Skip to content

Saturday, Jul. 18, 2020

Is Joe Biden proposing to eliminate the use of oil in the US?

Allegra Taylor, Gigafact
no

The $2 trillion energy plan Joe Biden announced July 14 does not propose to eliminate the use of oil. It does outline a range of ideas to increase use of alternative energy sources to help eliminate net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

The plan also proposes "aggressive methane pollution limits for new and existing oil and gas operations."

Biden has denied any plans to target the oil industry, which has rebounded in the U.S. in recent years thanks to hydraulic fracturing processes that extract oil and gas from rock. “Fracking is not going to be on the chopping block,” Biden said in a July 9 interview with a Scranton, Pennsylvania, TV station.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.