Harris campaign claims she no longer supports fracking ban she touted in 2019: report
Fox News
Vice President Kamala Harris no longer supports a fracking ban, in a change in her stance during the last presidential election, her campaign said on Friday, according to a report.
Before she dropped her bid for president in 2019 and joined President Biden’s ticket, she said in a CNN town hall “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”
“And starting with what we can do on day one around public lands, right?” she continued. “And then there has to be legislation, but, yes, that’s something I’ve taken on in California. I have a history of working on this issue and to your point we have to just acknowledge that the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the health and safety of communities.”
Harris also cosponsored the Green New Deal as a senator in 2019, a proposal to stem climate change that includes a ban on fracking.
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“Climate change is real, and it poses an existential threat to us as human beings, and it is within our power to do something about it,” Harris said on the campaign trail that year before exiting the race, according to The New York Times. “I am supporting the Green New Deal.”
However, Biden’s campaign and his administration have not backed banning fracking despite Biden once saying during a primary debate “We would make sure it’s eliminated.” His campaign later clarified that he “supports eliminating subsidies for coal and gas and deploying carbon capture.”
Since Biden announced he is dropping out of the race and endorsed Harris last Sunday, she has moderated some of her positions from her 2019 run, in which she embraced more progressive policies.
Trump was quick to paint her as a “radical liberal” since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Harris is the “most incompetent and far-left vice president in American history,” the former president told a rally crowd in Charlotte on Wednesday.
Trump charged that Harris “has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe. She is a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country if she ever gets the chance to get into office.”
He added, “She wants no fracking. You’re going to be paying a lot of money. You’re going to be paying so much. You’re going to say ‘bring back Trump.’”
Telling The Hill that Harris no longer wants to ban fracking, her campaign pushed back on Trump’s rhetoric.
“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” the campaign told The Hill. “The Biden-Harris Administration passed the largest ever climate change legislation and under their leadership, America now has the highest ever domestic energy production,” the spokesperson said in an email. “This Administration created 300,000 energy jobs, while Trump lost nearly a million and his Project 2025 would undo the enormous progress we’ve made the past four years.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Mike Marinella, said, “Kamala Harris is the most far-left progressive presidential nominee in history, and extreme Democrats in the Rust Belt now own every single policy she supports.”
He added, “A fracking ban would be disastrous for workers and families, and extreme Democrats’ mission to force Biden to step aside and replace him with San Francisco radical Kamala Harris shows exactly how out of touch they are with their voters.”
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Fox News Digital has reached out to Harris’ campaign for comment.
Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser and Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.