AEI Scholar Benjamin Zycher contributed to the Dispatch’s Symposium titled Regulatory Policy Experts: Both Harris and Trump Threaten Constraints on Innovation, as a group of experts outlined the many ways in which either potential administration’s understanding of how regulation of technology can impede innovation and threaten America’s dominance in that sector. Below is a section from Benjamin Zycher’s contribution.
For very different reasons, the policy outlook for U.S. fossil energy production over the next four years bodes ill given either a Kamala Harris or Donald Trump presidency.
Harris first: Notwithstanding her abandonment of a “ban” on fracking, Harris cannot reverse her long-standing support for climate policies and the preposterous net-zero greenhouse gas emissions goals of the Biden administration. Were she to endorse a substantial expansion of U.S. fossil energy production, her political coalition would be torn apart—the left-wing environmentalists would not stand for it—and the one constant in Harris’ entire political career is a firm determination never to anger the various components of leftist progressivism. Perhaps more to the point: Harris is a true believer in the climate “crisis” and “existential threat” balderdash, and it is naive to believe that she will abandon it.
Accordingly, Harris will unleash the regulators, the net effect of which will be a severe system of explicit and implicit constraints on domestic fossil energy investment and output. Ever-greater subsidies for wind and solar power, expanded by bureaucratic “interpretation” beyond the supposed limits imposed by actual legislative language, will create increasing competitive disadvantages for oil and natural gas production. The restrictions on methane emissions from wellhead operations are expensive and subject to constant tightening, in particular as the bureaucracy justifies such stricter limits on the basis of ever-higher, more artificial, and deeply politicized assumptions about the future economic harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions.