Banning fracking

What would be the effect of a US president banning fracking? Alex Epstein has the answer:

Banning fracking would have been one of the most harmful policies in US history. It would have destroyed 60% of our oil production and 75% of our natural gas production.

Why is that important?

Fracking is very likely the single most beneficial technological development of the last 25 years. By extracting cheap, abundant oil and natural gas from once useless rock, it has made energy far cheaper than it would otherwise be.

The availability of food is highly determined by the cost of oil, which powers crucial machinery, and gas, which is the basis of the fertilizer that allows us to feed 8 billion people. Thanks to fracking, the world is far better fed than it would otherwise be.

Given how life-giving fracking is to humanity and how essential it is to the prosperity and security of the US, any politician who has ever suggested banning fracking should be considered an energy menace until and unless they issue a deeply reflective apology.

So does any US presidential candidate want to ban fracking? Hard to know. But there's at least one who did: 

Kamala Harris ... in 2019 said, “There is no question I am in favour of banning fracking,” [and] now tells voters in fracking-dependent states like Pennsylvania that she is no longer wants to ban fracking.

Should we believe her?

They shouldn’t believe her, since Harris’s net-zero agenda requires banning fracking. ... And far from questioning the anti-fossil-fuel, “net zero” agenda, she has remained 100% committed to it.

Which means she’s an enemy of not just fracking but all fossil fuel use.

The guiding energy goal of Biden/Harris is “net zero by 2050”—rapidly banning activities that add CO2 to the atmosphere.

Since there’s no scalable way to capture CO2, burning fossil fuels necessarily means more CO2.

Given that “net zero by 2050” requires banning virtually all fossil fuel activity, the whole conversation about whether Kamala Harris wants to ban fracking is absurd.

You can’t be for fracking and for net-zero anymore than you can be for penicillin and for banning all antibiotics.

So, what about the other candidate? Where exactly does Trump stand?

Frankly, who the hell could know.