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Fact Check: Would Biden ban fracking as Trump claims? No.

Bottom line: Biden would allow most fracking to continue unimpeded. He would stop new fracking on federal land, which accounts for only about 10% of the industry.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused rival Joe Biden of seeking to destroy the oil and gas industry — and, specifically, ban fracking.

In a July 29 campaign speech in West Texas, Trump told oil executives and workers in Midland that if Biden wins, 2 million energy jobs would disappear overnight.

“I don’t think Biden is going to do too well in Texas,” Trump said. “He’s already written it off. It’s gone. No fracking. That’s part of his platform.”

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The former vice president has repeatedly disputed the claim that he would put an end to fracking.

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“I am not banning fracking,” he insisted Monday during a speech in Pittsburgh. “No matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me.”

Trump and his campaign have made it a central line of attack, and it was a key part of Vice President Mike Pence’s speech at the Republican National Convention last week.

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Pence said Biden would “abolish fossil fuels, end fracking, and impose a regime of climate change regulations that would drastically increase the cost of living for working families.”

Texas is the top producer of crude oil and natural gas in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and during Trump’s administration there hasn’t been significant regulatory pressure on the industry.

Although it is a controversial practice, fracking — a process of extracting oil and gas by forcing liquid into rock deep below the surface — made the United States an energy powerhouse in the past 15 years. Environmentalists and people who live near fracking sites complain the process contributes to water pollution, the release of toxic chemicals and local earthquakes.

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A study released in December by the U.S.Chamber of Commerce Global Energy Institute concluded that a ban on fracking would be “catastrophic” for the economy, and 3 million jobs would be lost in Texas alone. But the chamber did not assert that Biden has called for that.

The Basis for Trump’s claim

For evidence that Biden wants to ban fracking, the Trump campaign cites comments he made during the Democratic primary debates.

“Joe Biden cannot hide from his own words,” Trump spokesperson Samantha Cotten said in a statement. “Any Democrat who runs on an anti-energy platform in the Lone Star State will undoubtedly be rejected at the ballot box.”

In a July 2019 CNN debate, when Biden was asked if there was a place for fossil fuels in his administration, he said: “No, we would work it out. Make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for … any fossil fuel.”

In a March 2020 debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said, “I’m talking about stopping fracking as soon as we possibly can. I’m talking about telling the fossil fuel industry that they are going to stop destroying this planet — no ifs, buts and maybes about it.”

“So am I,” Biden said. “No more — no new fracking.”

Following the debate, Biden’s campaign clarified that his administration would not allow new fracking on federal lands and waters, but would not seek to halt further fracking anywhere else.

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“Joe Biden will not ban fracking,” said Tariq Thowfeek, Texas communications director for the Biden campaign. “Unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden will protect our natural resources, invest in our energy future, and create millions of renewable energy jobs.”

Only about 10% of fracking is done on federal lands, but more than 100,000 jobs are associated with energy development on federal lands, which indirectly support another 280,000 jobs, according to a 2016 study by the chamber.

A freeze on new federal leases for fracking would cost 73,000 jobs over the following 15 years, according to that study, plus 195,000 indirect jobs — jobs that don’t exist but won’t be created.

While fracking on private land would be continued under Biden, his policies could still hurt the fracking industry, said Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist, because his energy policy’s requirements for lower carbon emissions would shift power generation away from fossil fuels, and tighter environmental regulations would raise the cost of fracking.

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However, some experts caution that there may already be job losses in the future due to an abundance of fossil fuels and lowering demand.

The federal government foresees a 17% increase in U.S. oil and gas production over the next decade. But with most of the industrial world committed to reducing demand for fossil fuel under the Paris Climate Agreement — which President Barack Obama signed and Trump pulled out of — worldwide demand is likely to fall. That would leave a glut of U.S. production. And because fracking is among the more costly methods for extracting energy, producers would likely pull back on fracking as demand ebbs.

Biden and the Green New Deal

Biden has called climate change one of four crises the country faces, on par with the pandemic, the economy and civil rights.

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His plan for a clean energy revolution to address the problem of harmful greenhouse gas emissions uses the Green New Deal as a framework to wean the country off of fossil fuels over several decades, shifting toward renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, in order to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The Green New Deal is a proposed package of legislation by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, two of the Democratic Party’s most liberal members, that would address climate change and economic inequality by having the federal government fund a “10-year mobilization” that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero.

Almost all Republicans oppose the proposal, arguing that it requires too much federal control and could put at risk the economies of states responsible for most of the nation’s oil and gas production, notably Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Proponents of the Green New Deal say it could grow the economy and create jobs, regardless of what happens to fracking and the fossil fuel industry, Erickson said.

The Green New Deal itself does not explicitly call for the end of fracking. But Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have both introduced legislation that would ban fracking by 2025.

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Biden is trying to “thread the needle” between progressives who want to see the Green New Deal and voters in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania who rely on the fossil fuel industry, Jones said.

But, he added, Biden’s clean energy policies would adversely affect the oil and gas industry — though Biden and others who support the shift away from fossil fuels argue that the new technologies will create new jobs.

“He’s not going to be a Bernie Sanders,” Jones said. “He is not going to ban fracking on his first day in office. … But if you’re in the fracking industry, you have to look at the Biden administration with some trepidation that things are going to get worse than they were under Donald Trump.”