To brag about the United States’ record-high oil production — or let it go unmentioned. That is just one of the conundrums President Joe Biden faces in tonight’s debate with former President Donald Trump, who has spent years accusing his successor of attacking the fossil fuel industry and wrecking American energy “independence,” write Timothy Cama, Garrett Downs and Nicole Norman. While Biden has made fighting climate change a major pillar of his agenda, investing hundreds of billions of dollars more in clean energy and climate programs than any past president, his era has also seen record U.S. oil and gas production — a fact he might not want to highlight lest he further alienate young, progressive voters. Also a bad look: Boasting that U.S. companies produced more crude oil last year than any nation at any time in history to the backdrop of a dangerous, early-summer heat dome. Across the world, 1,400 temperature records were broken last week, many in the U.S., killing scores of people and offering a reminder of the consequences of a rapidly warming planet — which is primarily driven by burning fossil fuels. Trump supporters are eager to exploit Biden’s bind. “No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever,” former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told The New York Times in April. But he added, “The college kids are furious about it.” On the other hand: Failing to tout oil and gas production could leave Biden vulnerable with independents and people worried about high fuel prices. Trump has made those prices a cornerstone of his attack on Biden’s energy agenda, even falsely claiming two years ago that gasoline cost nearly $9 per gallon. (The national average at the time was $4.60. It was $3.50 today for regular, still much higher than when Biden took office.) One way out? Blame the oil industry, said Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, an endangered Democrat who will appear on the ballot with Biden this year. “If the price of gasoline comes up in my debate back home, I’m going to blame who should be blamed — which is the big oil companies,” he told POLITICO’s E&E News. “And we should tax their excess profits, that’s what we should do.” Trump’s greatest (or newest) hits: Some of Trump’s other favorite lines of attack that may make an appearance tonight include his attempts to link wind turbines to whale deaths, claims that Biden’s electric vehicle incentives amount to a “mandate,” and accusations that Biden’s climate policies are a “scam” that will “make China rich” and debilitate the military. But the former president added a new, perhaps unexpected argument earlier today: “Under my Administration CO2 emissions went down,” said a proposed talking point that Trump posted on Truth Social from his former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler. (Inconvenient truths: That decline was largely because of the pandemic, climate experts said at the time — and it wasn’t sharp enough to prevent catastrophic warming.)
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