Two years ago this week, I watched as Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote for the largest climate investment in American history. It was an emotional moment. After decades of inaction, the US had finally passed a climate law – one of the strongest climate laws in the world.
I didn’t know it then, but a month later I would get a call asking if I would like to interview the vice-president about climate policy.
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.
You can trace her influence by looking at her earliest days as a politician, then following the bills she sponsored as a senator, and finally examining her 2020 presidential campaign platform. During the earliest days of the Biden-Harris administration, when the Build Back Better agenda was coming together, Harris made sure that her priorities stayed on the list: electric school buses, cleaner water and investments for communities.
While she hasn’t been given the credit, as vice-president, Harris has worked behind 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.
In policy after policy, Biden’s signature climate bill bears the marks of Harris’s influence.
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.
Every single one of the last 13 months has broken a global heat record. The climate crisis isn’t stopping, and we can’t afford for federal climate policy to stop either. While the federal climate laws passed during the Biden-Harris administration will help us cut pollution at an unprecedented pace, they will not hit our goals without further action.
Missing our climate goals is all but guaranteed if Trump wins. In his own words, Trump has said he would be a “dictator” on day one to “drill, drill, drill”.
The planet will bear the scars of Trump’s first term for decades. And that was under a Republican administration that was ill prepared to govern. This time, there are extensive plans to dismantle federal climate policy if Republicans retake the White House. Project 2025 – a Republican manifesto authored by several Trump insiders – is a detailed vision to demolish the Environmental Protection Agency, eliminate the National Weather Service and roll back our federal climate laws.
This year’s presidential election could not have higher stakes. Whoever wins will run the White House until early 2029. And scientists are clear: we have to cut carbon pollution in half by 2030 to meet our climate goals. The next president will hold power during these crucial years. It’s not surprising, then, that 350 climate leaders have come out in support of Harris.
A couple weeks ago, when I learned that Harris would be running for president, I was out with my three-year-old daughters, picking raspberries on yet another unseasonably hot day. I thought back to my interview with the vice-president, remembered how her eyes lit up when she talked about climate action and felt something strange: hope. I knew that if Harris became president, the world would be safer for my daughters to grow up in.
At the end of our conversation two years ago, I asked Harris about the future of climate action, and she surprised me by talking about her role heading up the National Space Council. She said that astronauts can see how fragile the Earth is when they see it from space. That perspective gives them a vision that we must protect the only planet we call home.
“We must act with a sense of urgency. We must be swift,” Harris told me. “We still have so much more to do.”
Leah C Stokes is an associate professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Short Circuiting Policy
