President Joe Biden nominated the most diverse Cabinet in history, but the Senate, which gets to offer “advice and consent,” is suddenly full of members — mostly Republicans — who are critical of partisan tweets and are carefully scrutinizing nominees’ job qualifications.
The attention has chiefly fallen on three domestic policy roles:
- Office of Management and Budget nominee Neera Tanden has written a lot of mean tweets about conservatives and progressives and clashed with Bernie Sanders’ future presidential campaign manager. She’d be the first woman of color in charge of the executive budget.
- Department of Health and Human Services nominee Xavier Becerra played important roles defending the Affordable Care Act from the Trump administration’s efforts to get it declared unconstitutional and in California’s pandemic response. He’d be the first Latino to run HHS.
- Interior Secretary nominee Deb Haaland has supported the Green New Deal and wants to end fracking on public land. She’d be the first Native American Cabinet secretary.
The difficulty faced by Haaland is particularly interesting since it’s not just political — opposition or support for a fossil fuel economy — but also scientific. One party wants to actively address climate change and the other does not.
What Matters went to CNN’s Drew Kann, who covers climate change for the network, to find out more about how energy policy intersects with climate science and where Haaland fits into that equation.
What is fracking and why is it controversial?
WHAT MATTERS: One criticism of Haaland is that as a lawmaker, and unlike President Biden, she supports a ban on fracking on federal land. That’s pretty much the opposite of the Trump administration, which worked hard to expand fracking on public land. Why are fracking in general and fracking on public land in particular such key issues? Is it a scientific or political dispute?
KANN: Through a purely scientific lens, the link between fracking and climate change is fairly simple. Fracking — short for hydraulic fracturing — is a process of extracting oil and gas by blasting liquids deep underground into rock formations to unlock fossil fuel reserves hidden inside.
When we burn that oil and gas in our cars and trucks and power plants, it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the more carbon dioxide (CO2) that we put in the atmosphere, the thicker the blanket of greenhouse gases around the globe gets, and the hotter the planet gets as well.
Fracking doesn’t just add more CO2 to the equation. Oil and gas drilling also releases huge amounts of methane — another greenhouse gas that isn’t as abundant in the atmosphere as CO2, but has the potential to trap more than 25 times more heat and is already causing around 25% of the warming we feel today.
While burning fossil fuels…
Read More: Trump stacked his Cabinet with climate skeptics. Now Republicans are piling