The top Democrat presidential candidates for 2020 participated in a marathon town hall event on climate change for CNN on Wednesday, and if there was only one clear takeaway from the environmentalist extremism offered up by the several candidates it was that all-out war has been declared by the left against the fossil fuel industry.
Several of the contenders, including California Sen. Kamala Harris, called for a complete ban on hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, which is the latest, safest, and most technologically-advanced method for retrieving oil and natural gas from beneath the surface of the earth.
What seemed to have been ignored at that town hall, however, was the notion that Harris’ preferred ban on fracking would play right into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his quest for dominance in the global energy market.
Harris calls for fracking, offshore drilling ban
In an op-ed penned by Tom Rogan for the Washington Examiner, it was noted that for all of the talk from Democrats over the past three years about how terrible Russia and Putin are, the top Democratic candidates were, in essence, offering up a huge geopolitical win to Putin with their vows to hamstring and dismantle America’s booming energy industry.
With regard to Harris, a questioner from the CNN audience falsely asserted that fracking was incredibly dangerous and destructive to the environment and even people’s lives, despite the fact that fracking has been proven safe and is thought to have significantly reduced U.S. carbon emissions.
Apparently also ignorant of those facts, Harris, when asked if she would ban the fracking drilling technique, replied, “There’s no question that I’m in favor of a ban on fracking.”
Harris even went one step further and proposed a ban on all offshore drilling for oil. With no fracking or offshore drilling, the U.S. would quickly lose its place as the dominant producer of energy worldwide — a development that would leave Putin smiling broadly.
Ceding dominance to Russia
As things stand now, the U.S. produces vast amounts of oil and natural gas through offshore drilling and fracking, so much so that energy and oil prices have stabilized at a low enough level to prevent Russia — which really has no other export of significance other than energy — from generating profit, much less national wealth and power, from its sole exportable good.
Indeed, the plethora of relatively cheap fossil fuel-derived energy that is now exported from the U.S. to all parts of the world has served to undermine Russia’s agenda of gaining dominance over the rest of Europe by making them dependent on the more expensive Russian supply of energy.
However, were Harris or the other Democrats calling for a ban on fracking and offshore drilling to succeed in their economy-wrecking plans, Europe, particularly, would have nowhere else to turn except for Russia to meet its extensive energy needs.
Is she a Putin puppet?
Aside from Harris’ vow to utterly destroy America’s profitable and vital energy sector — to the great benefit of Putin and Russia — the senator also played right into Putin’s hands by stating her opposition to maintaining and expanding the U.S. nuclear deterrent against Russia, a nation that has shown no qualms about enlarging and improving upon its own nuclear arsenal in recent years.
Between her anti-American stance on energy production and on nuclear deterrence, it is only fair to ask the same question Democrats have been asking for the past couple of years in a slightly different manner — is Harris a Putin puppet doing the bidding of Russia at the expense of American interests? And if so, should such an apparent ally of Putin and Russian oligarchs be placed in charge of this great country?
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