Harris and Trump offer starkly different visions on climate change and energy
WASHINGTON — As the Earth sizzles through a summer with four of the hottest days ever recordedVice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have starkly different visions for how to address a changing climate while ensuring a reliable energy supply. But neither has offered many details about how they would get there.
During her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Harris briefly mentioned climate change, outlining the “fundamental freedoms” at stake in the election, including “the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water and live without the pollution that is fueling the climate crisis.”
As vice president, Harris cast the deciding vote on the Inflation Reduction ActPresident Joe Biden’s landmark climate bill that passed with only Democratic support. As a senator from California, she was an early sponsor of the Green New Deala sweeping set of proposals aimed at rapidly transitioning the US to all-green energy, and backed by the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Trump meanwhile led the chants of “drill, baby, drill” and promised to dismantle the Biden administration’s “green new scam” in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. He has promised to increase production of fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal and repeal key parts of the 2022 climate law.
“We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other nation by far,” Trump said at the RNC. “We are a nation that has the ability to make an absolute fortune with its energy.”
Environmental groups, which largely support Harris, call her a “proven climate champion” who will take on Big Oil and build on Biden’s climate legacy, including policies that boost electric vehicles and Limit global warming from coal-fired power plants.
“We are not going back to a climate denier in the White House,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action.
Republicans counter that Biden and Harris have spent four years passing “punitive regulations” targeting American energy while providing generous subsidies. tax credits for electric vehicles and other green priorities costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
“This onslaught of outrageous and outrageous climate regulations will close power plants and raise energy costs for families across the country,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo. “Republicans will work to stop them and fight for solutions that protect our air and water and grow our economy.”
Democrats have a clear lead on this issue. More than half of American adults say they trust Harris “a lot” or “somewhat” when it comes to tackling climate change, according to a AP-NORC poll conducted in July. About 7 in 10 say they have “not much” confidence in Trump or “no confidence at all” when it comes to climate. Less than half say they have no confidence in Harris.
A look at the two candidates’ positions on key climate and energy issues:
Harris said during her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign that she opposed offshore oil drilling and hydraulic fracturean oil and gas extraction process better known as fracking.
But her campaign has made it clear that she no longer supports a ban on frackinga widely used drilling method that is vital to the economy of Pennsylvania, a key swing state and the nation’s second-largest producer of natural gas.
“As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking,” Harris told CNN on Thursday in her first major television interview as the Democratic candidate. “We can … grow a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm, said Harris’ shifting positions show she is “trying to strike a balance between climate voters and industry advocates,” even as her campaign takes a “hostile stance” toward the oil and gas industry in general.
Harris and Democrats have pushed new rules — authorized by the climate law — to increase the royalties oil and gas companies pay to drill or mine on public lands. She has also backed efforts to clean up old drilling sites and close abandoned wells that often spew methane and other pollutants.
Trump, who pushed for a rollback dozens of environmental laws as presidentsays his goal is to give the U.S. the cheapest energy and electricity in the world. He would expand oil drilling on public lands, provide tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers and speed up approvals for natural gas pipelines.
Trump has repeatedly criticized the tough new vehicle emissions rules imposed by Biden, falsely calling them a “mandate” for electric vehicles. The Environmental Protection Agency rules, issued this spring, target tailpipe emissions from cars And trucks and encourage, but not require, sales of new electric cars to meet the new standards.
Trump has said that electric vehicle production will destroy jobs in the auto industry. In recent months, however, he has softened his rhetoric, saying he is in favor of “a very small fraction” of cars being electric.
The change comes after Tesla CEO Elon Musk “supported me very strongly,” Trump said at an August rally in Atlanta. Still, industry officials expect Trump to roll back Biden’s EV push and seek to rescind tax breaks that Trump claims benefit China.
Harris hasn’t announced an EV plan, but she has strongly supported EVs as vice president. At a 2022 event in Seattle, she celebrated about $1 billion in federal grants to buy about 2,500 “clean” school buses. As many as 25 million children ride the familiar yellow buses every school day, and they will have a healthier future with a cleaner fleet, Harris said.
The grants and other federal climate programs are not just intended to “save our children, but for them to save our planet,” she said.
Harris has focused on the implementation of the In 2021, a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill was passedas well as climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Actwhich offered nearly $375 billion in financial incentives for electric vehicles, clean energy projects and manufacturing.
Under Biden and Harris, U.S. manufacturers created more than 250,000 energy sector jobs last year, the Energy Department said. clean energy accounts for more than half of those jobs.
Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, call climate spending a “money grab” for environmental groups and say it will move American jobs to China and other countries while raising energy prices at home.
“Kamala Harris is more worried about climate change than inflation,” Vance wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.
Trump, who has dismissed climate change as a “hoax,” withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change and has vowed to do so again, calling the global plan to cut carbon emissions unworkable and a gift to China and other major polluters. Trump has promised to end wind subsidies included in the climate law and scrap regulations proposed by the Biden administration to boost the energy efficiency of light bulbs, stoves, dishwashers and showerheads.
Harris called the Paris Climate Agreement crucial to tackling climate change and protecting “our children’s future.”
The US returned to the Paris Agreement shortly after Biden took office in 2021.
After the Biden administration approved a raft of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects in January, paused consideration of new terminals for natural gas exportsThe delay will allow officials to assess the economic and climate impact of natural gas, a fossil fuel that emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The decision aligned the Democratic president with environmentalists who fear that the recent surge in LNG exports could potentially bring catastrophic emissions to global warming, even as Biden pledged to halve climate pollution by 2030.
Trump has said he would approve terminals “on my very first day back” in office.
Harris has not yet announced plans to export liquefied natural gas (LNG), but analysts expect she will impose tough climate standards on export projects as part of her broader crackdown on major oil and gas companies.