Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee this month, Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to speak on a topic that’s bedeviled President Joe Biden throughout his term: drilling for oil and gas on public lands.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, don’t have a public road map for the nation’s oil program as she prepares to address the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night in Chicago. That program is responsible for roughly one out of every four barrels of crude produced in the U.S.
The Harris campaign’s apparent reticence to adopt the anti-drilling approach that characterized the Biden era leaves observers to wonder how a Harris administration might reshape drilling on federal lands and in U.S. oceans, if at all. Biden committed to ending new drilling on federal property in his 2020 campaign for president, only to be hounded for not achieving that.
Policy experts suggest that Harris and Walz — despite their reputations for being more politically progressive than Biden — could follow his template on oil and gas on federal lands. That includes limiting oil leasing to shrink the oil program gradually, as well as leaning into electrification of cars and buildings and expanding renewables to reduce demand for oil.
