As the themes in the US presidential elections get delineated in the coming weeks, one closely watched issue will be how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris frame their differences on climate change. At the Democratic National Convention (DNC) last week, Harris mentioned global warming only once. That may appear to contrast with her radical positions as a Democratic challenger in 2019-2020 or Joe Biden’s emphatic criticism of Trump’s climate denialism in his last presidential campaign. However, Harris’s brief mention of global warming mitigation at the DNC attracted attention because she located climate change as one of the “fundamental freedoms” at stake during the November election. Along with “reproductive choice, the elections will be about the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis,” she said last Thursday. Tim Walz used the same language a day earlier when he said that “the elections are about freedom” — he contrasted this freedom with that advocated by Republicans “for corporations to pollute air and water”.
Trump was quick to call out the Democrats for making climate change an “issue of patriotism” without saying much about China. In a similar vein to his 2016 bid for the White House, Trump has couched fossil fuel advocacy in a language of economic nationalism. In July, he told a conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, that along with closing the US-Mexico border, his administration would go all out —“drill, baby drill” — to increase domestic oil production. Domestic drilling, the former president has maintained, will decrease the cost of oil and help lift the sentiment of consumers currently “worried about inflation and high energy costs”. In 2019-2020, the Biden-Harris team made the reduction of drilling one of its major campaign planks. However, environmentalists have called out the Biden administration for not only failing to act on poll promises but also approving the $7 billion Willow Oil Drilling Project in Alaska.
During her campaign in 2019, Harris said that she would ban the heavily polluting practice of fracking but has since toned down her position. The uncertainties of the post-Covid world, aggravated by the Ukraine crisis, could be one reason for the Democrats’ cautious approach. However, it has long been clear that global warming mitigation will require a major overhaul in the energy sector of the highest GHG emitter in history. The Harris-Walz campaign will be watched for how it deals with the issue.
