Harris Stirs Hope for a New Chapter in Climate Action

Although President Joe Biden already has cemented an unmatched legacy of climate change action, Vice President Kamala Harris raised the bar the moment that she entered the presidential race on July 21.

Those who care about the climate are now considering new possibilities based on Harris’ past actions: What would she do to hold Big Oil accountable? How could she push climate policy further, especially to address historic injustice? Would she be able to advance international cooperation, building on the progress made in her travels to Africa and Asia as vice president?

A new candidate has invigorated the climate movement—with some groups that have never before endorsed presidential candidates declaring support for Harris soon after Biden passed her the torch. They point to her history as a former California attorney general who took on oil companies, the environmental justice work she has focused on in the Biden administration and the historic nature of her candidacy as a woman of color. Her appeal only increased when she selected her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who implemented a $2 billion climate spending program in the state and signed a law to make the state carbon-free by 2040. 

“We see the hope of her presidency as something really refreshing,” said Kaniela Ing, national director of The Green New Deal Network, noting that Harris was an original co-sponsor of the group’s signature legislation as a senator in 2019. She has a record of “making sure that Black and brown and low-income communities aren’t disproportionately impacted by corporate pollution,” Ing said, “so we’re jumping into the race, something folks didn’t necessarily expect from a coalition like ours.”

The same record that has won Harris support from progressive climate groups is a bill of particulars in former President Donald Trump’s case against her. “Kamala Harris has long championed the most socialist and anti-American energy elements of the radical left’s ‘climate’ agenda,” the Trump campaign wrote in a July 29 email blast.

Close observers of environmental politics expect a Harris presidency to follow closely in the footsteps of the Biden presidency, setting ambitious goals to reduce climate pollution, but using carrots more than sticks to hasten a clean energy transition.

The most visible immediate difference between Biden and Harris may be in their ability to communicate the benefits of the more than $500 billion the current administration has directed toward clean energy. At the June presidential debate, when Trump called that spending a “green new scam” that is driving inflation, Biden flailed with his rejoinder: “If we reach for 1.5 degrees Celsius at any one point, well, there is no way back.”

In contrast, Harris’ rhetoric on the administration’s climate program, honed over the past year in travels at home and abroad, focuses on individuals, success stories and here-and-now benefits—much as Biden sought to do in his successful 2020 “Build Back Better” campaign. 

“When we invest in climate, we create jobs, we lower costs, and we invest in families,” Harris said at an April event in North Carolina.

It’s a message her allies expect her to repeat often on the campaign trail.

Holding Polluters Accountable in California

Harris took on Big Oil. This is the short-hand the vice president’s allies in the climate movement use to describe her record as California’s top law enforcement official.

The details are more complex and more revealing. Her actions against the state’s massive oil industry—California ranks third among states in refining capacity—were calibrated. Instead of taking on difficult novel claims, she used well-established law to address egregious instances of air and water pollution.

In 2016, Harris was one of 17 attorneys general who launched an investigation into ExxonMobil and whether it misled the public and its shareholders about the risks of climate change, in the wake of evidence that emerged in stories by Inside Climate News and other outlets. But Harris never sued Exxon. Only the AGs of a handful of states ultimately did; New York lost its case in 2019, and Massachusetts, Minnesota and Rhode Island are still fighting their cases.

Harris did sue Big Oil companies over leaky underground gasoline storage tanks that threatened groundwater, obtaining multimillion dollar settlements in 2015 and 2016 from Phillips 66, ConocoPhillips and BP. She also joined a criminal case against Houston-based Plains All-American Pipeline over a 2015 spill of 140,000 gallons of heavy crude oil in the Pacific Ocean, which polluted the shore near Refugio State Beach; the company was convicted in 2018.

And in her final weeks as AG, she filed suit to block an Obama administration plan to allow fracking in the Pacific Ocean, a case California won in 2022.

This willingness to take on a fellow Democrat’s decision displayed what RL Miller of Los Angeles, president of Climate Hawks Vote, calls “the fearless Kamala Harris.” Miller, who also is a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, says her 10-year-old advocacy group, which has never before endorsed a presidential candidate, is getting behind the vice president “because of this extraordinary moment in which we find ourselves.” 

“Democracy is on the line, and she is trying to do in 100 days what normally is done in two years,” Miller said. “So it’s very much an all-hands-on-deck moment.” 

Miller was disappointed that Harris never sued Exxon. But she said she has witnessed other important examples of Harris taking on entrenched interests in California.

For example, Harris joined a suit in 2012 that successfully challenged a San Diego regional transportation plan that purported to address climate change, but would have involved widening freeways.

“Suing a pipeline company for making a mess, that’s part of the job, but speaking out against a freeway expansion in California, my gosh!” Miller said.

And in 2014, Harris opposed Chevron’s proposed expansion of its century-old refinery in Richmond, California—taking on not only the oil company but the building trades unions that believed a bigger refinery would mean more union jobs. “She was taking a stand against an important part of the California Democratic Party base,” Miller recalled. 

Ultimately, Chevron scaled back its plan, and directly in response to concerns raised by Harris, agreed to cap its greenhouse gas emissions at then-current levels and limit sulfur processing at the facility.

By intervening on Chevron’s refinery plan, Harris was aligning herself with the long fight of the majority Black and Latino residents who suffer some of the worst air pollution in the country, notes Mary Creasman, chief executive of California Environmental Voters. Creasman sees Harris as someone who, as a woman of color, has a unique ability to speak for such disenfranchised communities at an important moment in the climate crisis.

“Representation matters deeply when we talk about environmental issues and climate issues, and women and people of color are on the front lines of impacts,” Creasman said. “The potential of having a president—in this last chunk of years, as we march towards a 2030 deadline on climate—who represents the communities most impacted by extreme heat, pollution, drought, flooding … would be powerful. And [it would] have a powerful impact on what policies, what leadership we see for our nation.”

Creasman is one of many climate activists who believe that the executive branch under Harris would do more to hold fossil fuel companies accountable than previous administrations. Biden’s Justice Department has not pursued litigation against oil companies over climate change, as some Congressional Democrats have called for. But when Harris was running for president in 2020, she voiced support for such legal action. “This is what we did with the tobacco companies,” she said, referring to the 1990s federal-state litigation that ended in a settlement that directed billions toward fighting smoking.

“Representation matters deeply when we talk about environmental issues and climate issues, and women and people of color are on the front lines of impacts.”

Harris has not addressed her stand on such litigation since beginning her compressed presidential run in mid-July, but the Independent Petroleum Association of America, representing the nation’s smaller oil companies, is clearly concerned. On its Energy in Depth website, it has accused Harris of being vague about her policy toward the oil and gas industry to maintain the support of climate activists while trying to win support of voters in energy-producing states, particularly Pennsylvania.

“Now is the time for Harris to clarify where she really stands on the issues,” said one post. “Will she continue to support climate lawsuits against American industry (and its labor workforce) as a presidential candidate? And if so, how far will she go?”

But Harris tends to stress the benefits of environmental action in an appeal across political divides. Creasman said a statement that Harris made at a summit of progressive groups in June 2018 is most emblematic of her climate leadership. “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,” Harris said.

This kind of openness makes her an especially effective ambassador for the Biden administration’s unprecedented federal investment in clean energy, according to her supporters.

Making the Case for Biden’s Climate Record

The largest climate action that Harris will run on, at least financially, is the Inflation Reduction Act, the $370 billion package of clean energy incentives for consumers and businesses that Congress approved in 2022 on the thinnest of margins. Harris, who has set a record among vice presidents for providing decisive Senate votes, cast the tie-breaking “aye.” 

“It’s very hard to legislate and it’s especially hard to legislate on something as big and transformational as the Inflation Reduction Act is,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters. “There were numerous points when it seemed like it was hanging on by a thread or perhaps the thread had snapped, but we never gave up. And most importantly, the president never gave up.”

But whether because of a failure to communicate the law’s achievements or the fact that many of its benefits have yet to be felt by consumers, 71 percent of U.S. adults either believe the IRA has not made much difference on climate change or don’t know enough to say, according to an April poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Trump has capitalized on doubts and the knowledge gap by pushing a narrative that the law is causing consumers pain. “We will end the ridiculous and actually incredible waste of taxpayer dollars that is fueling the inflation crisis,” Trump said at the Republican convention. 

Inflation, which has fallen below 3 percent, is down from its 9 percent peak in the summer of 2022, when prices surged worldwide due to the burst of pent-up consumer demand in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s still significantly more pressure for consumers than they felt in the near-zero inflation Obama years or the pandemic-driven economic standstill of Trump’s last year in office.

“While inflation is down and wages are up, prices are still too high,” Harris acknowledged in the first rally of her presidential campaign on July 30 in Atlanta. “You know it, and I know it.”

Harris now faces the job of showing that big federal investment in clean energy has been an economic plus. Long before a presidential run this year seemed a possibility, Harris was gaining experience making the case for the Biden administration’s climate program, a trek that took her in April to the kitchen table of Levon McBride, a small business owner in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Harris was in the city to announce the recipients of $20 billion in so-called “green bank” grants, the largest ever federal investment in financing for community-based climate projects. The grantees, eight groups of nonprofit lenders, would be a key conduit for ensuring that the IRA’s clean energy money gets to disadvantaged and rural communities. A former staffer in the vice president’s office, who was not speaking for the campaign and asked not to be named, said Harris saw the program as an opportunity to draw on her experience working on access to capital issues in the Senate. (She co-sponsored the record $12 billion in funding for community development financial institutions that was included in the 2020 pandemic relief bill.) 

Before announcing the grants, Harris visited McBride’s home, to see in person the work that one of the grant recipients, Self-Help Credit Union, planned to expand with the new funding.

McBride and his family have lived for a decade in one of 49 super energy-efficient homes financed by Self Help in Grier Heights, a historic African American community. He told the vice president his energy bills had dropped dramatically, from about $600 a month to $100 a month, because of the home’s design.

“She asked questions about what were some of the perks of the home being energy efficient,” McBride recalled. “One question was about us having kids and just being able to save money because we don’t have high utilities … I just felt like she really, really, truly cared about long-term environmental impacts for not just adults now … but the legacy we want to leave behind for our kids … And she just really cared about normal families, the costs for normal families.”

In her speech announcing the grants, Harris recounted what McBride told her, that he and his wife were now able to put aside $50 a month for their 2-year-old and 12-year-old because the money wasn’t being burned up by electric bills.

 “Yes, we talk about cutting energy costs,” Harris said. “But when we’re talking about real people with their dreams and aspirations and responsibilities and obligations, this is a big deal.”

The vice president’s former staffer said Harris consistently sought to highlight such examples of real-world impact, whether visiting an apprenticeship program for workers on an EV bus program in Madison, Wisconsin, or talking to union workers in Tonopah, Arizona, last year at the groundbreaking of the Ten West Link high-voltage transmission project.

“Climate work can very often feel abstract to folks,” the staffer said. “And in order for them to understand why we are making decisions and why policies should be supported, she really makes sure that we are grounded in the lived experience of somebody. Whether that is the student who is riding the bus on the way to school, or the grandmother who’s turning on her faucet, or that parent who’s paying the energy bill, she’s making sure that all of our policies connect down to that individual.”

Flipping the Script on International Climate Action

Harris compiled a record of international climate and environmental diplomacy that also focused on solutions.

In addition to speaking at international climate talks in Dubai in December in Biden’s stead, Harris has led the U.S.-Caribbean clean energy engagement effort, promoted bilateral cooperation on small modular nuclear reactors and other carbon-free technologies in Thailand, and met workers in a USAID-sponsored sustainable fishing initiative in the Philippines.

Such efforts are not necessarily politically rewarded in the United States, even though they help U.S. industry win business abroad and protect U.S. businesses from unfair competition (for example, from illegal fishing). Trump and the environmental officials who worked in his administration say the foreign work distracts from the job of improving the environment and public health in the United States.

“They were too focused on international goals and working amongst the international climate community,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Trump administration, criticizing the Biden administration’s global climate work.

Gunasekara, one of the authors of the Heritage Foundation-sponsored policy roadmap for a second Trump administration known as Project 2025, notes that global carbon emissions have increased since the start of international climate negotiations, which she calls “this bureaucratic U.N. process, where you get caught in this loop of talking about things but not producing a lot of tangible results.” (This is true, although the rate of increase has slowed significantly as a result of policies that are being enacted under the Paris agreement, according to the U.N. Environment Program.)

In Congress, there’s enough skepticism of that international process that Biden has not been able to get lawmakers to fulfill Obama’s original $3 billion pledge to help developing countries respond to climate change. The U.S. and other developed nations remain far short of the $100 billion per year they pledged to mobilize by 2020.

Harris took on this challenge last year on a climate diplomacy trip to Africa. “The Vice President was really focused on making sure that we are kind of reframing the narrative of how the U.S. works alongside Africa,” said her former staffer. “She wanted to focus her trip on the opportunity that Africa presents for both the people of Africa and for the U.S., that it is a forward-looking exciting story, that there was so much potential there.”

Harris made fundraising phone calls herself to businesses she already knew, such as Mastercard, with whom she was working on fostering better access to the digital economy. Mastercard was one of 27 businesses and philanthropies that agreed to commit a total of $7 billion to climate resilience, adaptation and mitigation in Africa, Harris announced after landing in Zambia in March 2023.

“The Vice President was really focused on making sure that we are kind of reframing the narrative of how the U.S. works alongside Africa.”

True to her practice of seeking to showcase real-world benefits, Harris made the announcement at Panuka Farm near the capital of Lusaka—a 100-percent solar operation run by development finance expert-turned-farmer Bruno Mweemba. In a nation rapidly losing forest to agricultural expansion, Mweemba seeks to run his farm as a model for how the thousands of smallholder farmers in Zambia can increase their productivity without taking up more land, even with the challenges of climate change.

Panuka (from the Tonga word for “being clever”) uses shade nets to protect its English cucumber, lettuce and sweet peppers from severe heat, and rainwater capture systems to cope with alternating heavy downpours and drought. Mweemba said Harris was especially interested in the farm’s use of technology tools, like smartphone apps that can diagnose pests and disease and guide solutions. Some of the private investment from U.S. companies that Harris announced is designed to expand access to such technologies.

“It was a huge opportunity for me to really showcase what I would call the real world on the ground, because I know most of our world leaders spend quite a lot of time in air-conditioned boardrooms,” Mweemba said. “She comes to a real farming enterprise that really interfaces with the realities of some of these global social and economic issues.”

Things have been difficult in Zambia since the vice president’s visit. It is one of six countries in southern Africa that declared national emergencies due to severe drought that has destroyed crops and dried up hydroelectric power. UNICEF estimates 56,000 children in Zambia are at risk of severe acute malnutrition due to what it termed a climate-related crisis. 

“I think she understands,” Mweemba said. “And I really hope, if she gets there, we can see some really good benefits of her understanding trickling down to the common man in Africa and other developing countries.”

Fossil Fuel Decisions Loom Large

While Harris can point to achievements on clean energy investment at home and international engagement abroad, she will face tough questions on the most politically charged climate issue—where she stands on fossil fuel development.

The president’s power to directly restrict drilling is limited; 76 percent of oil and 89 percent of natural gas is produced on private land in the United States. And despite the Biden-Harris administration’s climate policies, both oil and gas production have reached record heights during their term, and the U.S. remains the world’s top oil and gas exporter.

Decisions on fossil fuel projects that the president does have authority over—those on public land and waters or crossing borders—carry outsized political weight.

Biden has taken multiple actions to restrict fossil fuel development. He withdrew the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. He expanded or strengthened protections across 16 million acres in the Arctic and proposed an end to new coal leasing from federal reserves in the Powder River Basin, the nation’s most productive coal mining region. And he designated six new national monuments and expanded two, establishing protection for more than 1.6 million acres of public land.

But two of Biden’s fossil fuel decisions have overshadowed all others: his approval in March 2023 of ConocoPhillips’ massive $8 billion Willow oil-drilling project on Alaska’s remote North Slope, and his decision in January to pause approvals for pending and new applications for facilities to export liquefied natural gas, or LNG.

The LNG moratorium is embroiled in litigation, with a Trump-appointed federal judge last month issuing a stay that the administration is appealing. It’s a hot-button issue for the oil and gas industry, which has been quick to point out that Harris has not yet addressed where she stands. The geopolitical implications are huge, since LNG from the United States has been helping Europe cope with the loss of natural gas supply from Russia since its invasion of Ukraine.

Neil Chatterjee, an energy industry lawyer who chaired the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Trump, argues that Trump’s pro-LNG policy was a boon for Europe. (Many new export terminals were approved during the Trump administration, although most are not yet operational.) Now, he said, Biden’s moratorium has created uncertainty that is chilling investment in the industry, because parties don’t know “if the US is going to turn its back on gas in the future.”

“They’re sending continually mixed signals on what the U.S. posture is towards gas, because I think they’re really teetering between trying to play to their political base and young climate activists, while also trying to balance the needs of the economy,” Chatterjee said.

The moratorium did not seem to improve Biden’s standing with young voters. A CBS News YouGov poll in April showed Biden and Trump essentially tied among voters under 30 on their approach to climate, with most participants selecting “neither.” Many climate politics observers believe the conflict in Israel widened a rift between Biden and young people that had already opened up with the Willow decision.

“Because of Willow, and possibly because of a bad sales job, the Biden administration doesn’t get enough credit for the good things that it’s done,” said Miller, of Climate Hawks Vote. “The LNG pause, in particular, was truly massive. But I would try to explain it to people and I would just get blank stares. Willow became a pop culture moment for the climate movement.”

The lack of enthusiasm for Biden among young people was perilous for the Democrats in November because election data clearly show that higher-than-normal youth turnout helped carry him to victory in 2020.

Biden’s decision to end his re-election run, and Harris’ entry into the race abruptly changed the dynamic of the race, with Harris not only surging ahead of Trump in battleground state polls but garnering endorsements from progressive climate groups had been cool to Biden.

“While Vice President Harris is certainly a part of the administration, and served in this White House with President Biden … I think what we’re seeing is that younger voters are more open to her candidacy and aren’t hanging all of that baggage on her campaign,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist who is chief executive of The Tara Group and senior advisor to the data firm TargetSmart. This “leaves them more open to the level of enthusiasm, excitement, and hope around issues like climate and the environment as someone who could potentially build upon the successes of the first Biden term, and even do more.”

One climate activist who will be eligible to vote for the first time this year, Natalie Bookout, who leads the Charlotte, North Carolina, chapter of the Sunrise Movement, told NBC News, “I want her to be able to set that bar and not just fall into what the Biden administration was doing.”  

Trump and his allies in the fossil fuel industry hope to dampen the enthusiasm of those in the climate movement by cornering Harris into taking stands that would alienate either them or voters in oil and gas-producing states. But the Harris campaign’s statement that she would not ban fracking so far hasn’t shaken activists’ support, reflecting a store of good will that might help her safely navigate the politically perilous questions on how to cut carbon emissions in a nation still so economically tied to fossil fuel.

“The good politicians find a center and they run to it very quickly,” said Kaniela Ing of the Green New Deal Network, who is a former Hawaii state legislator. “So it’s kind of up to us as organizers in the movement to kind of shift where that center is. That’s not to say [politicians] shouldn’t be accountable, but we can’t expect them to stick their neck out so much that they lose.”