're Dick Cheney, I suppose. But what

(06:57):
we do have, as David points out out, is her
record in California and Washington, d C. So he points
out that during her first run for the Senate in
twenty sixteen, when she was Attorney General, she adorsed the
concept of bringing CO two Cap and trade scheme to

(07:19):
the nation's capital. Now, cap and trade is that we
cap how many emissions CO two or other greenhouse gases,
but Brabley's primarily CO two. How much by tonnage those
emissions can be and you're not allowed to admit any
more than that. And you know, you would pay for

(07:41):
the privilege of omitting CO two, and you could trade
these credits between different cities, states, countries. But the bottom
line is there's a cap. There's a cap on how
much you can pollute. Period. She also endorsed then Governor
Jerry Brown's proposal to ban plastic straws. And I don't

(08:02):
know about you, but everywhere I go where plastic straws
have been banned, I end up using two or three
paper straws because well, these don't last long enough for
me to finish my drink. Climate Wire reported this July
that one of her last acts as Attorney General in
California before she became a Senator was to sue the

(08:24):
Obama administration over its plan to allow fracking off of
the Pacific Coast. Let me say that again, Kamala Harris
sued the Obama administration because they weren't liberal enough over
its plans to allow fracking off the Pacific Coast. David
points out that once she got to the Senate, she

(08:45):
said about opposing most of Trump's energy plans, including the
effort by the Department of the Interior to offer up
substantial portions of US offshore waters for oil and game
asked leases. Also, while Senator, she became a co sponsor
of the Green New Deal. For those of you who

(09:08):
may or may not remember, that's a plan to transform
the entire US economy. That plan, as mister Blackman points out,
went absolutely nowhere in Congress. But the Green New Deal
you can see as an instruction manual, and many of
its pieces have made it into the Inflation Reduction Act,

(09:29):
which we all know now has nothing to do with
reducing inflation because it was a giant government spend. And
we'll come back to that in a second. David Blackman
points out that as a candidate for the Democratic Party's
presidential nomination in twenty twenty, she told a CNN town
hall that, no question, I'm in favor of banning fracking,

(09:51):
taking that concept further than even Biden was willing to do.
And the question is whether or not that is going
to haunt her in some of these high intensity energy
states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico, which is

(10:15):
a key oil and gas state as well. But once
she was chosen as Biden's running mate, she decided to
modify her opposition to fracking, and she said, quote, without
any ambiguity, Joe is clear, we will not ban fracking.
That's not exactly true, because this administration, the Biden Harris administration,
has made it very difficult on US energy producers that

(10:40):
are producing hydrocarbons. But across her time as vice president,
she has endorsed Biden's policies like canceling the Keystone Excel
pipeline first day in office, the passage of that green
subsidy filled Inflation Reduction Act, which, by the way, she's
the one who cast the tiebreaker vote in the Senate

(11:03):
to pass that piece of legislation that has spent oodles
and noodles of public money getting us nowhere. The bottom
line is that she is squarely in the camp of
the progressive green left of the Democratic Party. This according
to Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research.

(11:26):
He noted that the Biden administration had been mostly hostile
to the oil and gas industry of any administration in history.
The US Oil and Gas Association President Tim Stewart added
on Monday, the DEVICE president is on record opposing hydraulic
fracturing to offshore production and everything in between. If she

(11:47):
is as successful on energy policy as she's been on
border policy, we will see the californication of the entire
US energy policy. Wow. He goes on to say that
if there is continuity in the transition, it will be
how can we make something that is already bad even worse? Okay, so,

(12:08):
now we've heard from a couple of folks that are
not big fans. Let's kick ourselves over to any news
my Politico and if you know energy and environmental news,
any news I was bought by Politico not too long ago.
Politico very much inside the Beltway, insider to things happening

(12:33):
in DC. Neither one of these publications. In fact, I
was just on a Politico briefing a couple hours ago
where they were talking about Harris, and it looked like
a pep rally for her. They were iddy with excitement,
not even trying to restrain themselves as journalists or object

(12:54):
to it at all. So let's just say any News
is left of center, and Politico is firmly in the camp.
And so yeah, here's an article from Iany News, and
I'm just going to read parts of it here said,
I'm completely accurate. Some environmentalists already putting their weight behind Harris,
who they expect would largely continue Biden's effort to slash

(13:16):
greenhouse gas emissions as the effects of climate change increasingly
ravaged the globe. And they quote, let's see here, who
is this. The President is always recognized what it takes
to deliver a better future for the country, and today's
decision is another example of that forward looking leadership. Says
Lori loads, executive director of Climate Power, a Democrat allied group.

(13:42):
It's the same kind of patriotism that animates Vice President
Kamala Harris, the next president of the United States. They
say that Harris's energy record is a senator and later
as a candidate, and the Democratic presidential primary of twenty
twenty that we've just talked about before was to the
left of Biden's on many issues and sharply critical of

(14:06):
the oil and gas industry. The article starts out by
talking about how Kamala Harris is a more progressive energy
record than President Joe Biden. They go on to say
that she called for an end to hydraulic fracturing, she
urged a ban on plastic straws Okay, check check, We've
talked about that, and into the filibuster, a Senate legislative

(14:27):
tool that ensures some members of the minority party have
to sign off on most legislation. They also mentioned that
she was one of the original co sponsors of the
Green New Deal. Oh here it is the res The
Green New Deal stalled, but some of its ideas made
it into the Inflation Reduction Act, and Republicans often used

(14:49):
the phrase as shorthand for policy they say attack fossil fuels.
She also co sponsored the Climate Equity Act of twenty twenty,
which would have created an arm of the Congressional Budget
Office to score legislation based on its effects to what
she describes as historically disadvantaged communities. Okay, here we go.

(15:11):
She's pseudo Obama's Interior Department over fracking off the check
check check. She said, we must balance our energy needs
with our long standing commitment to protecting our natural resources
in public health, Harris said at the time. The Any
News also notes that she launched a probe and whether
or not Exxon Mobile lied to the public about climate change. Well,

(15:34):
some energy groups appeared cautious not to favor any presidential hopeful,
a nod of deep uncertainty over who would preside over
the country in twenty twenty five. And correctly, that's what's
a lot of trade groups and industries do, right you
You kind of hold your fire, at least in public.

(15:55):
And one group in particular is the National Ocean Industries Association,
which represents offshore wind interests. They fear that a second
Trump administration will not do well for their industry, and
they're also concerned that progressives would certainly sink their offshore

(16:19):
drilling opportunities while Trump administration might click the wings of
their offshore wind farms. So they have come out and
said our message to policy makers is clear. They balanced
and forward looking approach to energy policy is essential. This
includes supporting the full spectrum of offshore energy resources, oil, gas, wind,

(16:42):
carbon capture, critical minerals, and other emerging energy segments. Okay,
and all the above approach, but under Harrison Biden, the
offshore oiland gas industry faced far tougher rules for cleaning
up old infrastructure in the ocean and the smallest number
of offshore or oil auctions in the program's history. So

(17:05):
all right, not too different, just without all the rhetoric
of the sort of shall we say, not friendly folks
to Kamala. But so that was eany news. And then
we go over to Axios, which is well left of
center and very progressive when it comes to matters on

(17:31):
the climate, and they said that the presumed Democratic front
runner could bring a new focus on environmental justice to
the presidential race and almost certainly torrents of GOP attacks
on the Green New Deal. By the way, the Green
New Deal. One of the tenets on that was that
we were going to have to rebuild most of the

(17:53):
entire country because all of our buildings are not insulated
enough to make it to the stand andered that progresses
wanted to be because have to use far less energy
than we currently use, and so most buildings over fifty
years of age presumably would have to be either retrofit

(18:14):
with very expensive technologies. You can imagine at your house
you would have to take the siding off of your
house down to the studs and reinsulate the entire thing,
or you just need to blow it up and buy
a new house. And in some New England states where
you look at the insulation requirements, it can almost well,

(18:37):
it can increase the cost of a new home by
thirty to sixty percent. What they say, though, is if
she's the nominee, Harris would likely seek to continue the
Biden administration's agenda, but quote her more progressive image on
energy and climate would shake up the election on policy.

(18:57):
They note that Harris ran to the Biden's left on
climate during the twenty twenty presidential election, and as everyone
else has said, was an early back of the Green
New Deal. They also repeat the fact that she endorsed
a fracking band. Her campaign's climate plan also proposed an
international summits with major climate emitters to negotiate an end

(19:20):
to fossil fuel subsidies and a global managed to climb
in the industry. You know, here's also a broad misnomer.
There are no fossil fuel subsidies. There are very much
subsidies to buy an EV seventy five hundred bos. There
are subsidies for wind and solar. But what some people

(19:43):
call subsidies to fossil fuel are simple tax strategies and
the ability to deduct what every other business in this
country can deduct operating expenses Capital investments PTC, which is
a tax credit, is not a subsidy. Yet the left

(20:07):
wants to call what the motion picture industry gets, and
what farmers get and what a steel mill gets as
a tax deduction, But when it comes to hydrocarbon energy companies,
it's suddenly of subsidy. So I wanted to point that out.
But what they do go on to say is she
try to make her Marcus present with new initiatives on

(20:28):
environmental justice and new pushback on the oil industry. Joe.
She also floated a bill to create a new grant
program for electric school buses. A version of that idea
was later funded in the IIJA that's sort of known
as the Infrastructure Jobs Act. Democrats call it the Bipartisan

(20:53):
Infrastructure Bill, which I think less than four or five
Republicans supported. And there was just an article out on
that the other day that of all the money that
has gone in for these electric buses, they've produced so
few of them. And I don't quote me on the

(21:13):
exact numbers, but it was something like three hundred million
went into this or more, and that they only have
sixty buses. Maybe it's thirty buses. But what I do
remember specifically is the average cost of an electric bus
was seventy plus million dollars. And you heard that right,
seventy plus million dollars each. Look it up and check
it out. Here. They point out that Harris notably cast

(21:36):
the historic deciding vote to send the Inflation Reduction Act
over the finish line. Wow. So she created an environmental
justice unit as the San Francisco District Attorney. As a
California Attorney General, she was involved in the Volkswagen emissions
case and initiated criminal proceedings against a pipeline company after

(21:58):
a spill, and her record as a prosecutor could become
more relevant, they say, for the Democratic base, given the
party's recent attacks on oil and gas companies. But yet
they end the article by saying, well, our thought, bubble
is that Harris has isn't drastically different from Biden on energy,
but their differences could mean some real policy changes on

(22:21):
the margin in a world which Dems already pushed much
of their climate agenda over the congressional finish line. An't
even imagine. I don't think that's the case. At the
same time, her past anti fuel rhetoric could be a
real liability for her on the campaign trail. Last, but
not least, let's talk to a Let's take a look

(22:44):
at a thoughtful consulting group assessment called the BGR Group
out of Washington, d C. And they answered the question
what would a Harris presidency mean for energy? And they
say it would likely lead to a more assertive approach
on climate and environmental policy these when compared to the
Biden administration, And they point out again her records show

(23:05):
strong opposition to hydraulic fracturing or support for the green
new deal, an advocate for climate equity, shift towards stricter
admissions on oil and gas industry and a greater emphasis
on renewable energy. As Harris has stated, we must balance
our energy needs with our long standing commitment to protect
our natural resources and public health. They say that she's

(23:28):
expected to support investment in clean energy technologies, more money
for clean energy technologies, and doubling down on the ability
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Harris's stance could mobilize climate
activists and younger voters, shaping a robust climate strategy for
the Democratic Party. Here's the interesting part, and nobody else

(23:50):
has mentioned this. They say, what about her potential running mates? Well, First,
Governor Andy Basheer Kentuck. He is known for balancing conservative
priorities with environmental goals. He's highlighted the state's electric vehicle
battery plants, but he's rejected the EPA's climate pollution reduction program.

(24:13):
About Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina, another individual mentioned
as a potential running mate. He's emphasized environmental cleanup, but
he's vetoed measures favoring nuclear energy as clean energy. Wow, okay,
nuclear energy, it is clean energy folks. Senator Mark Kelly

(24:33):
of Arizona another possibility focused on securing federal drought funding
and balancing water regulations while at the same time advocating
against over regulation of industries. Okay, one of the top
front runners that I've heard, Governor Josh Shapiro Pennsylvania, proposed
a new climate program to reduce emissions, but he did

(24:55):
so at the same time as highlighting the state's role
as an energy powerhouse, embracing hydrogen alongside coal and natural gas.
That one could be interesting, so we will have to
see which direction she goes. But based on looking at
the available material and my own background, Biden was further

(25:20):
left than Obama when it came to energy, and a
potential of a president Harris would move that needle as
far to the left as you could get. I think
that's problematic in some respects because, again, throughout these podcasts
we've talked about the need to understand our energy mix

(25:44):
while not giving up on the affordability, reliability, and availability
of energy resources, and the need to both balance carbon
reductions and environmental stewardship with economic development so that given
the strength of America's natural resources, we can embrace an

(26:07):
energy policy that is cleaner, safer, and more affordable than
everywhere else in the world, but only if we reject
extremist policies in order to do that. You've been listening
to Charge Conversations, which is a Joe Strecker production. I'd
bring them account. Be sure to let us know your

(26:29):
thoughts in the comments section below, or you can send
your comments, dots, or ideas over to Charged Conversations at
bamaccount dot com. That's Charged Conversations at BA McCown dot com.
I'll see you next time.