(DCNF)—Vice President Kamala Harris purported to be in favor of fossil fuels on the debate stage on Tuesday night, but several of her talking points lacked key context or were contradicted by her record in the Biden administration.
The vice president reiterated on the debate stage that she no longer backs a fracking ban, stated that she favored energy independence and took credit for specific oil and gas-related provisions included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s signature climate bill that passed the Senate with Harris’ tie-breaking vote in 2022. While Harris tried to depict herself as a champion of energy independence and diversifying supply, her record as vice president and as a senator is full of actions that restricted American fossil fuel production.
ABC’s Linsey Davis, one of the debate’s moderators, asked Harris to explain her reversals on a number of topics, ranging from her past support for a fracking ban to her purportedly discarded view that illegal border crossings should be decriminalized.
“So my values have not changed. And I’m going to discuss every one — at least every point that you’ve made. But in particular, let’s talk about fracking because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States,” Harris said in response. “And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”
As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris said there is “no question” that fracking should be banned, and she did not disown that position in the 2020 vice presidential debate against former Vice President Mike Pence as she suggested on Tuesday night. In the debate against Pence, Harris only went so far as to say that President Joe Biden would not ban fracking.
In the first weeks of the Biden-Harris administration in 2021, Biden signed a since-overturned executive order that effectively prohibited future oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters.
Meanwhile, the IRA mandated the federal government to hold 60 million acres worth of offshore oil and gas leases in order to hold more offshore wind lease sales. Ultimately, the Biden administration finalized the bare minimum 60 million acres for offshore oil and gas lease sales in its five-year leasing schedule in December 2023.
The IRA also allowed for the creation of a new tax on methane emissions that has been described by opponents as a de facto natural gas tax that would likely increase costs for consumers.
Onshore, the Biden-Harris administration has taken huge swaths of the federal estate off the table for oil and gas development. The administration has moved to block future oil and gas activity on tens of millions of acres of Alaskan land and canceled previously-awarded leases.
Moreover, federal data analyzed by the Western Energy Alliance shows that the number of onshore acres available for lease sales, the number of leases issued, and the number of acres issued through those leases all trended down under the Biden-Harris administration.
“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” Harris continued in her response. “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”
Nominally, it is true that U.S. oil production reached record highs while Biden was in office. However, as energy sector experts previously explained to the DCNF, this may be an achievement that happened in spite of the administration rather than because of it: fossil fuel production, especially on federal lands, takes years to come to fruition, meaning that some of the output happening today is the product of work done under the Trump administration.
The U.S. is still a net exporter of crude oil as of 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration, but the administration may be more sensitive to global price swings than they let on. Officials have loosely enforced sanctions against Iranian and Russian oil to keep prices stable ahead of the pivotal 2024 election.
The Harris campaign did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
