Democrats to Trump: Here, you win
The other day at a Harrisburg press briefing, Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey highlighted one more way Democrats are angling to lose to Donald Trump in 2020.
“The top Democratic presidential candidates,” the senator said, “are competing with each other over who can do more harm to this tremendous source of economic growth and national security.”
He was talking about the surging natural gas industry and a possible ban on deep earth oil drilling by a future Democratic president that would effectively end that surge.
The senator then quoted an anonymous former national leader extolling the employment and foreign policy benefits of having a secure supply of natural gas literally at our feet.
“I don’t often agree with Barack Obama,” Toomey said, “but he was right. Natural gas has been a game changer for our country and for the commonwealth. It’s hard to exaggerate how good the story is for Pennsylvania.”
Toomey noted that Pennsylvania ranks second nationally to Texas in natural gas production. The U.S. is slated soon to become the world’s third largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, behind Australia and Qatar.
With his statement, Toomey was aiming a sharply-pointed arrow at the exposed positions of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris, each of whom has proposed to ban natural gas fracking, the admittedly less than pristine method used to extract the jewel of U.S. energy self-sufficiency from the bowels of the earth.
The day before his Harrisburg appearance, Toomey introduced a resolution in the Senate that would put that body on record: no president has the executive authority to stop fracking.
In Harrisburg, surrounded by business types, he said he found it “essential to push back on some of these ideas” currently in vogue on the left in the Democratic party.
Toomey speculated that a future Democratic chief executive might declare a national emergency to get her way on fracking. His goal, with the resolution, he said, was to “diminish the threat from some of our Democratic friends.”
Toomey has Democratic “friends?” Really? His objective here is political: to shine a spotlight bright enough for every state resident, maybe especially residents in the southwest corner of the state, to see the harm a Democratic president elected in November 2020 might do by way of a fracking ban.
Of course, Democrats have only themselves to blame for Toomey’s divisive mischief-making. The Obama administration took the view that natural gas was a “bridge” fuel for the United States: with climate change hanging over our heads, we were making our way from coal to the energy renewables wind and solar.
In the two plus years since the end of the Obama administration, left-leaning Democrats have moved to embrace the view of the Sierra Club’s Ariel Hayes, who has called fracking “a bridge to climate disaster.”
R.L. Miller, of the advocacy group Climate Hawks Vote, speaking to E&E (Energy and Environmental) News in July 2018, said that Democratic progressives view “the shift from fossil fuel dependence as being the equivalent to universal health care…. That’s the direction of the party.”
As Scott Waldman of E&E News stated at the time, “Democratic positioning on fracking stands to be a thorny climate issue.”
It’s not that all Democrats are onboard with a fracking ban. Gov. Tom Wolf recently told KDKA’s Jon Delano, “We need to get to that solar future, wind future as quickly as possible. How do we do that? It’s not by banning fracking.”
Democratic congressman Conor Lamb is not for a ban. Why? Eliza Griswold of The New Yorker followed Lamb while he was campaigning in Waynesburg in March 2018. She observed, “Deep drilling for natural gas has created revenue that has helped to keep hotels and diners and chainsaw shops … afloat” in Waynesburg and elsewhere in our part of the world.
“To shut down the shale industry, yeah, that would probably not be a good thing for the economy,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell told Congress last week.
Putting a stop to fracking would “vaporize the oil and gas boom in the United States,” ending both jobs and U.S. energy independence, energy analyst Bob McNally told CNN.
As for Toomey, he might well have called his Senate resolution “the get Elizabeth Warren bill.” In September, Sen. Warren, currently riding high in the polls, said she would end fracking on day one of her presidency.
It’s the third leg of the trifecta for the Massachusetts lawmaker and presidential candidate. First guns. Second, the threat to end private health insurance. And now, a fracking ban.
With a platform like that, the prospect of cutting into Donald Trump’s winning 2016 margin in Western Pennsylvania would be gone. And it might very well be true: as Western Pennsylvania goes, so goes the state.
Goodbye fracking, hello Donald Trump for another four years.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.