I was shocked in the presidential debate that Harris gave staunch support for fracking. I was under the impression that democrats are against fracking, and remember people being critical of Fetterman for supporting it.
I also grew up in an area that was heavily impacted by the pollution from fracking. People who worked in the field were seen as failures of moral character who chose profits over the health of their children. How is it that both major parties are now in support of it? I feel like I must be missing a piece of the puzzle.
It’s because of the electoral college. Most states give all their electoral college votes to whomever wins the state rather than dividing the votes equitably. This means Pennsylvania – a swing state – will go either all-red or all-blue. The state has a lot of fracking, and a lot of people making money off it, so Democrats are trying to appease pro-fracking to get votes.
The people getting harmed by fracking are stuck without anyone on their ‘side’, but will presumably be more likely to vote blue because that side favors more regulation and pro-environment stuff. Note that all Harris said was she wouldn’t ban fracking. She didn’t say she wouldn’t make it difficult to do. My guess is any attempts to make it cleaner will get crushed by Congress and the Corrupted Supreme Court that has sided against Unions, workers, citizens, and the planet – all to favor of their sugar daddies. So even if the next President wants to do something about fracking, it would be a hard to actually do anything.
That and because there are Democrats who are bought by the oil companies, just like Republicans.
Democrats have the backwards idea that trying to be conservative enough to siphon off republican voters is how they’ll win, while they’ve got this mass of chronically ignored, disconnected progressives who they never serve “because they don’t vote”. And they don’t vote because no one represents them.
Just eternally chasing that cracked out meth head of a party over to the right.
Without evidence I will say it’s more likely that she has significant funding from the fracking industry and is under the thumb of rich executives. The difference is that they likely understand that supporting fracking could cost them the election, but they know that by not supporting it they lose a huge source of funding. They have weighed the costs, benefits and risks, and decided it’s a risk worth taking.
A good solution is to get corporate money out of politics. There are narrow ways to achieve that, but a broad solution that fixes a lot of problems is to end corporate personhood. This organization has made steady progress toward that and I think is worth supporting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Move_to_Amend. Considered signing up for their email list.
Another solution is more wisely voting. People don’t vote in primary elections, but they’re more important than the general elections. They determine what the field of candidates looks like. Vote in primary elections. You don’t necessarily want to vote in primary of the party you most align with though. An obvious example where you’d vote in a different party is if you live in a gerrymandered district. There’s a near 100% chance the gerrymandered party candidate will win. It doesn’t matter who the other candidates are. Vote for the least bad candidate in the other party. You won’t get everything you want, but you’ll get more than you would otherwise. It will also force the party to change.
That’s not the only time you’d vote in a party you don’t align best with. Maybe you’re relatively happy with all of the candidates in a party, so why split hairs if you’d be ok with any of them? There are so many considerations that the only advice is to keep an open mind about party membership, evaluate where you make the most impact (not what looks the most like you) and vote in every damn election, primaries included.
LOL. She needs Pennsylvania. That’s it.
That does sound better doesn’t it? If I were a presidential candidate, I would definitely say “We support fracking because we need Pennsylvania” instead of “We support fracking because our campaign has accepted millions of dollars from the oil industry”.
Any commentary I’ve heard is talking about Pennsylvania. It’s critically important to a win, and fracking is critically important to voters there.
That said, can’t it be both?
I’m sure both campaigns have accepted donations from loads of shady industries. Crypto is a salient example.
Money wins elections, and the race being as close as it is I don’t care where the dems are getting their money from.
I find myself saying this a lot, but if the left was going to win a convincing victory, they would have some scope for more progressive policy. There isn’t any room, and they don’t have that mandate.
It corporations weren’t given the same rights as people, then we’d need to wonder less about what politicians’ real motives were.
Corporations are legal entities, but they do not have the same rights as people.
They do according to the US supreme court. The court ruled in Citizens United that restricting donations from corporations was a violation of corporations’ first amendment rights.
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I have no evidence of her motives. Campaign donations are public record, and she receives funding from oil companies. The idea that politicians are not swayed by finance is absurdly naive. They don’t need to accept that money. And, regardless whether convincing swing voters is a part of the campaign’s consideration, it should be clear that influence from corporations is not an influence. Then we could sit here an take them at their word. As it is, it’s impossible to think that millions of dollars from oil companies is not affecting the decision to make a complete u turn on supporting fracking.
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That’s an interesting possibility - is there any data to support it?
Here in Georgia the fight is in the center, for sure.
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They are trying to cater to the independent voters, not republicans. This is smart because independent voters have decided elections in several states before
US presidential elections aren’t about swaying your base. They’re about swaying very specific swing states.
The electoral college means pushing to the center is the only way for progressives to win an election. Conservatives can generally do what they want, they have an inherent advantage in the electoral college.
Giving up the chance to make small change because you refuse to compromise only means that, within the system we have here, we end up backsliding. Every small improvement is hard won, and giving up means dramatic losses.
It’s a shit system, but it’s the system we currently have to work with.
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Fracking has granted the United States independence from OPEC, and turned the US into the largest exporter of oil. The US now has the pricing power on the world oil market. This has huge geopolitical implications.
Back in the 2000s it was completely different. All of the geopolitical wonks were pushing renewable energy as a means of OPEC independence. And now that independence has been granted, but we still have the oil.
Meanwhile, as others have stated on this thread, the immediate problems from fracking have been mostly fixed, including the earthquakes. Long term, I don’t think anyone knows what’s going to happen with all of that dirty wastewater going back into the ground.
So on balance, there’s a good reason for the leadership in both parties to be on board with fracking: oil still rules the world, and fracking lets the United States rule the oil markets.
Yeah, and I’m fine with that short term. But only if it’s very short term and only if we use it as a brief reprieve to build out renewable energy faster than otherwise. That seems unlikely
Oh I thought the sign was going to say “we have to sacrifice everything we believe in for the incredibly narrow issues going on in a single state because of the Electoral College, that’s how democracy works you dumbfuck” but my eyes are getting bad
Many don’t. I don’t. I’m not gonna vote trump over it though.
Are you gonna vote for the lying cop or the lying criminal?
Probably the lying cop since a criminal is proven guilty?
Because nothing matters if we lose the election and we can’t win the election without PA.
What’s more disappointing is that she had been historically anti-fracking. Tossed all of that out though, I suppose.
On one hand, I get it. To ensure herself a smooth election, keep the funding from your enemy.
On the other hand, fuck man I just want a President with policy that won’t destroy the planet.
The aim is to suck all resources from the planet and die just before things go to shit
The argument given back in the day was “energy independence”.
The options (simply put) were 1) give money to shady middle eastern dictators 2) drill in ANWAR or 3) innovate in domestic production (fracking).
Renewables were still not up to par and nuclear was not seriously considered because the carbon thing was still an afterthought.
I’m not condoning this shit, I’m just explaining the state of play as I remember it.
User MKWT explained it fairly well. We have solved all the major issues with fracking, so now the only issue left is oil and gas releases. If we build out renewables as Kamala wants, fracking would be a non issue.
Pennsylvania is a swing state and likes fracking politically. As Republicans support fracking, this could be the one issue that convinces some Pennsylvania voters to vote Republican over Democrat.
When they needed PA to win the election.
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they now have earthquakes because of fracking in Oklahoma
Why are you making me defend fracking? Gross. But yeah, that’s not how geology works. How many miles down are they injecting the
poisonsolution?
She’s still a politician. It’s easy to put her on a pedestal because she’s NOT Trump, but without him, how excited would you really be about Harris?
Fracking technology has some potential upside in the climate discussion, https://time.com/6302342/fervo-fracking-technology-geothermal-energy/
A ban on fracking might not be the best solution if you want to move the technology towards something more beneficial to the fight against climate change.
I’m not convinced democrats have been completely against fracking. I think it’s location based as fracking does or can have extreme negative consequences on the surrounding environment, so doing it around a major city aquifer probably isn’t the greatest idea. Fracking out in the middle of nowhere might be more positively embraced.
