Vice President Kamala Harris, seemingly first in line to run as the Democratic nominee for president now that President Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 race, may be even more aligned with the environmental left than Biden, her record and past comments indicate.
Harris, who is tied to Biden’s $1 trillion-plus climate agenda in her capacity as vice president, has gone beyond Biden’s energy positions in the past a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal introduced in 2019 when she was a senator, and she has also made comments in support of a fracking ban that she subsequently walked back. While she has previously vacillated on some of her more left-wing policy positions, her record suggests that she may be even more progressive on energy policy than Biden if she secures the Democratic nomination and defeats former President Donald Trump in November.
The New York Times described Harris on Monday as a politician who has assumed “positions far to the left of Mr. Biden on climate change,” and Politico wrote Sunday that Harris’ climate plans would have “gone even further” than those of Biden by instituting policies like a “climate pollution fee.”
While in Congress, Harris was one of the original backers of the Green New Deal, a massive proposal to transform the U.S. economy and transition it away from reliance on fossil fuels, and even favored abolishing the filibuster to ram the bill into law, CNN reported in 2019. Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another one of the Green New Deal’s original co-sponsors, estimated in 2019 that the price tag for the proposal would be about $10 trillion.
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Some aspects of the Green New Deal, such as huge subsidies for green energy development, ended up making it into what became the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill signed into law in 2022. While Biden and Harris own the same climate record since 2021, the League of Conservation Voters — one of the largest environmental activist groups in America — rates Harris more highly on its legislative environmental scorecard for her years in the senate than it does Biden for his senate career.
Harris has also previously called for an outright ban on fracking.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris told a voter during a 2020 town hall hosted by CNN. “And starting with what we can do on day one around public lands, and then there has to be legislation. But yes, and this is something I’ve taken on in California, I have a history of working on this issue, and to your point, we have to just acknowledge that the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the impact on the health and safety of communities.”
To date, fracking has been responsible for the production of more than seven billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America. The practice has become a major target of environmental activists who oppose it despite its role in cutting American emissions by helping allow cleaner-burning natural gas displace coal in the American power sector.
Biden also delivered a “guarantee” that he would “end fossil fuel” while on the campaign trail in 2019, but he added nuance to his views in a 2020 debate against Trump to demonstrate that he favored a gradual energy transition and the elimination of particular subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. Similarly, Harris pivoted on her anti-fracking comments by saying that the Biden administration would not ban fracking.
Additionally, Harris has previously called for a ban on plastic straws to fight pollution, according to E&E News. During her tenure as California’s attorney general, Harris also sued the Obama administration over its plans to potentially extract fossil fuels off the state’s coast, and she launched a separate probe investigating whether ExxonMobil lied to the public about the effects of its products.
Neither the Biden campaign nor the White House responded immediately to requests for comment.
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