What Kind of Climate Candidate Will Kamala Harris Be?
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Earlier this month, TNR’s Kate Aronoff argued that perhaps the best gift President Biden and his team could give the planet would be to step aside. “The Biden administration has almost certainly done more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than any of its predecessors,” she wrote. But sticking with a “struggling” candidate unlikely to win in November would be a “catastrophe”—not just because it might hand the White House to Donald Trump, who has already promised to reverse Biden’s climate policies, but because Democrats would trash their credibility with younger voters, making it harder to pass robust climate policy for years to come.
Now Biden has stepped aside, passing the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. That Harris would be a more pro-climate president than Trump is pretty clear—even to senior Republicans and Trump alums. But just how pro-climate would she be?
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.
Ultimately, it might be Harris’s time as senator that proves most tantalizing to those dedicated to the fine political art of tea-leaf scrutiny. Harris supported numerous pieces of environmental legislation during her time in the Senate—the Los Angeles Times points to the Clean School Bus Act of 2019, the Water Justice Act of 2019, and her support for limiting PFAS and lead exposure, among others. She was also one of the original co-sponsors of the Green New Deal.
While the Biden administration has pursued policies aligned with the Green New Deal, Biden himself has typically refrained from letting those three words pass his lips, much as he’s often retreated into euphemism when it comes to abortion. There’s clearly a difference of some degree between Harris and Biden when it comes to language and rhetoric. Only time will tell what difference there might be in substance.
Good News/Bad News
Water use in California’s urban areas is down 9 percent since the last drought emergency, the Los Angeles Times reports. A caveat: This falls short of Governor Newsom’s goal of a 15 percent cut in urban water use. A much bigger caveat: Urban water use is, itself, a bit of a red herring. The amount of water consumed by agriculture is roughly four times higher than that for urban residential needs, and that’s a much tougher nut to crack, politically. While shifting away from thirsty crops like alfalfa (for cattle), almonds, and fruit could cut water consumption by 93 percent, researchers recently found, replacement crops wouldn’t be as profitable.
As news broke that the world’s average temperature for a single day had climbed to the highest ever recorded on Sunday and then smashed that record again on Monday, research firm Rhodium Group released a report finding that, even with the Inflation Recovery Act’s infusion of cash into green energy and energy efficiency, the U.S. is falling short of its pledge to cut emissions 50 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2030.
Stat of the Week
40%
That’s how many active ingredients in U.S. pesticides are actually PFAS, according to new research contradicting Environmental Protection Agency claims. PFAS are extremely long-lasting chemicals that have been linked to liver damage, immune system disruption, hormonal disruption, obesity, and some forms of cancer, to name a few possible health effects. “The researchers also obtained documents,” The Guardian
reports, “that suggest the EPA hid some findings that show PFAS in pesticides.”
What I’m Reading
Global warming is opening up new habitat for mosquitoes and the diseases they transmit. And one particular species is now threatening Africa:
A mosquito native to Asia has found a new home on the planet’s second-largest continent—and, as a prime carrier of the parasite that causes malaria, poses an increased public health threat to nearly 130 million people.
The mosquito—the notorious Anopheles stephensi—is not only adaptable, but it also bears a striking resemblance to most other insects in its genus, making it difficult for researchers, government officials and just about anyone else to determine which bug is which.
That is, until earlier this year. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that they have developed a new test that allows for the rapid identification of the disease-transmitting insect, giving communities where the mosquito is migrating a chance to move quickly to eradicate it and address potential malaria infections.
Read Victoria St. Martin’s full report at Inside Climate News.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
