After the House passed a pair of bills last September banning offshore drilling in the Atlantic, Pacific and Florida Gulf, U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher laid into her 226 Democratic colleagues and the roughly two dozen Republicans who supported the ban.

Fletcher, a Houston Democrat and one of five in her party to oppose the legislation, said curbing offshore drilling would intensify greenhouse gas emissions, not reduce them. And the bills would make the U.S. more reliant on foreign oil, reflecting “a lack of understanding about where our energy comes from and how we solve the climate crisis,” she and Louisiana Republican Garret Graves wrote in an op-ed.

The offshore drilling vote demonstrates the balancing act Fletcher must perform to retain her seat in Texas’ 7th Congressional District — an area replete with Fortune 500 oil and gas companies and thousands of energy jobs — as her party embraces more urgent and drastic measures to stifle climate change.

Such proposals, including a ban on hydraulic fracturing, imperil Fletcher’s re-election chances against Republican Wesley Hunt, who wasted no time trying to link Fletcher to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders upon winning his party’s nomination Tuesday.

“The Green New Deal would devastate Texas’ economy. Lizzie Fletcher won’t protect our jobs,” the narrator says in a Hunt ad released Wednesday morning. “Fletcher votes with Nancy Pelosi 100% of the time, and she’ll rubber-stamp Bernie’s socialist agenda too. A vote for Lizzie is a vote for Bernie.”

Since taking office in January 2019, however, Fletcher has staked out several positions that could complicate Hunt’s efforts to paint her as overly hostile to the energy industry. On the most politically explosive topic, the Green New Deal, Fletcher penned an op-ed in April making clear that she opposes the resolution, a broad set of goals and proposals reviled by conservatives that aims to move the U.S. off fossil fuels and rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

And in February, Fletcher called U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bill to ban fracking by 2025 “misguided” and said, “I do not support this bill or any similar proposal to ban fracking.”

Hunt, who won his six-way GOP primary with 61 percent of the vote after being endorsed by President Donald Trump, contended that Fletcher should have come out sooner against the Green New Deal. He said “her silence on the issue is really what precipitated me getting in the race,” and argued that she has not done enough to combat the most ardent progressive voices in her party — including Pelosi, whom Fletcher supported for speaker.

“As a congressman in this district, representing the Energy Corridor and the energy capital of the world, I think she broke her promise from day one by voting for Nancy Pelosi,” said Hunt, an Army veteran. “By voting for the head of that party, that basically represents legislation that would kill jobs here in Houston.”

Paris agreement

Fletcher insists that it presents a false choice to portray climate change reform and the energy industry as inherently clashing.

“We should not frame this as a choice between energy and environment,” Fletcher said. “We’ve got to get everyone working toward a common goal of protecting the planet. I truly believe the people who can figure out how to do that live or work in the 7th Congressional District, or are connected to it.”

Inherent in Fletcher’s advocacy for natural gas, she says, is her support for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which as of 2016 accounted for about two-thirds of U.S. natural gas production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But Republicans questioned Fletcher’s support for fracking — a way of extracting natural gas that some Democrats want to ban over concerns about groundwater pollution — after she voted with House Democrats in October to block a vote on a symbolic resolution reaffirming that states have authority over fracking on state and private lands.

It also would have asserted that presidents cannot bar fracking on federal lands.

After the vote, a spokesperson from the National Republican Congressional Committee accused Fletcher of being “more loyal to her socialist party leadership” than Texans working oil and gas jobs.

Fletcher later said Ocasio-Cortez’s fracking ban “would negatively impact our national economy, our energy costs, our environment and our efforts to meet energy demand with cleaner, more responsible development in the United States.” In a statement for this story, Fletcher spokesperson Erin Mincberg cited her opposition to the Green New Deal and the alternative fuel tax credit.

“These attacks simply aren’t true,” Mincberg said. “Rep. Fletcher has never supported a ban on fracking.”

Where Fletcher and Hunt starkly disagree is the Paris climate agreement, which Fletcher has framed as “an important, collaborative step forward” that sets more realistic benchmarks than the Green New Deal. Under the agreement, nearly 200 countries have made pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help poorer countries impacted by climate change.

Hunt said the U.S. is already making strides to decrease its carbon footprint and argued that China and India are the true global emission “culprits.” Under the accord, China and India both set emission reduction goals for 2030, though some argue that their goals are insufficient compared to the targets set by the U.S. and others.

Spared exposure

Fletcher’s stances have come with little scrutiny from the left, as she did not receive a 2020 primary opponent. And she has been fortunate to face few controversial energy-related roll call votes so far, observers and advocates said.

Fletcher “has generally been a supporter of the oil and natural gas industry since joining Congress, although we have not seen many pure ‘energy’ related votes in the House this year,” said Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association, an energy industry trade group in Austin. He added that the organization “would like to see Rep. Fletcher’s voting record on … some of the more challenging energy related issues for her party in the future.”

In Congress, Fletcher chairs a bipartisan Natural Gas Caucus and frequently leans on natural gas’ reduction of U.S. carbon emissions as proof that energy and environmental interests can work in tandem. She was also elected chair of the House Science Committee’s energy subcommittee in January.

In November, Fletcher introduced a bill with Oklahoma Republican Markwayne Mullin to reinstate a lapsed 50-cent federal tax credit for every gallon of alternative fuels — including compressed, liquefied and renewable natural gas — used as motor fuel. A spending bill signed by Trump in December revived the tax credit through the end of 2020.

Fletcher said the tax credit would reduce greenhouse emissions and produce lower fuel costs by incentivizing innovation. Some who support the legislation hope it will mitigate the practice of flaring, when drillers burn off natural gas because doing so is more cost-effective than transporting it to markets.

The tax credit has generated opposition from some environmental advocates, who contend that leaks of methane — the main component of natural gas and a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — put overall emissions from natural gas-powered vehicles nearly on par with that of gas and diesel vehicles.

“Natural gas fueling infrastructure is a bridge to nowhere, when we should be investing in charging infrastructure for cleaner electric vehicles,” Daniel Cohan, an environmental engineering professor at Rice University, wrote in an op-ed critiquing Fletcher’s bill.

Still, Fletcher’s stances that put her at odds with some members of her party appear to have generated little criticism from progressives and environmental activists.

"She's definitely not a lefty, but the context for us is, here's a person who defeated a person who didn't believe in climate change, and has come to Congress and been serious about the issues,” said Jack Pratt, senior political director for the Environmental Defense Action Fund.

Pratt said the parent group, Environmental Defense Fund, disagrees with Fletcher over her opposition to the offshore drilling ban. On the Green New Deal, however, Pratt said, “You're not going to get a serious climate change bill through Congress just based on votes from the most progressive communities.”

Free of a primary opponent, Fletcher was unencumbered by political pressure drawing her left on energy and environmental policy, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

“A primary challenge on the left would definitely require her to address some of these issues more pointedly that she might not want to, or that might be politically damaging,” Rottinghaus said. “She's sort of spared that potential ideological exposure.”

jasper.scherer@chron.com