Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

What Climate World Wants From a Harris-Walz Administration

Three possible policy agendas.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

If Vice President Kamala Harris is elected president in November — as is looking increasingly likely — her term will last until the beginning of 2029. At that point, we’ll have a much better idea whether the planet is on track to hit the 1.5 degrees Celsius climate threshold that some expect it to cross that year; we’ll also know whether the United States is likely to meet the first goal of the Inflation Reduction Act: to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions to half of 2005 levels by 2030.

There is a lot riding on the outcome of the 2024 election, then. But even more to the point, there is a lot riding on how, and how aggressively, Harris extends President Biden’s climate policies. Last week, I spoke to nine different climate policy experts about what’s on their wishlists for a potential Harris-Walz administration and encountered resounding excitement about the opportunities ahead. I also encountered nine different opinions on how, exactly, Harris should capitalize on those opportunities, should she wind up in the White House come January.

That said, the ideas I heard largely coalesced into three main avenues of approach: The first would see Harris use her position to shore up the country’s existing climate policies, doubling down on spending and addressing loopholes in the IRA. A second path would involve aggressively expanding on Biden’s legacy, mainly through major new investments. The final and most ambitious path would involve Harris approaching climate change and the energy transition with an original and bold vision for the years ahead (though your priorities may vary).

The policy proposals that fall under these loosely organized paths aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and, as you’ll see, some of the advocate’s proposals fall into multiple categories. But it’s also true that by making everything a priority, nothing is. With that in mind, here are three approaches climate insiders say Harris could take if she wins the White House in November.

Harris should finish the job Biden started

  • Continue building on what has already been accomplished
  • Ensure permitting reform gets across the line
  • Address existing regulatory uncertainties
  • Make sure policies like the Justice 40 Initiative are working the way they’re supposed to

Before jumping headlong into expanding the country’s climate policies, the Harris administration could start by shoring up existing legislation — mainly, the loopholes and oversights in the Inflation Reduction Act. “The IRA was the biggest climate investment in history and fundamentally changed the emissions trajectory of the U.S — but the work is not done,” Adrian Deveny, founder of the decarbonization strategy group Climate Vision who previously worked on the IRA as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s director of energy and environmental policy, told me.

As things stand, the policies in the IRA alone won’t be enough to meet President Biden’s goal of halving the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; to do that, the U.S. would “need to pass another IRA-sized bill,” Deveny said. Until that happens, filling the IRA’s emissions gaps will take a lot of work “in every sector of the economy,” he added.

Lena Moffitt, the executive director of Evergreen Action — which has already released a comprehensive 2025 climate roadmap for a Harris administration — told me that the task of “doubling down on Biden’s climate legacy as a job creator” will run through rebuilding and expanding the grid and revitalizing industry and rural economies, two projects that started in the IRA but remain incomplete. “We’d love to see a day one executive order from the White House outlining a plan to create American jobs and seize the mantle of leadership by building clean energy and clean tech in the United States,” she told me.

Permitting reform is part of that — and could be another piece of yet-unfinished business Harris will need to wrap up. “If that doesn’t get done this year, that is what we have to look to as soon as possible during a future Harris administration,” Harry Godfrey, who leads Advanced Energy United's Federal Investment and Manufacturing Working Group, told me.

That’s not the only regulatory matter still up in the air. Austin Whitman, the CEO of The Climate Change Project, a non-profit that offers climate certification labeling and helps businesses reduce their emissions, told me that the Federal Trade Commission, for example, still hasn’t updated its green guides — “a loose collection of recommendations to companies on how to behave to not violate the FTC Act” — since 2012. “We just need a clear timeline and a sense of direction of where that whole process is going,” Whitman told me. Additionally, he said that the government has a substantial and outstanding role to play in standardizing and streamlining emissions reporting practices for businesses — which, while perhaps not “very sexy,” are necessary to “relieve the administrative burden so companies can focus on decarbonization.”

The last piece: Make sure everything that’s already in place is actually working. “We’re seeing that states and local governments need additional capacity to manage [the IRA] money well,” Jillian Blanchard, the director of Lawyers For Good Government’s climate change program, told me. Harris could help by enacting “more tangible policies like granting federal funding to hire community engagement specialists or liaisons or paying for the time of community leaders to provide local governments with key information on where the communities are that need to be benefited, and what they need.” She also floated the idea of a Community Change Grant extension to help get federal funding to localities more directly.

Harris should go bigger — on everything

  • Make investments in high-impact sectors
  • Fund more Climate Pollution Reduction Grants
  • Funnel additional resources into the states
  • Reinstate the U.S. as a global leader on climate

“One of the criticisms of the Inflation Reduction Act is that it didn’t do ‘X’ — whatever ‘X’ is,” Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon and a former senior White House energy official, told me. “And in reality, it probably did. It just didn’t do it big enough.”

As opposed to those who thought Harris should take a quieter, dare I say conservative approach to advancing the U.S. climate agenda, Samaras told me he wanted to see Harris pump up the volume. The current climate moment requires “attacking the places where we need to immediately make big emissions cuts and big resilience investments. This is the industrial sector, the cultural sector, heavy transportation, as well as making sure that our cities and communities are built for people.”

There are plenty of existing programs that could take some supersizing. Godfrey of Advanced Energy United brought up the home energy rebate programs, arguing that as things stand, those resources are only serving “a fraction of the eligible population.” Blanchard of Lawyers For Good Government also pointed out that the Environmental Protection Agency had almost 300 Climate Pollution Reduction Grant applications totaling more than $30 billion in requests — but only $4.3 billion to hand out. “There are local governments, state governments, tribal nations, and territories hungry for this money to implement clean energy projects,” she said. “There are plans that are ready to go if there are additional federal award dollars in the future.”

Another place Harris could expand on Biden’s legacy would be by reinstating the U.S. as a climate leader on the world stage. “We need to say, ‘climate is back on the table,’” Whitman of The Climate Change Project told me. “It’s a main course, and we’re going to talk about it” — something that would give us “a more credible seat at the negotiating table at the COPs.”

Perhaps most importantly, though, Harris needs to use her term to start looking toward the future. As Deveny of Climate Vision told me, “We designed the IRA to think about meeting our 2030 target. And now we have to think about 2035.” Looking ahead isn’t “just about extending policies,” in other words, but about anticipating new technologies and opportunities that could arise in the next decade — and Harris, if elected, should step up to the challenge.

Harris needs a bold, original vision

  • Start an “industrial renaissance”
  • Make polluters pay
  • Invest trillions into transforming every part of the economy

Some believe Harris shouldn’t limit herself to the framework of the IRA as it exists now — that she needs to dream bigger and better than anything seen under the Biden administration. “The question is: Are we going to just ride the coattails of the IRA as if this problem is mostly solved? Or are we going to put forward a whole new, bold vision of how we can take things on?” Saul Levin, the political director of the Green New Deal Network, wondered to me.

According to Deveny of Climate Vision, that means continuing to build on “our industrial renaissance.”

“We have really awakened a sleeping giant of clean industrial manufacturing in this country to make solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries,” he explained. “We can also lead the world in clean industrial manufacturing for steel, cement, and other heavy industry projects.” Samaras of Carnegie Mellon, too, shared this vision. “By the end of a potential Harris Administration first term, the path to zero emissions should be visible everywhere,” he told me. Also on his wishlist were “abundant energy-efficient and affordable housing, accessible clean mobility infrastructure everywhere, schools and post offices as community clean energy and resilience hubs, and climate-smart agriculture and nature-based solutions across the country,” plus greater investment in adaptation.

“The fact is that both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act are the largest investments in resilience we’ve ever done,” he said. But “we have to think about it the same way we have to think about mitigation,” he went on. “It’s the largest thing we’ve ever done — comma, so far.”

One of the biggest openings for Harris to distinguish herself from Biden, though, would be by taking a tougher tone with big polluters. Biden had shown less of an appetite for going after businesses, several times kicking the can down the road on a decision to what would have been his second term. Harris, by contrast, is well positioned with her background as a prosecutor and already went as far as to call for a “climate pollution fee” and the creation of an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice and Accountability during her 2019-2020 campaign.

“We love seeing her already reference from the stump that there is a lot that she can do with Congress or through the executive branch to hold polluters accountable for the toll that they have taken on families and our climate,” Moffitt of Evergreen Action told me. “That could look like a host of things, from repealing subsidies to using the Department of Justice to hold polluters accountable.” Maria Langholz, the senior director of Arc Initiatives, a strategy group that works with climate-related organizations, told me in an email that her team would also like to see the Harris administration revoke the presidential permit for Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline as high, in addition to developing a public interest determination “that fully addresses the social, environmental, and economic impacts of LNG.”

But Levin, more than anyone else, wanted to see Harris pursue a “moonshot campaign from day one,” he said. “Hoping that tweaking the IRA is an appropriate solution to climate change is totally out of step with mainstream scientific consensus. It’s absolutely ridiculous. At the end of the day, we need to fundamentally transform our economy so that all people can survive climate change.” To have a prayer of meeting the IRA’s climate goals — let alone putting a meaningful dent in America’s contribution to global emissions — the U.S. must “invest trillions of dollars in transforming our transportation system, our building sector, our food and agriculture sector, and every part of the economy so that we can create a livable, sustainable world forever that works for everyone.”

Green

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

AM Briefing: China Relents on Rare Earths

On resuming rare earth shipments, hurricane tracking, and EV tax credits

The U.S. and China Have Reached a Trade Deal
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: The Ohio Valley is still sweltering through the last remnants of this week’s brutal heat wave • The death toll from recent floods in South Africa has risen to 101 • It’s 90 degrees in Venice, Italy, where the world’s rich and famous are gathering for the wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez.

THE TOP FIVE

1. U.S. and China finalize trade deal

The U.S. and China have hammered out the details of a trade deal, including an agreement that China will resume rare earth shipments to the U.S. Rare earth materials are essential for everything from planes to EVs to wind turbines. China controls most of the world’s rare earth production and halted exports in April in response to President Trump’s tariff hike, and China’s chokehold on rare earths threatened to derail trade talks between the two countries altogether. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said a deal has now been “signed and sealed.” “They’re going to deliver rare earths to us,” Lutnick said, adding that the U.S. will then “take down our countermeasures.” Lutnick also indicated that Trump plans to announce further trade deals with other nations in the coming two weeks.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Q&A

How the Wind Industry Can Fight Back

A conversation with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications

The Q&A subject.
Heatmap Illustration

Today’s conversation is with Chris Moyer of Echo Communications, a D.C.-based communications firm that focuses on defending zero- and low-carbon energy and federal investments in climate action. Moyer, a veteran communications adviser who previously worked on Capitol Hill, has some hot takes as of late about how he believes industry and political leaders have in his view failed to properly rebut attacks on solar and wind energy, in addition to the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday he sent an email blast out to his listserv – which I am on – that boldly declared: “The Wind Industry’s Strategy is Failing.”

Of course after getting that email, it shouldn’t surprise readers of The Fight to hear I had to understand what he meant by that, and share it with all of you. So here goes. The following conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for clarity.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Hotspots

A New York Town Bans Both Renewable Energy And Data Centers

And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Chautauqua, New York – More rural New York towns are banning renewable energy.

  • Chautauqua, a vacation town in southern New York, has now reportedly issued a one-year moratorium on wind projects – though it’s not entirely obvious whether a wind project is in active development within its boundaries, and town officials have confessed none are being planned as of now.
  • Apparently, per local press, this temporary ban is tied to a broader effort to update the town’s overall land use plan to “manage renewable energy and other emerging high-impact uses” – and will lead to an ordinance that restricts data centers as well as solar and wind projects.
  • I anticipate this strategy where towns update land use plans to target data centers and renewables at the same time will be a lasting trend.

2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project will learn its fate under the Trump administration by this fall, after a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department must come to a decision on how it’ll handle a court challenge against its permits by September.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow