Rep. Chip Roy: Biden Would Cripple American Energy

September 9, 2020

This morning, Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote an op-ed in Fox Business with a very simple message: Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) would dismantle America’s energy industry. Harris has always been very clear in her mission to ban fracking, but Biden has flip-flopped throughout his campaign trail.

“I am not banning fracking… no matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me,” Biden said confidently on August 31 to supporters in Pittsburgh. But don’t let him fool you.

During a primary debate in March against Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., when his audience was not Western Pennsylvania, Biden agreed with Sanders’s fracking ban legislation. “No more – no new fracking,” Biden chirped.

Rep. Roy considers, though, why Biden would backpedal from his initial statements. He concludes, as do many other Americans who see through this transparent maneuver, that Biden is simply shifting his messaging to appease swing states.

Western Pennsylvania is not unique, as the oil and gas industry directly employed 428,234 Texans in 2019. Those numbers don’t account for the indirect employment attributable to oil and gas operations, which PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated at 10.3 million U.S. jobs in 2015.

All of these jobs would be sacrificed in the name of baseless talking points aimed at the Bernie/AOC voters, too. According to Baker Hughes, an energy technology company, nearly 90 percent of all new oil and gas wells drilled today are horizontal, fracked wells – you cannot shut this down without painful geopolitical and economic consequences. For the sake of Americans across the country, particularly as we try and recover from Covid-19’s economic fallout, we cannot destroy a recently-flourishing industry.

We are less dependent now on Middle Eastern and Russian oil and now lead the world in oil and gas production. And even while accomplishing this, since 2005 no country in the world has reduced their CO2 emissions more than the United States, primarily driven by fracked natural gas used in electricity production.

In addition to these results, oil and gas production due to the fracking revolution is saving American families a combined $203 billion annually, or around $2,500 per family. These are savings that Americans need now more than ever, and Biden understands that he can’t be transparent about his plans to take them away. Hopefully, voters will see through his pandering just as Rep. Roy does.