Why Climate World Loves Kamala

Kamala Harris quickly rang up endorsements from Democratic elected officials and convention delegates Sunday afternoon after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign, making Vice President Harris the likeliest Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States. Many of these plaudits came from figures in the climate policy space, but few were quite as vociferous as the one from Gina McCarthy, a director of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama and White House climate advisor under Biden.

“Vice President Harris would kick ass against Trump,” she said in a statement. “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.”

When Harris has had the chance to formulate climate action on her own — as the attorney general of California, as a U.S. senator, as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 — it has tended to be aggressive in its timelines for decarbonization and heavily focused on the harms that fossil fuel extraction and processing inflict on marginalized communities.

As vice president, however, she has been subsumed into the rollout of both the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. In some cases, the programs she’s pitched and praised have an organic connection to her own personal policy work — a grant program for electric school buses, for instance, the launch of which was the source of one of her more enduring Kamala-isms: “Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus?”

Assuming she wins the party’s nomination and then, finally, the White House, a Kamala Harris climate agenda would no doubt look much like Biden’s. To people who’ve been paying attention all along, however, there’s no reason to think she couldn’t push the country even more zealously toward decarbonizing.

For one, there’s the historical record. Harris not only endorsed Green New Deal legislation in 2019, she also put out a climate plan during her campaign that included $10 trillion of public and private spending and called for reaching net-zero by 2045, achieving a carbon neutral electric grid by 2030, no new fossil fuel leasing on public lands, and a carbon pollution fee. While expansive, Harris’s plan was not the work of someone like Jay Inslee, who has legislated on climate for years, or Bernie Sanders, who was willing to simply outbid his fellow candidates on progressive policy, but her climate policy was the process of consulting with climate activists. In fact, her team had reached out to Inslee’s after he dropped out for advice on climate, Jamal Raad, Inslee’s campaign communications director, told me.

“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 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.”

Where she did stand out in the Senate, on the campaign trail, and in the Biden administration was in her focus on environmental justice, an issue combining green politics and racial justice that she used to reach out to the party’s left wing. By the time the she was picked to be President Biden’s vice presidential nominee, she had won the praise of both the youth-led Sunrise Movement (which has since protested outside her Southern California home and notably withheld its support from Biden during his reelection campaign) and Evergreen Action, a climate policy group built by former Inslee staffers. “She made environmental justice central to her climate plans on the presidential campaign,” said Raad, an Evergreen Action cofounder.

In the summer of 2019, she joined up with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a bill that would have required all climate-related legislation to undergo a review of its effect on “frontline communities,” those living adjacent to energy-related facilities, which tend to be disproportionately populated by poor people of color, and created offices of climate equity within the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget.

While this particular piece of legislation went nowhere, the motivating ideas have been all over the Biden-Harris White House’s policy agenda — in tax benefits directed toward projects in “energy communities;” in the Justice40 Initiative, which aims to direct 40% of climate and related spending to flow toward disadvantaged communities; and in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a.k.a. “green banks,” aimed at making climate-friendly investing more affordable.

That’s all great, Raad told me. But he also added, “What’s more relevant has been how central she’s made climate in her vice presidency as one of her top priorities.” Harris reached out to Raad and others in the run-up to the IRA’s passage, he said. “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.”

Whatever her policy priorities as president, they would have to fit between the lines of what would be, at best, narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress, limited by the filibuster and reconciliation process, along with large policy shifts that any new administration will have to deal with, such as the expiration of key portions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2025. It will be a far distance from the heady days of the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, when Harris eagerly participated in a bidding war between the candidates for the most aggressive and expansive climate program — less Frank Capra, more Alan J. Pakula.

“The reality is that the climate movement should focus as much, if not more, on creating the conditions that force politicians to act on climate as we do pushing for candidates with a hawkish climate policy platform to begin with,” Guay told me. “That was the greatest lesson from the Joe Biden era. He was no climate hawk when he entered the 2020 primaries,” but thanks to decades of unrelenting pressure and calls for more policy ambition, “he emerged the most powerful climate president we’ve ever had.”

Raad, too, emphasized the importance of realpolitik at this point in history. Having a president willing to put herself on the line for climate policy is important — “even if we don’t get major legislation done,” he told me. “We need to make sure the IRA is implemented effectively in the fullest way possible. We need a very careful eye towards writing regulations that are as effective as possible so they’re not getting overturned by Federalist Society judges.” Getting money out the door will be key, he said, “and that’s why we need an advocate in the White House.”

With assistance from Jeva Lange and Robinson Meyer.