September 12, 2024 | 9:14 AM

Former President Donald Trump claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris would ban fracking if she is elected president, which she wouldn’t have the power to do.

• Susan Phillips
  
  

  Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people’s every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan’s coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania’s natural gas rush called “The Shale Game.” She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

FILE – Work continues at a shale gas well drilling site in St. Mary’s, Pa., March 12, 2020. Facing the need to win Pennsylvania, Vice President Kamala Harris has sworn off any prior assertion that she opposed fracking. But that hasn’t stopped Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump from wielding her now-abandoned position as to win over working-class voters in the key battleground state where the industry means jobs. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File)

Fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania took up significant airtime during the presidential debate Tuesday night at the National Constitution Center in Old City, especially when you consider how little influence a president has when it comes to drilling for oil and gas in the state.

In such a tight presidential race, Pennsylvania will be a hard-fought swing state. So, of course, we have to talk about fracking.

Former President Donald Trump is all for it, and at Tuesday’s debate, he claimed Vice President Kamala Harris is not.

“And she will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania. If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said.

There’s a big problem with Trump’s statement because a president can’t “ban fracking” in Pennsylvania, only an act of Congress will accomplish that.

When you hear talk about banning fracking by a president – that is limited to federal land. And the state has virtually no federal land to frack. The Allegheny National Forest, in the north central part of the state, is the only place where federal leases exist, and they span about 850 acres.

The vast majority of leases are on private land, something a president cannot touch. The state also leases land to oil and gas development – in 2020 those leases included about 250,000 acres.

Harris, who favored a fracking ban when she first ran for president back in 2019, changed her position once she joined President Joe Biden as his vice-presidential running mate.

“Let’s talk about fracking because we are here in Pennsylvania,” she said. “I made that very clear in 2020.  I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States.”

To be clear, a vice president can’t ban fracking on any private or state-owned land in Pennsylvania either.

Vice President Harris did say correctly that oil and gas development has increased over the past four years under President Biden.

In January, E&E News reported that federal leases for oil and gas development also increased under Biden.

And while most voters don’t make their presidential decisions based on fracking, it’s one of those issues where you’re either for it or against it. It’s what’s known as a wedge issue, which Trump is using to define himself in contrast to Harris, as he did in the 2020 race against Biden. This will likely continue despite both parties’ support for fracking, and the fact that it’s, again, not something a president can do much about in Pennsylvania even if they wanted to.

A collection of interviews, photos, and music videos, featuring local musicians who have stopped by the WITF performance studio to share a little discussion and sound. Produced by WITF’s Joe Ulrich.

President Biden posed with a crowd of children decked out in pro-Donald Trump attire in an awkward photo op at a Pennsylvania firehouse on Wednesday.

The 81-year-old president looked uncomfortable as he stood in the middle of about 16 youngsters — many donning shirts in support of Trump — during a visit to a Shanksville firehouse to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. 

The photo, shared on X by conservator influencer Benny Johnson, shows several of the kids wearing shirts with Trump’s face plastered on the front, including one with the former commander in chief in Terminator sunglasses with “I’ll be back” written on it. 

One less-than-enthused teen stood far off to Biden’s left and did not crack a smile.

Biden brought beer and pizza to the firehouse following a wreath-laying ceremony at the memorial for United Airlines Flight 93, which was hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists and crashed in rural Pennsylvania rather than hitting its intended target after passengers stormed the cockpit.

While at the firehouse, a man handed the president his red “Trump 2024″ hat, which Biden briefly put on his head before handing it back with a grin.

Shanksville, located in Somerset County in central Pennsylvania, is a deep-red part of the battleground state where more than 77% of voters backed Trump in the 2020 election.

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Fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania took up significant airtime during the presidential debate Tuesday night at the National Constitution Center in Old City, especially when you consider how little influence a president has when it comes to drilling for oil and gas in the state.

In such a tight presidential race, Pennsylvania will be a hard-fought swing state. So, of course, we have to talk about fracking.

Former President Donald Trump is all for it, and at Tuesday’s debate, he claimed Vice President Kamala Harris is not.

“And she will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania. If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said.

There’s a big problem with Trump’s statement because a president can’t “ban fracking” in Pennsylvania, only an act of Congress will accomplish that.

When you hear talk about banning fracking by a president – that is limited to federal land. And the state has virtually no federal land to frack. The Allegheny National Forest, in the north central part of the state, is the only place where federal leases exist, and they span about 850 acres.

The vast majority of leases are on private land, something a president cannot touch. The state also leases land to oil and gas development – in 2020 those leases included about 250,000 acres.