Could Talking About Climate Change Now Help Kamala Harris’s Campaign?

In the final minutes of the last Presidential debate of the 2src2src election, the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, called for an end to all federal subsidies for the oil industry. Global warming, he’d explained earlier, is an “existential threat to humanity,” adding, “We have a moral obligation to deal with it, and we’re told by all the leading scientists in the world we don’t have much time.” Then, in response to a belligerent challenge from the incumbent, Donald Trump—“Would you close down the oil industry?”—Biden said, “I would transition from the oil industry, yes.” “Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?” Trump said, hopefully. Twelve days later, Biden carried Pennsylvania and, with it, the election.

In the intervening four years, here’s what has happened to the climate: average air temperatures have soared above any ever recorded. The oceans have set new marks, too—last year, a reading off the Florida coast showed a hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit, and pools of that warm water helped amp up hurricanes such as, most recently, Helene and Milton. Frightening new evidence has emerged about warmer water undercutting the glaciers of the Antarctic, and about the ways that melting ice in the north seems to be menacing the currents of the Atlantic. Worldwide, drought and heat have sparked a series of unprecedented fires, and floods have inundated vast regions. The planet’s chief diplomat, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, has issued one undiplomatic pronouncement after another—last spring, he called the fossil-fuel industry the “godfathers of climate chaos” and implored the world’s leaders to find an exit from “the highway to climate hell.” This month, in the journal BioScience, a group of the world’s leading climate experts warned, “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.”

Not that you’d know it from this year’s Presidential campaign. Vice-President Kamala Harris, since becoming the Democratic nominee, has spoken very little about climate change. To the degree that a transition from fossil fuel has been discussed at all, it’s been in the form of her assuring Pennsylvanians that she won’t interfere with fracking. She has spoken about creating green jobs, but not much else. The reasons are fairly clear. First, the Democratic Party essentially had no primary season. Biden faced only token challenge, and when he stepped down Harris was nominated by acclamation, so activists had no chance to elevate climate change to a crucial electoral issue, as they had done in 2src2src. Remember the backdrop: Greta Thunberg’s movement had crested in the fall of 2src19, with some six million people marching in protests around the world. In this country, the Sunrise Movement was pushing a Green New Deal. The governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, who was also briefly a Presidential candidate, called that time a “magic moment” for climate politics. NBC reported, “Climate change has recently shot to the top of polls of issues that Democratic voters care about in the presidential primary, rivaling for the first time longstanding bread-and-butter topics like health care.” Harris, in her primary bid, said that global warming “represents an existential threat to who we are as a species.” Biden, after winning the nomination, secured Senator Bernie Sanders’s support by committing to work with him on climate initiatives.

The second reason for the relative silence this year is that Biden, in fact, largely kept to his commitment. He somehow persuaded the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which finally devoted serious federal money to an energy transition. His need for Senator Joe Manchin’s vote meant that the bill included gifts to the fossil-fuel industry, but it has nonetheless unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from heat pumps and E.V. chargers to battery factories. The basic stance of mainstream environmentalists now is that the country is more or less on the right track. They assume that, if Harris wins, many of the people driving policy in the White House will remain in place and that, in four more years, the momentum behind clean energy will be unstoppable. The fossil-fuel industry apparently assumes the same thing: it has been raising money at Spindletop rates for Trump, who has promised to “drill, drill, drill” and has noted, “I hate wind.” The choice is so obvious that Harris doesn’t really need to say much. But, if she’s elected, she’s going to have to do a lot.

Even if the U.S. keeps to its current decarbonization path, it will need to decide whether it wants to increase its already world-leading exports of natural gas. The next President will have to deal with a steady stream of unnatural disasters that will demand ever more federal dollars, and also quite likely with an insurance crisis that could reignite inflation. So perhaps it would be wise for Harris and her team to more aggressively remind voters nationwide of what’s at stake, maybe in an ad with a drone shot of the destruction caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton near Augusta or Asheville or Tampa, and a voice-over of Trump from a September rally, saying, “You’ll have more seafront property. . . . Isn’t that a good thing?” If nothing else, it would be a counter to the disinformation that Trump is spreading about fema; Georgia, North Carolina, and maybe even Florida are battleground states, too. (As is Arizona, where Phoenix just had an unprecedented twenty-one straight days of high temperatures that matched or broke records.) Perhaps Harris’s running mate, Governor Tim Walz, could meet with hurricane survivors who used the capacious batteries in their E.V.s to keep their refrigerators humming.

If Harris’s team thinks that supporting fracking in Pennsylvania is key to winning over undecided voters, then so be it. But, especially as polling still shows widespread support for climate action, it wouldn’t hurt to send a broader signal of concern about this most crucial of issues. The 2src12 Presidential election was similarly quiet about global warming—there was no mention of it in the debates—until Hurricane Sandy hit the mid-Atlantic, in late October. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s Republican-turned-independent mayor at the time, used the occasion for a surprise endorsement of President Barack Obama, saying that the devastation had brought the stakes of the election into “sharp relief.”

Responding to Bloomberg, Obama said, “Climate change is a threat to our children’s future, and we owe it to them to do something about it.” A child who was born that year is now in middle school, and the planet is far, far hotter. ♦