Former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance hammered Vice President Kamala Harris on her energy policies Monday during stops in Pennsylvania where they slammed her views on fossil fuel production and power plant regulations.
As the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago on Monday, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. Vance, spoke at separate events in Pennsylvania — a critical swing state — where the GOP candidates criticized Harris on energy policies and promised a drastically different approach if they win in November.
At an appearance in York, Pennsylvania, Trump promised to “unlock American energy,” slash regulations, and broadly repeal the policies put into place by President Joe Biden and Harris.
Trump accused Harris of pursuing a “war on American energy,” and called her a “non-fracker,” referring to her previous support for a nationwide ban on fracking. The vice president’s campaign said in July that she does not support a fracking ban.
If Harris is elected, Trump said, “there will be no fracking” in Pennsylvania “or anywhere else.” He promised that if he retakes the White House, a top priority will be to “cut the cost of energy in half within the first 12 months of taking office.”
Trump took aim at the Biden administration’s power plant regulations.
Harris is on “a regulatory jihad to shut down power plants all across America,” Trump said, adding he would “end the anti-American energy crusade and terminate Kamala’s so-called Power Plant rule. It’s a disaster for our country.”
The rhetoric isn’t surprising from Trump, who has frequently assailed Biden and Harris for their energy policies and pledged to torpedo their regulations. But the focus on specific energy and environmental policies in Pennsylvania as the race heats up signals the Trump campaign hopes to sway voters on that issue in the pivotal swing state.
At Vance’s speech in Philadelphia, he struck a similar tone and promised to roll back regulations that get in the way of oil and gas production and make the United States “energy dominant.”
“We are, first of all, going to unleash Pennsylvania energy workers. We are going to drill, baby, drill,” Vance told supporters and journalists. “We are going to stop buying energy from tinpot dictators all over the world who hate this country. We’re going to start buying it from our own land, from our own people, from our own workers. And that’s going to start on Day 1 of the Trump presidency.”
Vance brought up a regulation he said he just read about that would “shut down a ton of American power plants.”
“Who’s going to benefit from that? The Chinese,” he said. “Now they say they care about our environment. But if you’re manufacturing more and more in China, the dirtiest economy in the world, you’re not benefiting the environment. You’re not benefiting American workers.”
While Vance claimed to have read “just today” about the power plant regulation, he appears to have known about it previously.
He wrote a letter in September 2023 to EPA Administrator Michael Regan objecting to the then-proposed power plant rule as “unworkable” and a danger to the nation’s industrial base, and in June, he signed on as a co-sponsor to West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s Congressional Review Act resolution that seeks to overturn it.
Vance also published an opinion piece on energy policy in The Wall Street Journal on Monday to slam Harris.
“There is no more fundamental issue in this campaign: Kamala Harris cares more about climate change than about inflation. She prefers solar panels and wind turbines to American jobs,” he wrote. “Her policies make the environment worse while turning millions of Americans into paupers — begging their government for help with high energy bills rather than standing on their own two feet.”
