President Donald Trump seized on Joe Biden’s pledge Thursday to eventually replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, turning the Democratic nominee’s remarks into a warning for swing state voters that oil and gas jobs could be at risk. Biden’s comment came in response to a question from Trump during Thursday’s debate in Nashville about whether he would shut down the oil industry. The former vice president, in one of his starkest comments of the campaign on the issue, said “I would transition from the oil industry, yes.”
“The oil industry pollutes significantly,” Biden said. “It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.” That response carries risk for Biden heading into the final days of the race. For weeks, Biden has been wooing voters in Pennsylvania with assurances that his pledges to ban fracking are limited to federal land and would not amount to wholesale destruction of the oil and gas sector. He plans to campaign there Saturday. Trump seized on Biden’s remark.
“Basically what he is saying is he would destroy the oil industry,” Trump said. “Would you remember that Texas? Would you remember that Pennsylvania? Oklahoma, Ohio?” Trump, meanwhile, sought to portray himself as an oil industry savior, boasting about his efforts in the spring to broker a global crude output cut as the coronavirus pandemic collapsed fuel demand. “We saved our oil industry,” Trump boasted, and it’s “vibrant.”
Trump was trying to recreate a moment in 2020 that he used to advantage in 2016, when Hillary Clinton said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
Biden’s climate plan aims to remove greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. electricity generation by 2035 — a target that favors emission-free wind, solar and nuclear power, while leaving little room for natural gas-fired power plants, unless they are outfitted with expensive carbon-capture technology.