Has Harris joined the “all above” club? It seems so. (Video)

In one of the few significant policy exchanges during Tuesday night’s highly anticipated debate, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke in more detail about her approach to energy than in previous appearances. She also tried to explain a bit more about her shift on the fracking ban.

“My position is that we need to invest in diverse energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Harris said at one point, referring to green energy but also noting that she helped approve new fracking leases during the Biden administration after pushing for a ban in 2019.

All of this, which occurred during at least two exchanges during Tuesday’s showdown on ABC, could be described as adopting a sort of “all of the above” energy approach.

It was language clearly designed to appeal to moderate voters, and it was perhaps an example of Harris following debate advice from moderate figures like independent Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who had publicly advised her in the run-up to the election to focus on an inclusive, energetic message.

Harris’ continued evolution on this issue is crucial in Pennsylvania.

A debate took place Tuesday night in the commonwealth that could very well decide the next president and which is also one of the world’s largest producers of natural gas.

“Let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania,” Harris said at one point.

Whether Pennsylvanians will be convinced remains to be seen. But Harris’ comments come amid a heated exchange on the subject of energy with former President Donald Trump, who largely stuck to his repeated accusation that Harris would change her position again after the election.

“Fracking? She’s been against it for 12 years,” Trump said as Harris shook her head in denial. He added that she was a radical and that “if she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania would stop on day one.”

Trump also touted his own plans to increase energy production and lower energy prices.

The energy information came amid a wide-ranging debate that spanned topics including the economy, Israel and health care. But Harris has often shown herself able to deflect Trump from substantive criticism.

“They eat the dogs,” Trump said in one particularly memorable moment, echoing an evidence-free right-wing idea that Haitian immigrants eat pets in an Ohio town. “The people who came, they eat the cats,” Trump added before being checked by moderators.

An energy approach that has its roots in the 1970s

For decades, up until figures like Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, politicians of both parties often supported investment in virtually any form of energy they could get their hands on.

President Carter, for example, touted green energy and installed solar panels on the White House, but he also took steps that allowed for the expansion of more traditional energy exploration — including the development of hydraulic fracturing after he left office.

“This country needs an all-out strategy that develops every available source of American energy,” President Obama added in his 2012 State of the Union address.

But that approach has become less common in recent years, with Democrats often focusing on green energy and Republicans on traditional energy sources — and each side rejecting the other’s approach.

On Tuesday night in Philadelphia, the energy debate revolved around hydraulic fracturing, a process that involves pumping out oil and gas buried in rock. Environmentalists have long pointed out the environmental damage caused by the process and called for it to be stopped.

And Harris pushed to eliminate the practice altogether during her 2019 presidential campaign. She said at a CNN town hall that year: “There’s no question that I support banning fracking.”

But later in that same campaign, this time as vice presidential candidate in 2020, Harris began to change her mind and promised that presidential candidate Joe Biden would not ban fracking.

As a candidate in her own right for 2024, Harris discussed the issue Tuesday night in a way that signaled a gradual shift in focus toward clean energy, but with a reliance on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.

“We’ve invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy, while we’ve also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” Harris noted toward the end of the debate on the topic in response to a question about climate change.

It’s a message Biden has often avoided, and Harris has touted the rise in traditional energy production in recent years, with the United States now producing more oil than any other country in history.

During the debate, Trump also said he was a supporter of green energy sources, but he was quick to dismiss them and question their benefits in favor of returning to his accusation that Harris would be a radical if elected.

“Fossil fuels will be dead,” Trump said at one point. “We’ll go back to wind and solar, when it takes a whole desert to produce energy.”

Harris, as she did on many issues throughout the night in a debate that most observers said she came out on top, dodged Trump’s accusations and tried to deliver a moderate message aimed at swing voters.

On energy, this meant a promise to help domestic oil production as part of “an approach that recognizes that we cannot be overly dependent on foreign oil.”

Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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