Kamala Harris can’t afford to return to her attacks on Big Oil

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.