The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Why Kamala Harris Is Embracing Oil Production
Dear Diary. Morally in life, when is it O.K. to fib? My answer is that when in the long run of any relationship it benefits both parties, with no involved future hurtful consequences. Depending upon the situation, though, any fib may come back to haunt the lying party. In the case of V.P. Kamala Harris, A) Is she really lying about embracing oil production? and B) If she is to just get elected and embraces stricter policies to combat climate change early in her administration, won’t her comments come back to haunt her politically, particularly if gas prices spike? In my opinion, she HAS to get elected or else there will be no climate action at all…thus any slight fib to get into office on her part is O.K. by my book,
As I’ve stressed many times on this blog, if we are going to keep our climate from spiraling out of control such that civilization can be kept intact, we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. People aren’t embracing electric vehicles fast enough across the United States, so at some point gas prices need to go up substantially to spur change. Declaring a climate emergency by a Harris Administration might do the trick, although Congress could do so by yanking subsidies away from fossil fuel companies and taxing gasoline at very high rates…neither which is likely. So we continue to bake and bake as the globe ticks toward +1.5°C above preindustrial conditions and beyond.
The good news here is that Kamala Harris might weather any storm in association with fracking because of global trends:
Here are more details from the Washington Post. For a chart that I did not include, hit the following link:
Why Kamala Harris has embraced America’s oil boom – The Washington Post
Why Kamala Harris has embraced America’s oil boom
Tuesday’s debate barely touched on the subject of climate change. But when it did, Harris embraced oil production.
A shale gas well drilling site in St. Marys, Pa., in 2020. Under the Biden administration, new leases for fracking were approved. (Keith Srakocic/AP)
September 11, 2024 at 12:28 p.m. EDT
Tuesday’s presidential debate barely touched on the subject of climate change. But in the few minutes devoted to climate policy, Vice President Kamala Harris aimed at moderates by voicing full-throated support for domestic oil production.
“We have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris said Tuesday night in Philadelphia. “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.”
In a state where natural gas helps power the economy, she pivoted from her 2019 call for a ban on fracking — extracting natural gas by creating cracks in the earth’s bedrock.
Harris’s moves show how some top Democrats have abandoned the idea of blocking oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters — which President Joe Biden once embraced — and shifting their rhetoric to appeal to swing voters.
“I will not ban fracking,” she said. “I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tiebreaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”
In the weeks leading up to the debate with former president Donald Trump, Harris’s campaign had tried to strike a balance by positioning the candidate as neither overwhelmingly opposed to drilling, nor wholly in favor of it. She did not highlight climate change or other environmental issues in her stump speeches. All the while, Trump pledged to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental regulations to spur more oil production and attacked Harris for her alleged “war on American energy.”
Forced to address the issue Tuesday night, Harris embraced the oil boom.
Harris emphasized the need for the United States to be an independent oil producer. She praised the Biden administration’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed with her tiebreaking vote. But in the same breath, she also bragged about the country’s record oil and gas production.
“We have invested over a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy, while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” she said.
Trump ignored the question and criticized the Biden administration’s record on auto manufacturing.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the vice president’s remarks reflect today’s political and economic reality. Fracking is the largest source of energy production in the country. Though wind and solar are growing quickly, and displacing coal, the shift to cleaner sources of energy remains a distant goal. And though the Biden administration pledged to stop drilling on public lands and cancel fossil fuel subsidies, his administration has not been able to do those things without support from Congress.
Meanwhile, the success of Harris’s campaign rests in swing states including Pennsylvania, where some voters’ livelihoods depend on the fossil energy industry.
“It’s a shift in rhetoric, not in policy,” Gerrard said. “The climate advocacy community is solidly in Harris’s camp — they realize Trump would be a horror show. Harris has a greater need to attract voters from states like Pennsylvania that rely heavily on fracking, and those votes are far more likely to be swayed by this rhetoric than the votes of the environmental community.”
For their part, many of the country’s largest environmental groups have not pressed Harris to commit to going further than Biden in limiting planet-warming emissions. But younger climate activists have — and they were disappointed by Harris’s comments.
Stevie O’Hanlon, a spokeswoman for the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, said the vice president’s support Tuesday for domestic oil production was “misguided” and predicted that it would not help her in Pennsylvania.
“It was a missed opportunity for her to draw a really clear contrast with Donald Trump and show young voters, who are wondering what the next president will do to protect our future and our lives,” O’Hanlon said. “The task isn’t that hard,” she added, because Trump “has made it so clear he will do exactly what oil and gas executives want him do.”
By Anna Phillips Anna Phillips is a national reporter for the Washington Post, covering how climate change is transforming daily life — including Americans’ homes, food and health. She previously covered environmental policy for the Los Angeles Times and was a courts and local government reporter for the Tampa Bay Times.
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is more new August 2024 climatology. (More can be found on each daily post during September.):
Here is More Climate News from Saturday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)