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Joe Biden is going to be remembered in history not only as the guy who stepped aside from the 2024 presidential campaign to give America a better chance of preserving democracy, but also as the world leader whose landmark actions on climate gave humanity its best fighting chance to keep our planet habitable.
As the man likes to say, that’s not hyperbole: For too many decades, America and the world talked about maybe doing something on climate, even as we kept increasing the fossil fuel emissions that are driving the crisis. Biden finally began the change in course that we need to make in order to head off even more catastrophic warming. It takes a lot to turn a supertanker around, but we’re finally turning in the right direction. Happily, Kamala Harris is just the right person to take the helm.
Now that Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place in the 2024 election, let’s take a look at her own positions on climate and clean energy, and consider how she might follow up on Biden’s already impressive — but unfinished — climate legacy.
For starters, she’s gonna need a Democratic House and Senate. And for the first time this year, the excitement around her candidacy makes both of those seem like a real possibility, but it’s going to be a tough fight to hold even a 50-seat tie in the Senate. Upside? The two most vocal opponents of filibuster reform, Joe Manchin (I-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona), after leaving the Democratic Party, are also leaving the Senate, and there’s a better than even chance Sinema will be replaced by Democrat Ruben Gallego. But Manchin’s seat will go R, just to keep everyone nervous.
As this nice overview at Heatmap News reminds us, back in the 2020 D primary, Kamala Harris was actually more aggressive on climate than Joe Biden was, although once he secured the nomination he adopted most of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s best-of-the-bunch climate plan. During the primary, Harris called for a carbon tax, endorsed banning fracking, and proposed spending up to $10 trillion on cutting greenhouse gases and transitioning to clean energy. As a senator, she was an early endorser of the Green New Deal, many parts of which made it into Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. She even proposed a more aggressive target for reaching net zero emissions, 2045, compared to the 2050 target set by Biden.
Based on her history of tough climate positions and lawsuits against polluters, including Big Oil, Harris’s likely nomination has climate people pretty chuffed. As Heatmap notes, almost immediately after Biden endorsed Harris, his climate advisor Gina McCarthy, who also served as Barack Obama’s EPA administrator, issued a statement underlining how important Harris’s nomination will be for the planet and its big clumsy mammalian inhabitants:
“Vice President Harris would kick ass against Trump. […] She has spent her whole life committed to justice, fighting for the underdog, and making sure that no one is above the law. She will fight every day for all Americans to have access to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment.”
If she becomes president — and for Crom’s sake, she kind of has to, for democracy and all that — Harris is likely to continue Biden’s climate policies, but is quite likely to go even farther, because that’s what you do when the planet is burning. Again, from Heatmap:
“[Harris] was one of the most ambitious presidential candidates in the 2020 primary cycle,” Justin Guay, program director at Quadrature Climate Foundation, told me. “She had the largest proposed spending plan of any candidate not named Bernie. She promised a sum 10 times that of the greatest climate president we’ve ever had, Joe Biden.” Importantly, he added, she focused on “sticks, not just carrots,” including investigating and bringing lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, as she’d done in California. This, he said, is “red meat for the climate base.”
OK, but for the climate’s sake, not too much red meat. The metaphorical kind is pretty emissions-neutral.
Also, while she was in the Senate, Harris joined Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) to propose legislation that would require all climate legislation be evaluated for its effects on “frontline communities” — people living next to energy production and mining, a focus on environmental justice that was later adopted as a key part of Biden’s climate policies.
And while vice presidents tend to stay in the background of the public mind, Harris has spent her term in the office pushing aggressively for climate policies, a focus that’s also likely to carry over to her presidency, and isn’t that a fun sentence to write?
So hell yes, let’s do this. It’s only the future of our kids and grandkids, after all. And Kamala Harris is all set to get the job done.
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