BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Joe Biden Tries To Clean Up His Fracking Mess

Following
This article is more than 3 years old.

When it comes to energy policy, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has a lot of cleaning up to do as he now begins to move into general election mode in his campaign. The clean-up job will not be easy.

During the primary season, as he worked to secure the votes of his Party’s left-leaning voter base, Mr. Biden has promised at various times to enforce a policy of “no new fracking” in his administration; to end the use of oil and natural gas in the United States; and to end new drilling on federal lands in the U.S. While promises like those and others played well to the voters in Party primaries around the country, they have the potential to come back to haunt Biden during the general election in key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Mexico, where the industry supports hundreds of thousands of jobs and the state governments rely heavily on income from oil and gas taxes.

Make no mistake: These impacts are huge. A recent study released by the Marcellus Shale Coalition calculated that a ban on fracking in that state would cost 609,000 jobs and eliminate $261 billion in economic impact and cost the state government $23.4 billion in annual income. Shale development in the Permian Basin has completely transformed the financial fortunes of the state government in New Mexico, creating a huge budget surplus that policymakers plan to use to upgrade the healthcare system, infrastructure and education. Those benefits and many more disappear the moment fracking is banned.

Acting on these realities, Biden told an interviewer with Pennsylvania ABC news affiliate WNEP that “Fracking is not going to be on the chopping block,” directly contradicting his previous statements. That bit of information likely came as surprising news to both Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC), whom Biden has enlisted to be his key energy and environment policy advisors.

And therein lies a real conundrum for the presumptive nominee: How will he navigate the perilous waters in which the competing interests related to oil and gas drilling, income and fracking swim? At the very least, he’s going to need a life jacket.

A big part of the Biden problem here is that he made each and every one of the promises listed above live on national television during various Democratic debates during the primary season. Thus, he has no real means of honestly denying that he made those commitments to secure votes from the Party’s base voters, who will no doubt feel betrayed as he attempts to walk them back. You can be sure that the Trump Campaign, flush with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on media, will flood the airwaves in those key states with ads featuring the relevant clips from those debates.

At the same time, Biden can ill-afford to alienate Sanders and especially AOC, a darling of the anti-fracking movement who is seen as a titular leader of the more radical elements of the Democratic Party’s base. We should remember that AOC’s support for Biden is already tepid: At several points during the primaries she made it quite clear that she’s not exactly thrilled with having the former Vice President as the Party’s nominee in the first place. AOC is also the lead House sponsor of the “Green New Deal,” a policy smorgasbord that would immediately outlaw fracking and rapidly eliminate the use of all fossil fuels in the U.S. economy. Sanders himself has aggressively advocated the outlawing of hydraulic fracturing for at least a decade now.

How will either hope to reconcile their own policy views to a Biden effort to walk back his primary season commitments?

Biden hopes to have both Sanders and AOC actively campaigning on his behalf this fall. Can he really expect either of them to now give speeches in those critical swing states in which they repeat his promise that those fracking jobs are not on the chopping block? More importantly, given the copious amount of video footage that exists of all of these politicians making their fracking ban promises, will anyone believe them?

It’s a real mess. For Biden, it could turn into a quagmire.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website