Kamala Harris at Democratic Party picnic in Des Moines, 2019.
When President Joe Biden said, “I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation,“ and endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, you may have wondered, “Where does Kamala Harris stand on climate action?”
After President Biden’s endorsed her, Kamala Harris rapidly gained endorsements from former Democratic Presidents, hundreds of Democratic Party leaders at the national, state and local level, labor organizations, and other non-government organizations (NGOs). Among the NGOs who have publicly endorsed VP Harris for President are four major environmental groups.
“Kamala Harris has been a driving force in delivering the strongest climate action in history. She’s ready to build on those gains from day one as president,” said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the NRDC Action Fund. “She championed the policies and investments that are cutting climate pollution, creating jobs, unlocking innovation, strengthening the economy, and protecting vulnerable communities. Harris grasps the urgency and scale of the challenge. She’ll advance the climate progress we’ve made at home and internationally. She’ll raise climate ambition to make sure we confront the climate crisis in a way that makes the country more inclusive, more economically competitive and more energy secure.”
Did Kamala Harris support the Green New Deal?
As a U.S. senator, Harris was an early co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, a non-binding blueprint for transitioning the country to 100% clean energy within a decade. The Green New Deal was first introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey in February 2019.
You can hear and see directly from Vice President Kamala Harris about the current administration’s commitment to climate action at this video streamed and recorded on April 4, 2024.
“I care about the environment not because I have any particular desire to hug a tree, but I have a strong desire to hug a healthy baby.”
– Vice President Kamala Harris
As Third Act’s Bill McKibben wrote in his July 22 newsletter:
“MAGA owns the Republican party lock, stock and barrel of oil, and MAGA thinks physics is fake. Whereas Kamala Harris? She’s pretty darned good on climate stuff. Now, since most of what we know about her stands on energy and climate date from the 2020 primaries, it’s important to remember the context. We were pretty near peak-Greta (the massive school strikes of autumn 2019 were just a month or two in the rearview mirror), and polls were showing that the number one issue for many Democratic voters was climate change. And this was a primary fight. So don’t look for her to be stressing all these positions in the next three months. But, in her “Climate Plan for the People,” she laid out a common sense manifesto:
My plan sets out a bold target to exceed the Paris Agreement climate goals and achieve a clean economy by 2045, investing $10 trillion in public and private funding to meet the initial 10-year mobilization necessary to stave off the worst climate impacts. It modernizes our transportation, energy, and water infrastructure. It accelerates the spread of electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines. And it makes big investments in battery storage, climate-smart agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and the innovative technologies that will build our carbon-free future.
By 2030, we will run on 100 percent carbon-neutral electricity, all new buses, heavy-duty vehicles, and vehicle fleets will be zero-emission. All new buildings will be carbon-neutral. We will protect 30 percent of our lands and oceans. We will transition our public lands from producing the fossil fuels that represent 24 percent of national emissions to carbon sinks. And to power this transformation to a clean economy, we will empower the American workforce and create millions of good jobs.
Among other specifics, she proposed to “convene a meeting of major emitters in early 2021” that would include “the first-ever global negotiation of the cooperative managed decline of fossil fuel production”. Which, in fact, is exactly what we need, and if we didn’t do it in 2021, well, 2025 is considerably hotter. In her years as a district attorney in San Francisco, and then as AG in California, Zoya Teirstein writes, she:
‘created an environmental justice unit to address environmental crimes affecting San Francisco’s poorest residents and prosecuted several companies including U-Haul for violation of hazardous waste laws. Harris later touted her environmental justice unit as the first such unit in the country. An investigation found the unit only filed a handful of lawsuits, though, and none of them were against the city’s major industrial polluters.
As attorney general, Harris secured an $86 million settlement from Volkswagen for rigging its vehicles with emissions-cheating software and investigated ExxonMobil over its climate change disclosures. She also filed a civil lawsuit against Phillips 66 and ConocoPhillips for environmental violations at gas stations, which eventually resulted in a $11.5 million settlement. And she conducted a criminal investigation of an oil company over a 2015 spill in Santa Barbara. The company was found guilty and convicted on nine criminal charges.‘
Sometimes she went a little further rhetorically than she had in practice—during the campaign, for instance, she said she’d sued Exxon Mobil while attorney general in Sacramento. But, alas, she hadn’t quite worked up the nerve to pull the trigger. Still, it’s an excellent thing to contemplate—and since the least competent member of the Biden administration must be Merrick ‘Local Train’ Garland, maybe she could hire her New York counterpart Letitia James, who actually did take on the oil giant. (Jamie Henn has a great list of the ways she could litigate against Big Oil). In any event, it’s all been enough for Bloomberg to proclaim that she’d be a “tougher oil industry opponent than Joe Biden.”
“She is the kind of leader who will hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, and that’s what we need right now,” Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from Harris’ home state of California, said in an interview. “She would absolutely carry on and build on the success of the Biden administration on climate and clean energy.”
Oh, and…she’s from California. Which is the epicenter (outside of China) of the clean energy revolution. So one guesses she’s not scared of getting cancer from a windmill.”
I spent more than a dozen years as an independent journalist and later worked as a communications specialist for The Brooklyn Historical Society, Consumers Union, and Associated Press. At this stage of my life, my primary concern is to meet the challenge that climate change presents to my children, grandchildren, and the future of life on planet Earth.
