The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
Biden attacked in swing state for fracking stance
Ina late gambit to win the battleground state of Pennsylvania, US president Donald Trump and his Republican allies have intensified attacks on Joe Biden over fracking.
Mr Trump hopes to drive a wedge between the former vice-president and the white, working class voters tied to the state’s booming natural gas industry.
That assault is playing out in a barrage of TV adverts and conservative and right- wing websites, and is repeated at every Trump rally in the state.
It relies on a series of confusing statements from the former vice-president – including remarks on the oil industry from last week’s televised debate – to claim he intends to “ban” or end national gas extraction, although that is not the Democrats’ official position.
Mr Trump’s fracking strategy comes as polls show he is struggling to over take Mr Biden in Pennsylvania and in need of a boost from the voters who helped him to a narrow victory in the swing state in 2016.
It also aims to snap the tightrope that Mr Biden is walking between the Democratic Party’s left wing, which is hostile to fossil fuels, and its bedrock blue-collar union base that is building an expanding network of gas pipelines, power plants and processing facilities in Pennsylvania.
Mr Biden’s climate change plan aims to reach net- zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and does not involve banning fracking.
He argues net-zero threshold can be achieved by helping eliminate emissions from natural gas infrastructure, while redirecting government subsidies for oil and gas to cleaner energies.
“I do rule out banning fracking because we need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zeroemissions,” Mr Biden said in Thursday night’s debate.
For his part, Mr Trump often ridicules the science behind increasingly urgent warnings for immediate action to stave off the worst of climate damage by cutting fossil fuel emissions.
It is not clear how many votes are being decided by Mr Trump’s fracking claims in a contest where the vast majority of voters had already made up their minds. But in a heavily populated state that Mr Trump won by just over 44,000 votes in 2016, any marginal change, no matter how slight, is significant.