Donald Trump Had a Bad Debate ... But Don’t Ignore Kamala Harris’ Worst Moment.

The most serious and dangerous issue of our time got sidelined yet again.

by NITISH PAHWA
September 12, 2024

Win McNamee photo

A hurricane is slamming Louisiana, and multiple wildfires are ravaging Southern California, Idaho, and Arizona. So naturally, Tuesday’s debate moderators only brought up the topic of human-caused climate change about an hour and a half into the forum—keeping up the depressing tradition of mentioning global warming only as a footnote in these presidential debates, if at all.

When climate and energy were raised in the debate, they appeared as cameos within Donald Trump’s rambling, deranged answers. Kamala Harris, who pulled off a strong performance and decisive victory, failed to respond in a way that could have superseded a fundamental lie about climate politics and offered her an affirmative advantage on the issue.

The debate took place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, setting this faceoff in one of the election’s most important swing states: Pennsylvania, where Harris and Trump run squarely neck-and-neck. The fight for the commonwealth’s 19 electoral votes has already been the source for many tired pundit feuds (e.g., whether Harris should have run with Gov. Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz), but few have been as exhausting as the hand-wringing over Harris’ anti-fracking platform during her failed 2019 run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Never mind that she immediately reversed that position during the 2020 vice presidential debate; never mind that Joe Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 while explicitly promising to phase out fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy; never mind that polls consistently showed in 2020 and 2024 that majorities of Pennsylvania voters oppose fracking, and that far more Pennsylvanians work for solar, wind, hydropower, and electric vehicle facilities than for oil and gas plants; never mind that the Energy Information Administration has found that we don’t need to plan new fossil-fuel extractions in order to meet global energy needs, since plenty of already planned projects will be sufficient to replenish supplies for decades to come. The anti-fracking narrative has stuck on the Keystone State, and despite years of local protests against the steep environmental and health impacts of the drilling practice, both mainstream media and Democratic consultants appear to have persuaded Harris to accept this narrative.

The ABC News moderators, who mostly did a good job keeping things rolling, betrayed this fossil-fuel bias by asking Harris why “so many of your policy positions changed,” citing the 2019 fracking comments as the first example. The Democratic nominee then gave an answer that probably made Charlie Koch very happy:

Let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020: I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil. We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over-rely on foreign oil.

There are other reasons why the standard-bearer for the climate-conscious Democratic Party would take this pro-oil tack, which lines up with much of her thus far vibes-based approach to campaigning: She wants to distance herself from her unpopular president, appeal to more moderate voters, and take a cautious route when it comes to policy, having enjoyed a post-Biden polling honeymoon until now.

While understandable, this strategy misunderstands why President Joe Biden is so unpopular and was ultimately dissuaded from his reelection bid: He is very old and no longer has the public charisma and charm he once had. His public disapproval also has way less to do with what he achieved in office than the fact that most voters don’t know he achieved anything at all (including the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included both historic investments in clean energy and some fossil fuel concessions) thanks to his ineffective communication and poor media relations.

One more reason why Harris’ moves here are misguided? That debate night demonstrated how none of Donald Trump’s policies, on energy or abortion or anything else, make any goddamn sense.

Harris, in a manner befitting her prosecutorial background, expertly baited Trump into ditching the low-key, straight-faced tone he assumed in the first 15 minutes and got him riled up enough to babble about his pet peeves—crowd sizes, immigrants, foreign dictators, etc.—in an incoherent and off-putting manner. This extended to energy politics, a subject Trump’s consultants undoubtedly told him to emphasize and that he just could not land in any sensible manner. Some relevant excerpts, starting with his rant about the unpopular Keystone XL gas pipeline and the nonoperational Nord Stream 2 pipeline that Ukrainians later blew up:

I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Biden put it back on Day 1 but he ended the XL pipeline. The XL pipeline in our country. He ended that. But he let the Russians build a pipeline going all over Europe and heading into Germany. The biggest pipeline in the world.

He went on to deliver this beautiful word salad following Harris’ initial fracking answer and his quick aside on “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison”:

If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on Day 1. Just to finish one thing, so important in my opinion, so, I got the oil business going like nobody has ever done before. They took, when they took over, they got rid of it, started getting rid of it, and the prices were going up the roof. They immediately let these guys go to where they were. I would have been five times, four times, five times higher, because you’re talking about three and a half years ago. They got it up to where I was because they had no choice. Because the prices of energy were quadrupling and doubling. You saw what happened to gasoline. So, they said let’s go back to Trump. But if she won the election, the day after that election, they’ll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead. We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant? By the way, I’m a big fan of solar. But they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil …

If you squint, you can see a case Trump is trying to make about the high gas prices that resulted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Republicans attempted to pin that on Biden in their attempt to hamstring Democrats in the 2022 midterms, but that talking point flopped when it turned out voters were far more concerned about the future of democracy and abortion rights. The rest of this answer is, of course, hokum, and I’m sure Trump’s most fervent climate-denying, pro-fossil-fuel voters were not happy about his little “big fan of solar” aside. (By the way, solar panels are actually good for desert soil.)

Kamala Harris entered the debate very focused and prepared, and it’s likely many of her answers were well-rehearsed beforehand. That being the case, it’s still odd that after she extracted such obvious slurry from Trump, she felt the need to defend oil and gas. When the moderators finally asked Harris and Trump what they would “do to fight climate change,” the veep empathized with the victims of extreme weather who are “being denied home insurance” or losing their houses as a result before adding:

DAHLIA LITHWICK

The Most Satisfying Moment of the Harris-Trump Debate

I am proud that, as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels. We have created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs while I have been vice president. We have invested in clean energy to the point that we are opening up factories around the world. Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs. And I’m also proud to have the endorsement of the United Auto Workers and Shawn Fain, who also know that part of building a clean energy economy includes investing in American-made products.

Certainly, a better answer than her previous one, with the bonus effect of spurring Trump to blubber on about tariffs and “money from Ukraine” and, for some reason, “the mayor of Moscow’s wife.” Harris gave a knowing shoutout to the young voters who soured on Biden’s pro-oil concessions and are hoping she can do better (although it’s not just young progressives who have climate change on their minds). The mentions of home insurance, displacement from disasters, and union workers are also savvy moves; as I’ve previously argued, Harris can find an effective middle ground on climate change by noting how its effects batter our economy, and by framing the fight against misbehaving oil and gas executives as a matter of economic fairness as well as simple law-and-order accountability. It would be easy for her to apply her anti-price-gouging talking points to the oil companies that have blatantly conspired to inflate gas prices and offered their shareholders record returns..

And yet, her pride in “domestic gas production,” coupled with those earlier fracking comments and her reluctance to also mention the UAW’s support for electric cars, specifically, threatened to undermine all of that. By retreating to a defense on fossil fuels instead of expounding on a vision for a bountiful green-energy future that will shrink the methane and carbon emissions wrecking the atmosphere—and reduce the need for the hydraulic drilling that’s polluting our increasingly scarce groundwater resources—Kamala Harris threatens to cede the Earth’s very future to Republicans’ disingenuous terms of debate. But this week’s extreme weather disasters demonstrate that that can’t be our course of action.

Considering how expertly she can spar with Trump and leave him deflated, it’s extra disappointing that she won’t call his bluff as the most nonsensical ambassador the fossil fuel industry could ask for. Trump’s attacks on Biden’s appearances with “anti-fracking activist Lady Gaga” didn’t work in 2020, and this debate has shown that his weird obsession with pipelines and oil isn’t winning him the broader favor among the electorate that he needs.