Kamala Harris: Climate justice warrior

With energy and climate an increasingly important component of EU-US relations, officials in Europe are keen to understand what US Vice-President Kamala Harris is thinking on these topics, and what a Harris presidency would mean for the transatlantic relations.

Cleantech rivalry and floods of US liquified natural gas (LNG) to replace Europe’s lost Russian gas have injected both cooperation and competition into the relationship over the past two years.

While officials in Europe have to date focused on ‘Trump-proofing‘, the end of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, announced this week, means they must now contend with a new possibility – a Harris presidency.

Climate issues have regained prominence under the Biden administration. See for example the country’s return to the Paris Agreement, or the the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivises clean energy production.

Harris has long been a voice who championed the environment during her years as a public prosecutor, US senator, and most recently vice president.

Harris’s green background

In 2005, as a prosecutor, Harris created what she said was the first environmental justice unit in the US. “Environmental crimes are crimes against communities, against people who are often poor and disenfranchised”, she said when the unit was set up.

During her mandate and subsequently, as Attorney General of California, Harris prosecuted Plains All-American Pipeline following an oil spill off the Californian coast in 2015 and obtained a criminal indictment against the company.

She won an $86 million settlement from Volkswagen following allegations of cheating on diesel emissions tests and investigated Exxon Mobil over concerns that the company misled the public and shareholders about climate change risks.

Elected as a senator in 2017, Harris was an early co-promoter of the Green New Deal, a precursor to green growth policies subsequently adopted in the US and Europe. She has also backed climate fairness bills and supported tribal community efforts to shut down a major oil pipeline project.

What were her positions as a candidate?

Back in 2019, when Harris launched a presidential bid, her climate agenda was more ambitious than Biden’s, Bloomberg recalled this week.

Harris proposed spending $10 trillion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with the aim of achieving a zero-emissions economy by 2045. She planned to introduce a ‘climate pollution tax’ that would “make polluters pay for the greenhouse gases they emit into our atmosphere.”

During a 2020 CNN forum on climate change, Harris declared her opposition to fracking and offshore drilling. She also promised to ban fossil fuel leases on public lands if elected president.

In her programme, she wanted to establish an independent office of accountability for climate and environmental justice, while strengthening enforcement and prosecution of fossil fuel companies.

Despite being appointed vice-president by Joe Biden in 2020, these campaign promises largely did not translate into concrete policy, but she still won praise from climate activists.

And as Veep?

“Vice President Harris has been integral to the Biden administration’s most important climate accomplishments and has a long track record as an impactful climate champion,” Evergreen Action, a climate-focused policy group, said in a statement published on Sunday 21 July.

Harris has often been the spokesperson for the Biden administration’s environmental policies at the national and international level – including the administration’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act.

“We must do more”, she declared during the COP28 climate talks in Dubai in December 2023, where she represented the US. She announced a US commitment to double its energy efficiency and triple its renewable energy capacity by 2030 and pledged $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund.

As vice president, Harris also helped implement policies at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address long-standing environmental justice issues and advocated for the allocation of $20 billion to the ‘Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund’ to help poor communities impacted by climate change.

What it means for Europe

Harris’s record suggests that as president, she would be more willing to challenge oil and gas interests than Biden. However, she has also shown pragmatism on gas supplies to Europe, and as demand in Europe declines and new global supplies come online, LNG imports from the US may become less important.

Harris shares the EU’s goal of green growth, which offers potential for both cooperation and conflict.

However, while Europe and the US have managed to dial down tensions on their clean tech competition, Harris’ focus on the need for a ‘just transition’, which benefits American workers and communities, may clash with the interests of European leaders, who equally want to see the spoils of the energy transition returned to their voters.

[Edited by Donagh Cagney/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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