What If Kamala Harris Is Wrong About Voters’ Climate Views?

Several outlets have already tried to answer this question by looking at her history. As vice president, in addition to promoting the administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, “Harris argued for the allocation of $20 billion for the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, aimed at aiding disadvantaged communities facing climate impacts,” Grist’s Zoya Teirstein writes, and “was the highest-ranking U.S. official to attend the international climate talks at COP28 in Dubai last year,” where she announced new U.S. pledges for green energy and climate adaptation funds for poorer countries. But that, as Teirstein points out, doesn’t indicate much, as it goes along with the V.P. role.

One could also look to Harris’s platform for the 2019 primaries. That’s not the best indicator, either: 2019 was “pretty near peak-Greta,” observes writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben, referring to climate activist Greta Thunberg, and Harris was pitching herself specifically to Democrats. But that said, Harris did differ from Biden in backing a fracking ban. And there’s some reason to believe she meant it. The New York Times noted this week that in 2016, as California attorney general, Harris sued the Obama-Biden administration over fracking approvals off the state’s coast.

This wasn’t the only environmental case Harris pursued as attorney general, or as San Francisco district attorney before that. While the environmental justice unit she created in San Francisco “only filed a handful of lawsuits,” and not particularly significant ones, Teirstein writes, Harris did found the unit. She also secured several settlements for environmental cases against Chevron, BP, and Volkswagen and investigated whether ExxonMobil lied to shareholders about the risks from climate change.