Brian Lerer on WNYC, now our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday on the show all this year.

Our focus today is on Vice President Kamala Harris and her evolving stance on fracking.

Fracking, if you need a refresher, is a technique for extracting natural gas by drilling thousands

of feet into the ground and injecting a mix of water and chemicals through the Earth's crust.

Pennsylvania, big spring state, is one of the country's largest producers of natural gas,

and it helps us understand the relationship between Pennsylvania and fracking,

how Kamala Harris's position on fracking went from this in 2009.

Here she is at a CNN climate crisis town hall in September of that year as she was running in the Democratic primaries for president.

There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking.

But here she is a little over a year later in an interview with a view on ABC as Joe Biden's

running mate. Without any ambiguity, Joe is clear we will not ban fracking. All right. And that's

a message she has carried forward into her own presidential campaign now. The shift has been

fodder for Republican attacks, casting Harris as a potential

threat to energy jobs, even though the Biden-Harris administration has pumped money into Pennsylvania's

energy projects. They also obviously portray her as a flip-flopper because of those two clips.

We'll talk about Kamala Harris's positions on fracking and the politics and science of it all with Ben Geheman energy reporter at Axios.

Ben, welcome to WNYC.

Good morning, Brian. Thanks for having me on.

First, do you want to expand on that definition of fracking just so people are clear?

I feel like we hear the word a lot these days, but people really don't

have an idea of what exactly goes into it. Yeah, absolutely. So fracking is the oil and natural gas

extraction method that has enabled this gigantic boom in U.S. production of both of those

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