No Stupid Questions

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.

this is one time I side with the NIMBY's.

fracking is awful and we need to kick the oil habit anyhow. it absolutely fucks up the local enviroment, and destroys the water table. the full name is literally hydraulic fracturing... because the process is basically taking something you can't normally get oil out of, pumping in a shit load of water until the bedrock shatters to fucking hell.

it lets you get to the oil, sure, but it also releases the oil (and all sorts of other shit, like gases) so that it gets into wells and everything else.

Basically the only people that are pro-fracking are the assholes that are perfectly okay fucking over every one else, and the assholes that take their money.

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.

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.

Many don’t. I don’t. I’m not gonna vote trump over it though.

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.

Because nothing matters if we lose the election and we can't win the election without PA.

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.

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.

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?

It's pretty cool how my family, who are in Kansas, said that they couldn't understand the risk I take, of earthquakes, living in the Bay Area, California. It's also pretty cool how they now have earthquakes because of fracking in Oklahoma. The world is awesome, lemme tell ya.

Sigh.

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.

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.

Money

The Democrats won't win an election while opposing fracking. O&G is far FAR too powerful to let that happen. If Harris stood firmly against fracking, then the opponent would win - be he (and it will be a he) Trump, Musk, or David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz.

No, I'm not exaggerating.

Democrats don’t support fracking. They say things so they think will help them win elections.