COLD KEYSTONE LOGIC
A years-old pledge by Kamala Harris to ban fracking still resonates in energy-rich Pennsylvania. The question now is whether voters in this crucial swing state will look past it in November.
- Vice President Kamala Harris has a long track record of taking green-friendly positions, dating back two decades to her days as a San Francisco prosecutor. Her ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket was hailed by climate activists, who got even more amped up when she tapped climate hawk Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), as What A Day noted last week. But Harris has recently backed away from a pledge she made four years ago, during her first run for president, to ban the dirty drilling process known as fracking. And it’s not hard to see why. Pennsylvania is a world capital for fracking, a specialized and controversial technology for pulling oil and natural gas out of challenging underground formations. And now, Pennsylvania might just decide who becomes the next president.
- Disgraced former President Trump attacked Harris almost immediately over her previous fracking ban comments just as soon as President Biden dropped out of the race in July. “She’s against fracking, she’s against oil drilling, she wants everybody to have one electric car and share it with the neighbors,” Trump told a rally in Harrisburg, PA, on July 31. The Harris campaign called Trump’s assertions “false,” and stated Harris would not ban fracking — effectively reversing her former position.
- What will voters in Pennsylvania, one of the most important swing states in the 2024 presidential election, make of all this? For the moment, Trump’s attempts to drum up a controversy on the fracking issue aren’t exactly burying the Harris campaign. Harris is gaining in the polls and now leads Trump in Pennsylvania by about 2 percentage points, according to analyst Nate Silver’s polling average. A recent NYT/Sienna poll had her ahead by 4 points in Pennsylvania.
You can bet Trump will hammer on this issue as hard as he can from now until election day.
- Fracking turned Pennsylvania into an energy powerhouse by allowing drillers to access reserves that had once been considered too difficult to drill. The Washington Post profiled some of those PA voters on Tuesday, pointing out that some in this state would probably back Harris if not for concerns over where she really stands on this issue. That includes 31-year-old Emanuel Paris, who works in construction, believes that climate change is real — and plans to vote for Trump. “It’s not like we can just shut off everything else and switch to solar and wind,” Paris told the Post.
A future Trump administration, of course, is a climate disaster waiting to happen — with impact stretching well beyond the state of Pennsylvania.
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NEWS NEWS NEWS
Hamas said it will not take part in ceasefire talks scheduled to begin on Thursday, signaling that hopes of a deal to halt the fighting remain elusive. The group’s London representative told the New York Times it would not participate because it believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has not been negotiating in good faith.
Donald Trump held a glitchy, rambling “conversation” with tech-billionaire and misinformation enthusiast Elon Musk on X/Twitter Monday night. The event — which was riddled with so many flat-out-lies it had our heads spinning — kicked off 45 minutes late after what Musk called a Distributed Denial of Service attack that supposedly kept users from joining. Sure, pal! That’s that towering innovation we’ve come to know from Elon. An X employee told The Verge they were 99 percent sure Elon was lying.
Musk and Trump’s batshit conversation prompted the United Auto Workers union to file federal labor charges against the two men for comments they made about labor rights after the pair of billionaires waxed fondly over how cool it is to fire striking workers, which as the union noted, is illegal. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called the remarks “disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
Meanwhile, AppHarvest, a now-bankrupt startup backed by wannabe veep, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) has come under scrutiny as workers allege “nightmare” conditions at the Kentucky-based company.
Everything this man touches turns to workplace violations.
President Biden said he’s attend Trump’s inauguration, if Trump wins the election. Biden quipped: “I have good manners, not like him.
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