Vice President Kamala Harris veered to the center on energy last week, disavowing her support for banning fracking but offering few details on the future role she sees for oil and gas.
Enter Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor and Harris’ potential running mate. He’s widely seen as having navigated a middle path in a state that is divided on fossil fuel issues.
“Shapiro has found a way to play good cop and bad cop,” said Barry Rabe, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan.
That balance could be helpful for Harris as she moves to cover what appears to be a liability in a major gas-producing swing state seen by both parties as key to winning the presidential election in November. Shapiro sits high on the short list of potential vice presidents for Harris as she seeks to follow President Joe Biden and keep former President Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
In fact, Harris plans to campaign with her new running mate — whomever that is — starting next Tuesday in Philadelphia.
But on the ground, the sharp split in Pennsylvania’s Democratic coalition remains. Organized labor is happy with his outreach to energy companies as governor. However, some of the environmentalists who’d cheered his get-tough approach as attorney general feel betrayed.
It’s not clear what that might mean for a presidential contest. A track to the center by Democratic leaders isn’t enough to drive environmentalists into the Republican camp of Trump. But combined with other issues like Shapiro’s strong support for Israel, his centrist approach could dampen enthusiasm among the liberal constituencies energized by Harris’ rise.
Shapiro developed his centrist reputation on gas drilling as attorney general by prosecuting the excesses and misdeeds of natural gas drillers and pipeline builders without supporting a “ban” on fracking or anything that would sharply curtail companies that followed the rules.
That tracks pretty well with public opinion in Pennsylvania, said Christopher Borick, a pollster and political science professor at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College. People in the state have never been receptive to anyone calling for a ban on fracking, he said. But regulating and taxing gas production has generally been popular.
“Prosecuting fracking’s problems is pretty popular,“ Borick said. “It’s a delicate dance.”
Environmentalists cheered Shapiro’s entry in the race, seeing him as someone who would be tougher than former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, who in turn was far less friendly to drilling than his Republican predecessor, Tom Corbett.
As governor, Shapiro has embraced the state’s role as an energy powerhouse. He formed a high-profile alliance with a big driller and steered the state out of a regional cap-and-trade program. That has unions and other allies of the fossil fuel industry pretty satisfied.
Beyond that, Shapiro, 51, has aggressively sought money offered by the Biden administration from its 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, including money for oil and gas well plugging, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act climate plan. He was elected Pennsylvania’s governor in 2023.
The middle path is certainly at the heart of Shapiro’s pitch on energy. In an emailed statement, Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder touted the governor’s work to bring together “industry, union, and environmental leaders.”
Harris’ campaign didn’t provide a comment to POLITICO’s E&E News about the timing of a vice presidential pick or whether Shapiro may be chosen to be on this year’s Democratic ticket.
But what Shapiro and his allies might see as balance, some of his former supporters in the environmental community see as a bait and switch.
“We had so much hope, and now we feel like we have nothing to lose, really, in terms of speaking out, because we don’t have any kind of seat at the table,” said Shannon Smith, executive director of FracTracker Alliance, a Pennsylvania-based watchdog group.
In January, leaders from 10 green groups sent Shapiro a seven-page letter listing complaints about his handling of environmental issues.
“I can’t think of any environmental group that is not disappointed with him,” Smith said.
‘Face the facts’
Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing, a process that’s been used for decades in many types of oil and gas production. But in politics, it serves as a nickname for the horizontal drilling into deep shale formations that has driven the oil and gas boom of recent years in Pennsylvania and other parts of the country.
During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris said in a televised forum, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Biden was not in favor, and she took on his position when she became his running mate.
It didn’t take long after Biden’s withdrawal from the race for Trump to slam her position. She responded last weekend calling it one of Trump’s “false claims.” Harris did not elaborate her position, but her campaign responded to the criticism by saying the Biden administration created 300,000 energy jobs and stressed the United States now has “the highest ever domestic energy production.”
Notably, the president cannot ban fracking or drilling unilaterally. It would require an act of Congress, which has never shown interest.
As governor, one of Shapiro’s biggest moves on fracking was an alliance with CNX Resources, a major driller based in the Pittsburgh area with more than 4,400 wells in the Appalachian region. Shapiro’s administration joined the company in a project to gather more information about pollution from several of the company’s drilling sites. CNX and Shapiro have promoted it as “radical transparency.”
The CNX partnership does have support among some more centrist environmental organizations. John Walliser, senior vice president of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, said it’s “a good start, but only a good start.” By contrast, CNX CEO Nick Deiuliis called it “landmark” and lambasted criticism of it as “The New Line of Slander.”
But to greens like FracTracker’s Smith, it’s a radical sellout. To them, it’s not just making nice with a gas company with a history of environmental violations, but a sign that Shapiro is backing off the proposals that emerged from his high-profile grand jury investigation into the state’s handling of fracking.
As one example, the grand jury report Shapiro rolled out in 2020 as attorney general recommended a 2,500-foot setback, or buffer zone, between gas production wells and homes. As part of the agreement with Shapiro, CNX agreed to a 600-foot setback.
“When it comes to fracking, Pennsylvania failed,” Shapiro said in a news release in June 2020 when he announced the grand jury report. “Now it’s time to face the facts, and do what we can to protect the people of this commonwealth.”
That grand jury report was rolled out on the heels of criminal charges he brought against two gas producers accused in high-profile environmental controversies in the state. In 2021, Shapiro brought charges against the developer of a pipeline with repeated environmental violations as it laid pipe through the state.
Supporters of fracking in organized labor saw some of the proposals to come from those investigations, including the 2,500-foot setback, as potentially deadly for gas production, said Jeff Nobers, executive director of the Builders Guild of Western Pennsylvania.
But union leaders were not as worried as corporate leaders, Nobers said, seeing it as a way for Shapiro to survive the Democratic primary process.
“It appeased, maybe not the majority, but a substantial number of people who would rather not use fossil fuels at all,” said Nobers, whose group represents a coalition of unions representing 60,000 workers and contractors in construction trades.
Union leaders, he said, “had more opportunities to have direct conversations. So I think they felt a little less threatened by that stuff.”
Since taking office, Nobers said, Shapiro has put the state on the right track with improved economic development.
“He still generally enjoys the support of labor period, as best I can see,” Nobers said. “If you can’t supply affordable energy for these companies, they’re not going to come here.”
Bye, RGGI
Beyond fracking, Shapiro has pushed for Pennsylvania to get 35 percent of its electricity by 2035 from “clean” energy sources like renewables, small modular reactors and fusion. He asked state lawmakers to create a framework for carbon capture, utilization and storage and pushed for incentives to help customers pay their utility bills.
“Governor Shapiro is an all-of-the-above energy Governor and he is taking action to invest in affordable and reliable renewable energy while continuing to support the key energy resources that have helped Pennsylvania become the leader it is today,” Bonder, Shapiro’s spokesperson, said in his statement.
In his 2022 run for governor, Shapiro made it clear that he was skeptical of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in the Northeast.
Wolf, Shapiro’s Democratic predecessor, had entered into the program.
In office, Shapiro proposed replacing RGGI, which has been blocked by a court, with a legislative proposal for a new “cap-and-invest” program for reducing climate-damaging emissions from the power sector.
Navigating the divide between labor and the environmental community is tricky for Democrats seeking to win statewide in Pennsylvania, as one of the swingiest of the swing states. The state has liberal constituencies in its big cities and vast swaths of suburbanites hostile to big industrial projects in their neighborhoods.
But it has a proud union tradition and — as the No. 2 U.S. producer of natural gas after Texas — has one of the biggest energy sectors of the swing states.
The drilling crews that sink wells in the ground are not unionized, but many of the downstream jobs on pipelines and in processing plants are done by union workers. That has given the drilling industry powerful allies within the Democratic coalition.
And it’s part of what the gas companies themselves call a win-win for the state.
“Natural gas bridges political divides in Pennsylvania because the industry provides universally supported benefits: quality jobs, energy cost savings, and environmental advancement,” David Callahan, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a trade group representing major shale drillers, said in an emailed statement. “There should be no debate about the essential role of responsible natural gas development and use.”
There is considerable debate about that role, but Republicans in Pennsylvania generally agree with the win-win idea. Borick, the political science professor, said they’ve wholeheartedly embraced the shale gas drilling industry.
Still, he said, they’ve also been losing statewide elections in Pennsylvania pretty regularly since the last Republican governor, Corbett, was elected in 2010.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. The story has also been updated to reflect the correct status of the RGGI cap-and-trade program in Pennsylvania.
