Why is Kamala Harris hiding her energy agenda from voters?

Almost nothing could be more important to the future of American workers than access to affordable energy. That’s why Vice President Kamala Harris needs to be clear about her energy policy.

Giving in to the climate change zealots currently in power in the White House under Biden and Harris will skyrocket the cost of electricity and limit our country’s ability to compete in future industries like artificial intelligence.

Harris has changed her positions on many issues, but none have been as significant as her stance on energy and fracking.

While she promised to ban fracking in 2019, her campaign says she has changed her mind. She has not explained why she changed her mind. She doesn’t have to do that; we know she needs to win Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to win the election, and fracking is a big source of jobs and revenue in the Keystone State. So Harris is playing nice and not threatening to put some 400,000 workers out of work.

Conservatives don’t believe Harris. Apparently, neither do progressives. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a Green New Deal enthusiast, recently said, “On climate, on abortion, on race, on LGBTQ, we absolutely agree on her agenda.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) said that by backing away from many of her progressive positions, Harris was simply “doing what she thought was right to win the election.”

In her debate with Donald Trump, Harris boasted about the record oil production that has come under the Biden-Harris administration. And it’s true: Production recently reached a new peak of 13.2 million barrels per day, finally surpassing the peak of 13 million barrels per day recorded when Trump was president. But that achievement is despite her and her boss’s efforts, not because of them.

We should be producing far more oil than we currently do, but the Biden-Harris White House has done everything possible to stifle oilfield activity, including putting millions of acres on hold in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, raising royalties for production on federal lands and slowly rolling out drilling permits. Industry experts say the resources that are currently unavailable in Alaska alone could boost U.S. production by as much as 1 million barrels per day.

Cutting fossil fuel production to reduce emissions is stupid. Natural gas production (60 percent of which comes from fracking) has displaced coal as a larger part of our energy mix, allowing the United States to cut emissions when many other developed countries have not.

It’s also stupid because it comes at a time when the government is pushing the country hard toward electrification, trying to get consumers to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles, steering consumers toward electric appliances, and so on. Climate activists want the country to meet our electricity needs with renewable energy, but it’s not happening fast enough.

Accidents and a weak economy have all but shut down the offshore wind industry, while activists are blocking construction of new transmission projects that would connect renewable energy to consumers. The result is overloaded and increasingly fragile electric grids and rising electricity costs. The cost of electricity barely budged under Trump; it’s risen more than 20 percent under Biden.

The Biden-Harris energy policy has been tough on consumers, but the stakes are about to get much higher. Among the most exciting and promising opportunities for innovation and investment are AI and cryptocurrencies, which both require huge amounts of electricity. A year ago, the International Energy Agency calculated that data centers and data networks worldwide already account for 1 to 1.5 percent of total electricity consumption. As AI rapidly escalates, the growth in demand will become staggering.

Last October, an article in Scientific American quoted researcher Alex de Vries who said, “Continuing current trends in AI capacity and adoption is expected to result in NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. Those 1.5 million servers, operating at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity per year—more than many small countries use in a year.”

In a forecast published in January this year, the IEA predicted that global electricity consumption by data centers, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies in 2026 will likely be more than twice that in 2022, an amount “roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan.”

Blackstone CEO Steve Schwartzman told investors on an earnings conference call this summer that the company had committed $70 billion to data centers. He also said, “The need to power these data centers is a major contributor to the expected 40 percent increase in U.S. electricity demand over the next decade, compared with minimal growth over the past decade.”

Businesses in these industries will undoubtedly discover ways to reduce energy consumption, but for now, cheap electricity is the most important thing.

Schwartzman added that “approximately $1 trillion is currently expected to be invested in the United States to build and operate new data centers over the next five years, with another $1 trillion expected to be invested outside the United States.”

One of the most popular spending destinations here in the U.S. is Virginia. Why? Partly because electricity costs in the state are 28 percent lower than the national average.

Because of its abundance of cheap fossil fuels, the United States has always enjoyed a competitive advantage in the form of lower energy costs. That advantage remains. Electricity costs in the U.S. averaged 16 cents per kilowatt-hour last year, compared with 47 cents in Ireland, 40 cents in Germany and the U.K., and 28 cents in France.

Kamala Harris could eliminate that advantage by pursuing expensive renewable energy and making it even harder to produce oil and gas in the U.S. Right now, renewables only account for about 21 percent of our total electricity production, while natural gas provides about 43 percent. We will continue to rely on oil and natural gas for the foreseeable future.

Kamala Harris needs to clarify her energy platform. Will she allow climate-obsessed elites to price us out of the global competition for the industries of the future? Voters deserve to know.

Liz Peek is a former partner of the large Wall Street firm, Wertheim and Company.

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