This time of year, across the Allegheny National Forest in Northwest Pennsylvania, the white pine, maple, chestnut and black cherry trees scattered within the tall, hilly landscape turn deeper colors of orange and yellow.
To an unassuming eye, visitors of the forest may never know that numerous oil and gas wells are quietly and continually pumping out the resource. But the smaller companies who call this place home, like Cameron Energy, are worried the 2024 presidential election has put their livelihoods on the line.
“Some nights it’s hard to fall asleep,” lawyer-turned-Cameron Energy founder Arthur Stewart told Fox News Digital. “We have 55 employees. The pressures of worrying about the paycheck every two weeks are enormous. We’re suffering with inflation just like everybody else, and it’s a business killer. There’s just no other way to say it. And so the worries we have about this election are unbelievable.”
“We work hard so that everybody around us can have an affordable, modern life-supporting energy that’s domestically produced and safely,” Cameron’s environmental care coordinator Tyler Martin also said.
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“We have the cleanest streams in our area. In the United States, within our borders, we can produce energy cleaner than they can in other countries. And if you’re an environmentalist, that should be important,” Martin continued. “We should produce it here.”
Cameron Energy’s founder, spokesperson and an independent policy analyst compared and contrasted former President Donald Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ respective energy platforms as detailed on their campaign websites, and urged domestic oil production as the answer to getting U.S. prices down.
Democratic nominee Harris has proposed an “opportunity economy.” On her campaign website under the “Issues” tab, the economy is seemingly her top priority, but any oil and gas-related policies are found in the tenth and last subsection.
She will reportedly “tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advance environmental justice, protect public lands and public health, increase resilience to climate disasters, lower household energy costs, create millions of new jobs, and continue to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all.”
“I still believe that what Kamala Harris said when she was running for president in 2019, that she wants to ban all fracking, is the real Kamala Harris… You want to know what a real climate crisis would be? If there wasn’t energy to run air conditioners in Arizona, if there wasn’t natural gas to heat homes in Maine or Massachusetts or Pennsylvania or in our hospitals, anywhere. A real crisis would be if you couldn’t make the plastics for hospitals. And I don’t think that her policy understands that remotely,” Stewart said in response.
Cameron’s biggest customer is a Pennsylvania-based refining company that converts oil into high-quality wax, plastics and lubricants used primarily for hospital, cosmetic and food packaging products.
“It looks like another soundbite of word salad to me. Sounds like there’s a lot of feel-good terms in there for her base, [but] doesn’t really speak to any solutions,” Martin said. “We’re not out here to pollute. We’re not out here to do something wrong for people. We’re just out here to make a living, to make our way and to provide affordable energy for all Americans.”
“She’s going to double down from what she and President Biden are currently doing, pivoting to a net-zero energy direction,” Independent Women’s Forum Center for Energy and Conservation director Gabriella Hoffman also told Fox Digital.
Hoffman spotlighted data from the Department of Energy that estimates a 9% increase in electricity demand by 2028, and a more recent report that 61 existing or recently retired domestic nuclear facilities can be brought back online to boost clean energy supply.
“[Nuclear] uses the least amount of land,” she said. “But you don’t see that rhetoric in that language deployed there… for the [Harris-Walz] administration to say we’re going to continue our work with the [Inflation Reduction Act], we’re going to continue our work with boosting and supercharging unreliable, intermittent solar and wind, it doesn’t leave energy experts and energy-conscious folks with a lot of confidence.”
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On Trump’s campaign website, within his publicly listed platform stances, his first priority is to “defeat inflation and quickly bring down all prices.” The first step to that, his campaign writes, is to unleash American energy by “lifting restrictions on American energy production, terminating the Socialist Green New Deal, unleashing energy production from all sources, including nuclear, to immediately slash inflation.”
“That’s a statement by a man who’s in business and understands that energy is in everything, and we need all forms of energy. We shouldn’t do away with nuclear. We shouldn’t do away with wind or solar. We should respect and understand what their role is,” Stewart said. “Sixty-six percent of our electricity around the world still comes from fossil fuels. So it’s not something that we can just wipe our hands and think we’re going to do away with it.”
While she wishes Trump’s platform “had a couple more details” articulating his energy policies and vision, Hoffman pointed to his first administration’s record on oil and gas.
“Before they unleashed energy, they opened up a historic amount of oil and gas leases, almost 5,000 across their four years… We saw clean air, clean water conditions steadily improve,” she said. “If we’re truly looking to pivot to a clean energy future while also maintaining coal, oil and gas where appropriate… I would say the alternative, something as a good supplement to what we currently have, is nuclear. It uses the least amount of land, about one square-mile for a facility that powers 1,000 megawatts. So the least land-exhausted, 24/7 baseload power, a 93% capacity factor.”
All three called for less legislative restraint on the industry, arguing it would strengthen national security and help alleviate inflation.
“If the United States were to say, we’re done producing natural gas, and we have to import that, it’s either coming in liquefied or coming in a pipeline from Canada. And that costs energy, that costs money, and of course, it sacrifices jobs in the United States. But we need to produce it locally in order to help with inflation because it’s going to be cheaper that way,” Martin explained.
“Three things have to happen: permitting reform, deregulation, and then obviously inviting more private sector companies to truly bid on these energy sources and kind of innovate ahead of the government, instead of relying solely on the government for incentives for subsidies,” Hoffman expanded. “Because it’s going to really affect the market negatively and just create a very kind of perilous regulatory environment going forward where you have these intermittent sources contrasted against or replacing tested, reliable baseload power. And that’s again, going to lead to higher bills if you don’t know how to meet the demand and storage as well.”
Neither the Trump nor Harris campaigns responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. But the oil and gas insiders in a critical swing state want voters to think about their industry when heading to ballots this fall.
“We can achieve peace through strength. And strength comes in many forms. If we have a strong economy, we have peace. If we have a strong military, we have peace. If we have a strong energy industry, we have peace through it. And that’s peace for everybody. And I would hope that all voters could agree with at least some of that,” Martin said.
“I’m old enough to remember the 1970s,” Stewart pointed out, “when we didn’t have enough oil to power this country, and we had odd and even days at the gas stations.”
“And when you have either the threat of world wars that we have going on right now, with the trouble in Russia and Ukraine and the trouble in the Middle East, those aren’t good things for any business. It’s a bad thing for our business, because if prices spike, that’s almost as bad, and it’s almost as unpredictable as the inflationary cycle that we’re in right now. So I would like to live in a country that exercised political restraint.”
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