As Joe if not bettert
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He
endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place. “Today I want to
offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party
this year,” he said in another statement. Not long
after, Harris announced via the Biden campaign that she intends to run for
president. “I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention
is to earn and win this nomination,” she said.
During
his term, President Biden managed to shepherd a surprising number of major
policies into law with a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate. His
crowning achievement is signing the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — the
biggest climate spending law in U.S. history, with the potential to help reduce
greenhouse gas emissions up to 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. While
announcing his withdrawal, Biden called it “the most significant climate
legislation in the history of the world.”
Despite his legislative successes, the 81-year-old Democrat couldn’t weather widespread blowback following a debate performance in June in which he appeared frail and struck many in his party as ill-equipped to lead the country for another four years. He will leave office with a portion of his proposed climate agenda unpassed and the U.S. still projected to miss his administration’s goal of reducing emissions at least 50 percent by 2030.
Former
president Donald Trump has vowed to undo many of the policies Biden
accomplished if he becomes president, including parts of the IRA. And scores of
his key advisors and former members of his presidential administration
contributed to a blueprint that advocates for
scrapping the vast majority of the nation’s climate and environmental
protections. Whichever Democrat runs against Trump has a weighty mandate:
protect America’s already tenuous climate and environmental legacy from
Republican attacks.
With
Biden’s endorsement, Vice President Harris, a former
U.S. senator from California, is the favored Democratic nominee, but
that doesn’t mean she will automatically get the nomination. There are fewer
than 30 days until the Democratic National Convention on August 19. The
thousands of Democratic delegates who already cast their votes for Biden will
either decide on a nominee before the convention, or hold an open convention to
find their new candidate — something that hasn’t been done since 1968.
As vice president, Harris argued for the allocation of $20 billion for the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, aimed at aiding disadvantaged communities facing climate impacts. She also frequently promoted the IRA at events, touting the bill’s investments in clean energy jobs, including installation of energy-efficient lighting and replacing gas furnaces with electric heat pumps.
She was the highest-ranking U.S. official to attend the
international climate talks at COP28 in Dubai last year, where she
announced a U.S. commitment to double energy efficiency and triple renewable
energy capacity by 2030. At that same conference, Harris announced a $3 billion commitment to
the Green Climate Fund to help developing nations adapt to climate challenges,
although Politico reported that the sum was
“subject to the availability of funds,” according to the Treasury Department.
“Vice
President Harris has been integral to the Biden administration’s most important
climate accomplishments and has a long track record as an impactful climate
champion,” Evergreen Action, the climate-oriented political group, said in a
statement.
Harris
caught some flak for using a potentially overstated “$1 trillion over 10 years” figure to
describe the Biden administration’s climate investments. She got that sum
from adding up all of the administration’s major
investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely
connected to climate change.
As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris proposed a $10 trillion climate plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 on the campaign trail, including 100 percent carbon-neutral electricity by 2030. Under the plan, 50 percent of new vehicles sold would be zero-emission by 2030, and 100 percent of cars by 2035. But that proposal, like similarly ambitious climate change proposals released by other Democrats during that election cycle, was nothing more than a campaign wishlist.
A better indicator of what her plans for climate change as president
would look like — better, even, than her record as vice president, since much
of her agenda was set by the Biden administration — could be buried in her
record as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011 and as
California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017.
As
district attorney, Harris created an environmental justice unit
to address environmental crimes affecting San Francisco’s poorest residents
and prosecuted several companies,
including U-Haul, for violation of hazardous waste laws. Harris later touted
her environmental justice unit as the first such unit in the country. An investigation found the unit only
filed a handful of lawsuits, though, and none of them were against the city’s
major industrial polluters.
As
attorney general, Harris secured an $86 million settlement from Volkswagen for
rigging its vehicles with emissions-cheating software and investigated Exxon
Mobil over its climate change disclosures. She also filed a civil lawsuit against Phillips
66 and Conoco Phillips for environmental violations at gas stations, which
eventually resulted in an $11.5 million settlement. And she conducted a criminal investigation of
an oil company over a 2015 spill in Santa Barbara. The company was found guilty
and convicted on nine criminal charges.
“We
must do more,” Harris said late last year at the
climate summit in Dubai. “Our action collectively, or worse, our inaction, will
impact billions of people for decades to come.”
Clayton
Aldern contributed writing and reporting to this article.
This
article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/what-would-a-kamala-harris-presidency-mean-for-the-climate/. Sign
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