Primary Author: Mitchell Beer
The next president of the United States could be a confirmed climate hawk who supported the Green New Deal, ran lawsuits against oil and gas companies, sponsored climate equity legislation, and lent her support to a “first-ever international coalition to manage the transition away from fossil fuel production,” after Vice President Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the odds-on favourite to win the Democratic nomination in this fall’s general election.
Harris, a former district attorney, state attorney general, and U.S. senator from California who attended Montreal’s Westmount High School from 1978 to 1981, began assembling key endorsements and raised an eye-watering US$81 million in donations in the first 24 hours after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign Sunday afternoon.
That tally exceeded the $72 million Biden brought in in the first three months of 2023, when he launched his re-election campaign, and far exceeded the $53 million that Donald Trump collected following his felony conviction in May.
The Harris campaign “said that 888,000 donors had contributed in her first day, 60% of whom were making their first contribution of the 2024 contest,” the New York Times reports. “The funds will help rebuild a Democratic war chest that was at risk of being depleted in the weeks of uncertainty after President Biden’s poor debate, as big donors put a pause on fundraising.”
The Democrats said they’d also heard from 28,000 first-time volunteers after Biden withdrew and endorsed Harris. “That is more than 100 times the daily average,” the Times writes.
Biden’s departure pushed Trump into a “nuclear-level meltdown” on his self-styled Truth Social online network, Rolling Stone reports. The wannabe golf pro and failed real estate magnate “complained that he had been unfairly forced to spend money campaigning against Biden, and even suggested that ‘the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud’ now that he wouldn’t be running against the president,” the news story states. “In another post, he suggested that Biden was faking a recent COVID-19 diagnosis. The rant extended into the early hours of Monday morning, when Trump accused Democrats of having stolen the nomination from Biden.”
Multiple news reports noted that, with Biden out of the race, Trump will now be the oldest presidential nominee in American history, and a potential focal point for concerns about candidates with diminished capacity to serve as president.
In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s announcement, there were calls for a short, intense primary before the Democratic Party holds its nominating convention in August, to give grassroot voters a more direct say in the process and head off any perception that Harris was simply anointed by party brass. Former president Barack Obama was among the party leaders calling for an open convention.
But within 24 hours, potential challengers like Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, as well as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, had all pledged their support to Harris. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the Congressional Black Caucus have done the same.
“My view is this is a competitive process—she’s just winning it,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). “I have never, ever seen the Internet so ablaze with positivity and enthusiasm.”
By Monday evening, Harris had locked up the support of the majority of convention delegates, the Washington Post reports. Her campaign had been hoping to hit that milestone by Wednesday evening, Reuters says.
The New York Times profiles the “tight-knit group of female donors” who’ve been beside Harris for decades and worked over the last few weeks “to make sure her historic campaign would not be built on the fly.” In North Carolina, more than 44,000 Black women logged on to Zoom to attend a four-hour organizing call in a state that Biden lost by a narrow margin in 2020 and had hoped to win this year. They raised $1.5 million for Harris’ campaign, said Win With Black Women founder Jokata Eaddy.
Eaddy told the Washington Post she initially organized the session as a regular Sunday evening call, expecting no more than 1,500 participants. “But she realized something was different around 2 p.m., when she got a message that 50 people were in the Zoom waiting room. The call was set to start at 8:30 p.m.,” the Post recounts. “By 7:50 p.m., the Zoom was at capacity with 1,000 people. Members contacted Zoom, which moved the group to a webinar, giving them unlimited capacity to expand their attendees.”
“I am forever grateful to the leadership of Zoom for what they did,” Eaddy said.
“Anybody that does not think that Black and Brown women are the backbone of this party, they don’t know us,” lawyer and former TV talk show host Star Jones. told the Post. “[Harris] has already been leading by example. We are going to support her, we’re going to raise money for her, and we’re going to get out the vote for her.”
Bloomberg News has a rundown on Harris’ political career and her potential running mates, as well as a now-out of date list of possible challengers for the presidential nomination. Politico compares and contrasts Harris’ positions with Biden’s on a range of issues, including climate change, and Popular Information has a guide to the political attacks that Harris will encounter on the campaign trail. Vox and multiple other news outlets are recapping some less-than-stellar moments from her past campaigns, including at least one purported gaffe on its way to becoming a popular meme.
‘The Clock Isn’t Just Ticking’
The too-easy narrative as the U.S. general election approaches is the prosecutor vs. the felon, or the cop vs. the perp. In her first campaign appearance Monday, Harris herself said her law enforcement background would help her win against a convicted criminal, the NewYork Times reports.
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
But there’s more.
After prosecuting polluters in California and sponsoring the Green New Deal as a U.S. senator, “Harris is widely expected to try to protect the climate achievements of the Biden administration, a position that could resonate with voters during a summer of record heat,” the Times says. “A clear majority of Americans, 65%, wants the country to focus on increasing solar, wind, and other renewable energy and not fossil fuels,” based on a May, 2024 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.
News reports over the last day recount Harris:
• Calling for a $10-trillion increase in climate spending over a decade;
• Endorsing a carbon-neutral grid by 2030;
• Allowing no new fossil fuel leasing on public lands;
• Supporting a ban on hydraulic fracking and opposing offshore oil and gas drilling;
• Backing the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its campaign against the controversial Dakota Access pipeline;
• Establishing the United States’ first environmental justice unit when she was San Francisco district attorney;
• Joining Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to introduce legislation requiring government to consider the impact of environmental rules on low-income communities;
• Calling for a price on carbon, with a dividend returned directly to households, or a “climate pollution fee” to “make polluters pay for emitting greenhouse gases into our atmosphere”;
• Pledging to convene major climate polluters and “initiate the first-ever international coalition to manage the transition away from fossil fuel production”, in what amounted to an early call for a managed decline for oil, gas, and coal.
“Crimes against the environment are crimes against communities, people who are often poor and disenfranchised,” Harris said in 2005. “The people who live in those communities often have no other choice but to live there.”
When she represented the U.S. at last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, the Times recalls, Harris told world leaders that “the urgency of this moment is clear. The clock is no longer just ticking, it is banging. And we must make up for lost time.”
Times climate reporter Lisa Friedman interprets that line as a “subtle reference” to Trump pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement when he was in the Oval Office, and his promise to do it again if he gets the chance.
At COP 28, Harris also announced a $3-billion U.S. commitment to the United Nations Green Climate Fund, Grist recalls, though Politico reported at the time that the pledge was subject to available funds.
Well Beyond Biden
All of which suggests a Harris presidency could push well beyond the legacy of Biden’s climate policies. “To people who’ve been paying attention all along,” Heatmap reports, “there’s no reason to think she couldn’t push the country even more zealously toward decarbonizing.”
On their HEATED newsletter, climate journalists Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson recall the moment in 2016 when Harris, as California attorney general, sued the Obama administration over oil and gas fracking. The administration “had just finalized plans to allow oil companies to resume offshore hydraulic fracking and acidizing in the Santa Barbara Channel, determining the controversial practices posed ‘no significant impact’ to the local environment or global climate.”
The arguments in the lawsuit “ultimately helped environmental groups convince a federal judge to pause all new Pacific offshore fracking,” HEATED adds. “The injunction remains in place to this day, infuriating the likes of ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, who tried and failed to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn it.”
More recently, “if we jump in the Wayback Machine, [Harris] was one of the most ambitious presidential candidates in the 2020 primary cycle,” Justin Guay, program director at Quadrature Climate Foundation, told Heatmap. “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.”
Since then, “what’s more relevant has been how central she’s made climate in her vice presidency as one of her top priorities,” said Jamal Raad, former campaign communications director Washington State Governor Jay Inslee. In support of Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, “she held a town hall. She barnstormed the country. As far as folks wanting further momentum in the next presidency, that’s the more relevant development—that she wanted to be associated with climate action.”
‘Kicking Ass Against Trump’
The most recent polling has shown Harris narrowly outperforming Biden in a general election, but still trailing Trump by a couple of percentage points. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, two of the half-dozen or so swing states in the election, she polls better than Biden with “Black voters, younger voters, and women—all groups that Democrats need in order to be successful this fall,” the New York Times writes. “And, importantly, those are groups where Mr. Biden appeared to be losing ground.”
But in the early hours of a roughly 100-day run to the November 5 vote, there’s optimism that Harris can win against an opponent who has promised to burn U.S. climate policy to the ground, arm-twisted fossil fuel executives for $1 billion in campaign donations that would have brought them an estimated $110-billion return on investment, and had multiple former staffers working on a governing blueprint, Project 2025, that would fundamentally transform the country. Analysts at Wood Mackenzie said a Trump win would cost the country $1 trillion in clean energy investment, and an early projection by Carbon Brief had him adding four billion tonnes of climate pollution to U.S. emissions by 2030.
Investigative climate journalist Amy Westervelt is out this morning with a rundown of the 900-page Project 2025 manifesto and its architects’ plans for environmental deregulation in the U.S.
Against that self-documented risk, “Vice President Harris would kick ass against Trump,” said Gina McCarthy, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who served as national climate advisor to Biden. “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.”
Harris could also be instrumental in winning back the support of at least one key voting constituency that had slipped beyond Biden’s reach.
“One of the big reasons recent polls showed [Trump] ahead of Biden is the drop in young people supporting the Democratic ticket,” Politico reports. “Voters under 30 backed Biden by more than 20 points in the last election. But this year, poll after poll showed young voters equally split between Trump and Biden, or even breaking for the Republican.”
But with her endorsement of the Green New Deal, her support for a fracking ban, and her record of suing Big Oil, “there’s reason to believe Harris could woo them back.”
Harris’ position on the war in Gaza could also help differentiate her from Biden and win back the youth vote. Biden’s support for Israel and denunciation of college protests calling for a ceasefire “has alienated the youth-heavy green groups that in 2020 helped power his campaign to victory,” Politico says. “Harris, on the other hand, has been seen as more critical of Israel. She called for a ceasefire before Biden did, and she has emphasized the ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ facing civilians in Gaza.”
“The Venn diagram of young people who want climate action and young people who want a ceasefire is basically a circle,” Elise Joshi, executive director of Gen Z for Change, told Politico.
This article first appeared in The Energy Mix, and is republished under a Creative Commons license.
