ERIE, Pennsylvania — Republicans are out to tie the green climate policies backed by President Joe Biden and other liberals in Congress around John Fetterman‘s neck, hoping it’ll help sink the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor in a race that could decide the balance of the Senate.
Fetterman has distanced himself from some of the most hawkish positions on climate change promoted by, for instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who ran on a national fracking ban in 2020. But celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz and his backers in the National Republican Senatorial Committee are playing up the overlap between the former Braddock mayor and the broader climate policy positions of the party and of Biden, who nixed the Keystone XL pipeline and campaigned on restricting oil and gas leasing on federal lands.
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The backdrop of Fetterman’s faceoff against Oz is a fierce ideological battle in Washington over the future of U.S. energy policy. That battle has grown more intense during this Congress thanks to partisan strife, sustained high energy prices domestically, and a global energy crisis that many officials have assessed as direr than the oil crisis of the 1970s.
Energy policy plays big in Pennsylvania, which rests upon the second largest share of proved natural gas reserves and boasts a robust oil and gas workforce. The sector supported some 480,300 total jobs in the state in 2019, according to an analysis from the American Petroleum Institute.
Oz and company have capitalized on that fact, regularly calling to mind online posts Fetterman made during his 2016 campaign for Senate in which he said criticized fracking and called the industry “a stain on our state and natural resources.”
“Mr. Fetterman, as many on the far Left are prone to do, has an ideological view of energy,” Oz told the Washington Examiner, making mention of Fetterman’s “stain comments.” Oz also name-dropped the Green New Deal, a resolution backed by liberals in Congress like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) that calls for a “10-year national mobilization effort” to reinvent the economy. (Fetterman does not support the Green New Deal, according to his campaign.)
Fetterman “has indicated he wants to regulate the [oil and gas] industry so dramatically that it basically curtails its ability to thrive long term,” said Oz, who himself has gone on record calling for stricter environmental standards for fracking.
During his last Senate run, Fetterman backed a moratorium on fracking but has since reversed his position on the grounds that new regulations that succeeded his first bid for Senate have made it safer.
During this campaign, Fetterman has echoed climate rhetoric employed by Biden and others, dubbing climate change an “existential threat” and advocating on the campaign trail for a transition away from fossil fuels.
But such a transition must be “thoughtful” and “realistic,” according to Fetterman, who is billing himself as a union loyalist who will protect jobs in Pennsylvania’s energy sector. That transition should be done “in a way that is consistent with the jobs that are involved in these industries,” he said in June 2021.
Recent polling suggests it is working, at some level, with one recent survey giving Fetterman a 10-point lead over Oz.
“He’s been able to taper this over, ” Jeff Bloodworth, a political historian and director of the Public Service & Global Affairs program at Gannon University, said of Fetterman’s previous aversions to fracking. “And I think he’ll be able to continue to be able to just because he doesn’t look like what has become a normal Democrat.”
A normal Democrat to a lot of voters these days is an educated professional “who uses $5 words when a $1 word would be fine,” Bloodworth said.
Fetterman went to Harvard and surely knows a couple of $5 words but also uses swears, and his signature dress, including in campaign settings, is shorts and sweatshirts, not suits and ties, and he sports numerous tattoos.
On the other side of the trail, Oz and the NRSC brand him as an ideologue in the Biden mold whose support for shifting to green energy is undermining the U.S. oil and gas industry, killing jobs, and making energy more expensive.
“Rising energy costs are the #1 driver of inflation,” Oz said in a Sep. 3 tweet, yet the country is “forced to rely on our adversaries around the globe for energy thanks to Biden and Fetterman.”
The next senator from Pennsylvania could face any number of votes or oversight duties relevant to the state industry. The Sanders wing of the party is eager to block legislation that would ease permitting of fossil fuel infrastructure and still seeks to restrict fracking. The Biden Environmental Protection Agency is currently drafting new regulations to crack down on methane emissions from existing oil and gas sources, and while environmental groups favor stringent rules, some in the industry oppose more regulations and say they’ll make energy more expensive.
Biden has thrown Republicans a lot of red meat on energy policy, setting a lofty target envisioning that half of all new car sales in 2030 be electric vehicles. GOP critics insist that will make the United States more vulnerable to China because of its dominance of the EV supply chain, something Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), sought to address in the Inflation Reduction Act.
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Biden also ordered a “pause” on all new oil and gas leasing on federal lands shortly after taking office and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, the latter of which Fetterman endorsed.
The NRSC charged Fetterman with wanting to “destroy our energy independence” for backing Biden’s decision on the pipeline.
For Oz, all the transition talk and restrictive policies make oil and gas workers feel like there’s a target on their back.
“You don’t want people being embarrassed for working in energy. These are these guys working as hard as they can,” he said. “They’re proud — they should be proud of what they’re doing. And yet, they’re being told, messaged in different ways, that it’s a bad industry.”
