As Trump and Harris Vie for Fossil Fuel Supporters, the Climate Is Losing

When he ran in 2020, Joe Biden called climate change the “number one issue facing humanity.” He promised that, as president, he would put the U.S. on the path to net-zero emissions by 2050 while phasing out coal, oil and natural gas as energy sources.

Nearly four years later, the Biden administration has fallen short of those goals. In fact, emissions rose during the first two years of Biden’s tenure until they finally fell in 2023. But that decline still puts the U.S. far off track to meet standards laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement, with enormous, likely impossible, cuts required every year until 2030 if the U.S. is to meet its emissions goals.

As we approach the 2024 presidential election, the issue of climate change looms larger than ever. As the planet continues to warm, the scientific consensus is that extreme weather events will become more common in the U.S. and around the world, making scenes of climate devastation an increasingly regular part of our lives. In late September, Hurricane Helene laid waste to huge swaths of the Southeast, with the death toll from massive flooding still rising through early October. Whoever the next president is, that person will inhabit the White House until at least 2028 — roughly two years before, mainstream science says, damage from climate change becomes irreversible. In very real terms, whoever is elected in November may preside over a period that marks the U.S.’s last opportunity to play the role it must in mitigating climate change.

Although she has been vice president for four years, Kamala Harris’s stances on climate issues are only now becoming a topic of scrutiny. This is partly because, as vice president, she has spent the last four years promulgating climate policy set by Biden and his advisors, not her own. But her stances on key climate policies are also murky because her positions have changed significantly in her years running for office.

As district attorney of San Francisco, long considered one of the most progressive big cities in the U.S., Harris was an early adopter of left-leaning climate policy. In 2005, she created an environmental justice unit that was tasked with prosecuting environmental crimes, especially those happening in poorer communities. Harris had already begun voicing the idea that low-income communities of color were often the most impacted by climate change and environmental degradation, and the environmental justice unit was a way of tackling those disparities head-on. This unit has been criticized, however, by local environmental activists who say that the unit focused on prosecuting small-time environmental violations while allowing major polluters to go unchecked, especially in poorer neighborhoods that had long suffered from industrial pollution.

On her campaign site, Harris touts the “tens of millions” she won in settlements against “Big Oil.” Some California environmental activists agree that Harris pursued a bold, pro-climate agenda as California attorney general. She led a prosecution that netted a sizable settlement with Phillips 66 and ConocoPhillips for violating laws governing how underground gasoline storage tanks should be operated and maintained. She also guided a grand jury indictment of Plains All-American Pipeline, a pipeline transport company, on criminal charges relating to an oil spill in Santa Barbara County in 2015.

At times, though, Harris appears to have exaggerated her commitment to prosecuting environmental crimes. Her campaign statements have sometimes mentioned an investigation of ExxonMobil, which Harris has touted as exemplary of the ardor with which she’ll pursue fossil fuel polluters as president. This investigation, however, seems to have fizzled out. No charges were ever filed and the investigation was passed on to her successor without fanfare. That fact hasn’t stopped Harris from claiming, falsely, that she “sued ExxonMobil,” in a clear appeal to environmental activists.

During her time in the Senate, Harris sponsored a number of climate justice bills. These included the Climate Equity Act of 2020, which would have required the Climate and Environmental Equity Office to meet with the Congressional Budget Office to conduct an environmental impact analysis of all new legislation. She also introduced a number of climate equity bills aimed at addressing the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low income communities and communities of color. Many of these bills were introduced in the summer of 2020, just before she was announced as Joe Biden’s pick for his running mate, and none, ultimately, made it to a full Senate vote.

Harris was also a cosponsor of a Senate resolution clamoring for the institution of a Green New Deal, and at the time, said she was comfortable with getting rid of the Senate filibuster in order to pass Green New Deal legislation. As a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, Harris continued to affiliate herself closely with the Green New Deal, becoming the first candidate to endorse it during those primary debates.

As we approach the 2024 presidential election, the issue of climate change looms larger than ever.

Her close association with climate causes has followed her into the Biden administration. As vice president, Harris has often served as the face of the administration’s climate portfolio. She represented the U.S. at the COP28 climate meeting in Dubai in 2023, where she called for more collective action to address climate change. She has also handled the administration’s efforts to remediate lead contamination in drinking water, an initiative that echoes much of the environmental equity work that was characteristic of her approach to climate issues during her time as a prosecutor.

And Harris’s campaign has repeatedly called attention to her role in casting the “tie-breaking vote” to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, a piece of legislation that Biden and his allies have called “historic climate action.” While the administration has repeatedly pointed to the IRA as a major climate victory, some prominent environmental groups have been less laudatory, describing it as a “compromise [with] corporate oil lobbyists.”

As she has refashioned herself into a presidential candidate capable of winning in November, Harris has pivoted away from some of her more progressive environmental stances. For example, during her run to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020, she said there was “no question [she was] in favor of banning fracking,” a controversial method for extracting natural gas that is broadly opposed by climate and health activists because it accelerates the climate crisis. Now, Harris is denying that she would ban fracking, saying Donald Trump’s claims that she would are false. During the recent presidential debate, Harris also trumpeted the surge in domestic fossil fuel production during Biden’s tenure. For a candidate who, in 2020, said she would ban fossil fuel leases on public land, her embrace of domestic drilling represents another hard tack to the Democratic Party’s more conservative center.

The particularities of Harris’s path to victory in the Electoral College loom large as well. Pennsylvania, a critical part of the so-called “Blue Wall” that Harris likely needs to win in November, is one of the largest coal-producing states in the country. Another crucial swing state, Michigan, manufactures over 20 percent of all domestically produced automobiles — and with domestic electrical vehicle sales still hovering around just 10 percent of the total, an aggressive push on emissions standards may spell doom for manufacturing jobs in Michigan and elsewhere.

Harris’s repeated pivots on her climate policy reflect a broader trend within the Democratic Party. As the prospect of passing sweeping climate legislation like the Green New Deal becomes more remote, Democrats have tiptoed back from the precipice of becoming full-fledged proponents of radical and urgent climate policy. Whether the 2024 election augurs another sea change in the Democratic Party’s thinking about how and whether to foreground addressing climate change may hinge on the ultimate shape of the Electoral College map. If Harris is elected, and if pro-climate voters play an outsize role in propelling her into the White House, addressing climate change might once again take a prominent spot in the party platform. Otherwise, it may be at least another four years before climate issues become a primary concern for Democrats — four years more than the U.S., or the world, can afford to wait.