When we spoke, Harris demonstrated a depth I didn’t expect – she geeked out over heat pumps, confessed her love of electric school buses and described the heavy burdens poorer communities face from air pollution. The more I learned about her background, the more I found a clear pattern: policy ideas that she championed became central to federal legislation. Our nation’s landmark climate law, which is turning two years old this month, has Harris’s signature all over it.
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While she hasn’t been given the credit, as vice-president, Harris has workedbehind the scenes to champion her climate policies. And she’s managed to get a long list of her ideas signed into law.
Earlier this year, Harris announced a $20bn investment in green banks that will reduce pollution in communities across the country. This was no coincidence – she was a key advocate for the idea well before it was written into law. In 2020, she was just one of five senators who backed a national climate bank.
Harris was also an early supporter of a plan to ensure clean energy workers had higher unionization rates. And sure enough, the climate law gives funding bonuses to projects that pay workers prevailing wages.
Similarly, when she was running for president in 2020, Harris argued that electric vehicle incentives should be targeted to low- and middle-income families. Up to that point, it was overwhelmingly wealthier Americans who were using government incentives to buy an electric vehicle. Now, thanks to the climate law, low- and middle-income Americans can get up to $7,500 off a new electric vehicle, and $4,000 off a used one.
Throughout her career, Harris has been a vocal advocate for environmental justice. Two decades ago, when she was district attorney for San Francisco, Harris set up the state’s first environmental crimes unit. As she said back in 2005: “Crimes against the environment are crimes against communities.”
It’s not surprising, then, that Harris continued to focus on protecting communities. Back in 2011, when Harris was California’s attorney general, she filed a lawsuit against cargo terminals in the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports for polluting nearby communities through diesel exhaust. Months later, she reached a settlement, requiring the terminals to protect nearby communities. This idea also became part of the big federal climate law, with $3bn to cut pollution from ports. In total, that landmark law includes more than $40bn in investments for disadvantaged communities – the largest investment in environmental justice in American history.
And it’s not just one climate law that Harris has shaped. The bipartisan infrastructure package also included billions in funding for programs she championed.
As a senator, Harris introduced a bill in 2019 that would electrify school buses, and just two years later, Congress committed $5bn to the effort. Today, almost 200,000 kids are riding clean buses to school every day – a very fast change for a legislative body that’s known for taking decades to get policies passed.
The water investments in the bipartisan package were also Harris’ ideas. She was the lead author on legislation that would replace lead pipes. Today, $15bn is being spent on this effort across the country, and the Biden-Harris administration is on track to replace 1.7m lead pipes. And she was particularly vocal on drought funding, traveling to Lake Mead to drum up media coverage and get the bill passed.
If she hadn’t focused on these investments, making over 150 calls to legislators as they negotiated the bipartisan bill, they likely would have fallen out of the package. It’s not as if Republican senators had co-sponsored legislation with Harris on electric school buses or lead pipes.
When it comes to protecting people and the planet, Harris has been ahead of her time. After decades of effort, her vision for a cleaner environment has slowly but surely made its way into law.
Heather Souvaine Horn in The New Republic:
Ohio, which Trump has twice won comfortably, probably won’t decide the 2024 election. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, very well might. “Many strategists in both parties believe Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes could wind up being the decisive state,” Axios reported in May. And so far, the polling in Pennsylvania has suggested the race is neck and neck. So it’s not particularly surprising that Harris is backpedaling on her fracking opposition, presumably aiming to win Pennsylvania voters.
What about Harris’ VP selection Tim Walz?
Walz was first elected governor in 2018 and quickly started pushing priorities like aligning Minnesota’s car emissions standards with California’s and pumping new resources into the state’s water infrastructure.
But once Democrats took control of the state’s Legislature in 2022, he helped shepherd througha 100 percent clean electricity law, new subsidies for electric vehicles, permitting reform for clean energy and other major moves to cut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Democrats hope Walz helps the campaign translate the party’s agenda to the white, rural voters that have steadily abandoned the party.
Walz — who for 12 years represented a rural, Republican-leaning district in southern Minnesota — has a history of pitching skeptical voters on climate action. After he voted for the 2009 Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, he was one of the few rural Democrats to survive the midterm elections.
Climate activists cheered Walz’s selection.
“We applaud Vice President Harris for choosing a running mate who shares her commitment to acting on climate and know that together, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will build on the Biden-Harris administration’s historic progress on climate, clean energy, environmental justice, conservation, democracy, and so much more,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, said in a statement.
During the veepstakes, Walz emerged as the favorite of activists for both the content of his policies — like mandating zero-carbon electricity by 2040, one of the strongest in the country — and for passing them with a one-vote majority in the Legislature.
When Walz signed the clean electricity bill, he did it at the St. Paul Labor Center flanked by union members, climate activists and even a utility executive, Chris Clark of Xcel Energy.
“I have to tell you, when I hear people say ‘You’re moving too fast’ — we can’t move too fast when it comes to addressing climate change,” Walz said at that 2023 event. “This idea of waiting is a luxury we do not have, and Minnesotans do not have.”
Practically speaking, I think there was value in starting with goosing the Haves to buy these more expensive early generation EVs, just like the PC and smart phone markets. Mass markets for new technologies need build volume some way to get cost down, and having high costs and margins gains slack for cost reduction.