Climate activists rally around Harris, seeing a chance to build on Biden’s record

Endorsements for Vice President Harris are rolling in from environmental groups who see her as a strong potential ally on issues like climate change.

Climate advocates have highlighted Harris’ record stretching back two decades to her time as San Francisco district attorney, saying she’s worked throughout her career to protect the environment, as well as communities that suffer disproportionately from pollution.

“She’s totally legit,” Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a climate activist and marine biologist, said at a recent online fundraiser. “She’s not new to this.”

Activists say they’ve seen a surge of enthusiasm among their members, especially young people, since Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

“It’s night and day,” says Stevie O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate group. “I think it’s clear to me talking to young people around the country that there’s a really big opportunity to totally change the game with the youth vote this November.”

Early surveys show a close race between Harris and former President Donald Trump, with Harris winning back younger, nonwhite voters who were dissatisfied with Biden. But she’s not currently matching Biden's 2020 support among all voters below 45.

Harris’ campaign is barely three weeks old, and hasn’t yet come out with detailed policy proposals. On climate change, campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt says Harris would build on the Biden administration’s record. That includes the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law Biden signed in 2022 that provides hundreds of billions of dollars in funding and tax incentives to help companies and communities transition to renewable energy and other technologies that can cut fossil fuel pollution.

Harris’ choice as her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also has a record of climate action in his home state. Last year, he signed a law requiring all Minnesota power plants use 100% climate-friendly energy, such as wind and solar power, by 2040.

Harris has picked up endorsements from groups including the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of groups that held back support for Biden’s reelection. Also backing the vice president are prominent advocates for aggressive action on climate change, including former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee and Steven Chu, who was energy secretary under former President Barack Obama.

Energy In Depth, a campaign group affiliated with the oil industry trade group Independent Petroleum Association of America, has argued that a potential Harris administration would hurt oil and gas workers. “While environmental activists may be cheering, Harris’ record is directly in conflict with key battleground voters that will decide this election,” the group wrote on its website.

A record on environmental issues going back two decades

As San Francisco’s district attorney in 2005, Harris set up one of the country’s first environmental justice units, which was tasked with going after polluters in poor neighborhoods.

Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, told KQED in San Francisco that creating the unit was an important step, but that Harris wasn’t as tough as he would have liked on the city’s biggest offenders.

Harris kept working on environmental issues after she became California attorney general in 2010. She helped bring criminal charges against the company Plains All-American Pipeline for a major oil spill. Around 2016, Harris started investigating whether ExxonMobil misled the public and investors about the risks related to climate change. Last year, California sued ExxonMobil and other oil companies.

O’Hanlon, of the Sunrise Movement, hopes Harris’ background signals she’d go further than Biden has on climate and environmental issues, including taking on the fossil fuel industry more directly.

“She has been talking about the need to confront the climate crisis, to hold big oil accountable and touting her record as Attorney General,” O’Hanlon says. “She has a real opportunity to put forward a bold plan that will meet the scale of the crisis and energize young voters.”

After she was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris pushed for more aggressive climate policies. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal, a sweeping proposal for climate action championed by the progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., which was not ultimately adopted. When she ran in the Democratic primary for president in 2019, Harris supported a ban on the oil and gas drilling technique known as fracking. Harris’ campaign says she no longer supports such a ban. Pennsylvania, a battleground state seen as key to the race for the White House, is a major natural gas producer.

As vice president, Harris backed Biden administration policies to curb fossil fuel pollution. Along with the Inflation Reduction Act, that has included proposing sweeping new rules to clean up pollution from cars and power plants.

“I think the [Biden] administration has done a tremendous job of moving the U.S. forward on perhaps one of the most pressing policy issues of our time,” says Zara Ahmed, director of policy and science operations at Carbon Direct, which helps companies cut their fossil fuel pollution.

The Trump campaign has criticized Harris for her earlier support for a fracking ban, saying she “has long championed the most socialist and anti-American energy elements of the radical left’s ‘climate’ agenda.”

For years, Trump has cast doubt on the scientific consensus that the Earth is warming mainly as a result of burning fossil fuels, and he recently dismissed threats from rising sea levels. A senior Trump adviser, Brian Hughes, has said that if Trump is reelected, he would try to boost production of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.

Climate advocates say there’s more to do

Despite the Biden’s administration’s focus on curbing global warming, the U.S. still isn’t on track to meet its own commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the international Paris Agreement, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, a research firm.

“We’re not making enough progress,” says Ben King, associate director of the energy and climate practice at the Rhodium Group. The U.S. is on track to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by up to 43% in 2030 compared to peak 2005 levels, King says, short of the 50% reduction it pledged under the Paris agreement.

Climate advocates hope a Harris administration would push for more incentives to drive deeper cuts in climate pollution from parts of the economy they say need more attention, like heavy industry and agriculture. And they say the federal government needs to find a way to speed construction of more climate-friendly power generation like wind and solar plants, along with transmission lines to move that electricity.

“We need something very similar to the Interstate Highway Plan for energy,” says Tony Reames, an associate professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Until last December, Reames was deputy director of energy justice at the U.S. Energy Department.

Activists also hope a Harris administration would double down on issues related to environmental justice, given her early work in that area. The Biden administration promised to focus on communities on the front lines of climate change, and those that have historically borne the brunt of pollution from the fossil fuel and chemical industries. But advocates say the federal government could do much more.

“It’s true that front-line communities have not seen a rapid increase in enforcement,” says Abel Russ, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group.

“The Biden administration has started to turn the ship in the right direction, and we’re happy,” Russ says. “[But] the ship is not heading in the right direction yet.”