The News
As US Vice President Kamala Harris opens her campaign against Donald Trump, her green track record represents both one of her biggest assets and greatest liabilities.
During US President Joe Biden’s term, she has been a champion of the Inflation Reduction Act and a driving force behind aspects of the legislation that promote environmental justice and direct financial support for the energy transition to marginalized communities. In her prior jobs as a senator and California’s attorney general, she staked out an even more activist, left-leaning stance on climate and energy than Biden himself. In particular, she was willing to directly attack Big Oil in a way that Biden, to the frustration of progressives, never would.
Yet to win over a majority of Americans and succeed her boss, she may need to keep her distance from some of the positions that made her most popular with climate activists, and to strike an even more delicate balance on fossil fuels.
“Campaigning is one thing and governing is another,” said Kevin Book, managing director of the consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners. “Presidencies tend to be shaped by circumstances, the calendar, and the courts, and all three of these things pushed the Biden-Harris agenda towards the center compared to the 2020 campaign’s green moorings.”
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Tim’s view
As president, Harris would inherit a huge amount of momentum behind the US clean energy manufacturing boom, and would likely push for even more taxpayer support. But she would also inherit record-breaking oil and gas production, and a world of consumers and industry leaders not ready to pull the plug on fossil fuels just yet.
When Biden won the presidency, he threaded this needle by maintaining the “all-of-the-above”-type energy rhetoric that Barack Obama initiated. Biden’s climate policy was all about carrots, not sticks, a decision that helped keep it from getting snarled in court. Will Harris be willing to bring back the sticks? In the 2020 presidential primary she supported a ban on fracking, but reversed that position once she was on Team Biden, suggesting a willingness to compromise on more adversarial climate policies.
“She walked away from some positions once she joined the administration, and I think is sophisticated enough to appreciate the formula for how President Biden won the election and has kept large parts of industrial America and purple states in the Biden coalition,” said Sasha Mackler, executive director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank. “I would expect her to continue with that Biden approach.”
The most high-stakes issue on which she’ll need to choose whether or not to break with Biden and return to her roots is on legal liability for oil companies. As AG, she won numerous multimillion-dollar settlements against oil and utility companies for leaking storage tanks and other conventional pollution. She investigated ExxonMobil for misleading the public about climate change, although she never brought a suit. And in the 2020 primary, she promised to deploy the Justice Department to investigate and penalize climate pollution and obfuscation of climate science by the fossil fuel industry, something that so far the federal government hasn’t been willing to do.
Returning to that promise, and leaning into her reputation as being tough on oil companies, would definitely fire up the climate base. A 2019 Yale poll found that about half of Americans support lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. But other more recent polling shows that framing climate policy as a crusade against Big Oil is largely unpopular. And it could play into Trump’s castigation of Biden energy policy as a “green new scam,” especially if Harris’ past criticism of fracking comes back to haunt her in frack-heavy swing states like Pennsylvania. Harris’ focus on environmental justice could also complicate negotiations with Congress over permitting reform and lead to delays in building energy infrastructure, John Miller, managing director for sustainability at the bank TD Cowen, warned. The challenge for Harris now is to decide which audience she needs to connect with the most — and maybe to pick a running mate with a more moderate climate track record.
Room for Disagreement
For now, Harris remains popular with environmental groups, and has won an endorsement from at least one prominent climate-focused fundraising group. Whatever stance she chooses to take, on some policies she is unlikely to differ much from Trump, said Rob Thummel, senior portfolio manager at the investment firm Tortoise, including by preserving subsidies for renewable energy, extending new ones to biofuels and sustainable aviation fuel, and pushing more support toward carbon capture and hydrogen projects.