As the US south-east struggles to rebuild after two deadly and climate-fueled hurricanes, some environmental advocates are demanding Kamala Harris flesh out a strong climate plan.
Since Hurricanes Helene and Milton ravaged parts of the country, the vice-president has slammed Donald Trump’s climate record by airing a new campaign ad showing the oft-criticized moment the former president redrew a hurricane’s path with a marker, and taking aim at Trump’s spread of climate misinformation and history of withholding disaster aid.
Harris has also raised the alarm about Trump’s plans to slash environmental regulations. Yet she has not said much about her plans to deal with the climate crisis, instead pledging not to ban gas-powered cars in a Michigan speech and touting “record energy production” from the oil and gas industries during her vice-presidency on her website.
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, said that Harris had failed to build upon the strongest moments during her TV debate with Trump when she referenced the mounting costs of climate-driven disasters and their toll upon Americans’ ability to get home insurance.
Since then, he said, the campaign had been “understating the depth of the danger”.
“The American public need to know there are storm clouds ahead,” said Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate budget committee. “We will have to see if Harris and Walz are elected how they will move forward on policy but at the moment most Americans are not well informed of how serious this is going to get.”
The lack of a climate focus from the campaign has been “frustrating” but was probably a calculation that there is little political benefit to bringing up such a glaringly obvious divide with Trump, according to Paul Bledsoe, who was an adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House on climate.
“That might be the right political decision,” he said.
But others are skeptical that Harris’s climate approach will deliver electorally. Though polls show that voters place more importance on other issues, such as the economy and immigration, they also indicate that a strong majority of US voters would prefer to vote for a candidate who supports climate action. Many surveys indicate there is broad support for renewable energy even in fossil fuel-heavy areas.
“Pundits say she can’t risk losing any potential voters in Pennsylvania,” said Edward Maibach, the director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. “Taking a strong pro-climate action stance would almost certainly not cost her votes in [Pennsylvania] because more than half of voters in the state want to see the president take more, not less, climate action.
Many national climate policies – from job training for fossil fuel workers to full fossil fuel phaseout by 2050 – also enjoy majority support.
“I’m not convinced it’s good electoral strategy, because climate is an issue where voters trust Democrats more than Republicans so it actually would be a good issue to lean into to highlight the difference,” said Michael Greenberg, founder of the controversial activist group Climate Defiance, which endorsed Harris last month after meeting with her top climate aide.
A major hurdle for Harris’s campaign, polls show, is that undecided voters feel they don’t know what she stands for, said Collin Rees, campaign manager at advocacy group Oil Change US.
“It’s actively electorally harming her to not be more detailed,” he said.
If Harris wins the election, Bledsoe said, “she will need to level with the American people about how emissions reductions need to happen or these storms, heatwaves and floods will get far worse”.
But Rees said her approach has left space open for Trump to convince voters that climate policies are harmful, and that he is skeptical that Harris would make such a shift if elected.
“I don’t know that there’s ever been an issue in history where somebody didn’t talk about it on the campaign trail … but then turned around and prioritized it after they were elected,” Rees said.
Further irking advocates have been Harris’s attempts to appeal to conservatives. Last week, she pledged to create a bipartisan council of advisers if elected. The same day, she boasted her endorsements from former vice-president Dick Cheney and George W Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who helped craft a legal case justifying torture.
“We’re talking about courting neocons who support endless war when the military is one of the largest triggers of the climate crisis,” said Rees. “She’s courting members of a party that we know is not serious on climate even though we are all around us seeing the climate emergency.”
Other Harris allies are sanguine about the absence of climate from her campaigning, pointing to her record as a prosecutor in taking on big oil and their expectation that she will push for aggressive climate action if she claims the White House.
“She needs to talk about what will win this election, there’s only so much time for subjects and people have a limited bandwidth,” said Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington and a prominent climate advocate. “I’m not critical of the way she’s run her campaign, they’ve made decisions on how to use limited communication time and I’m confident when she’s in the White House she’ll be an effective leader on clean energy.”
But the issue is not only one of messaging, but also of substance, said Rees.
“I don’t think climate has to be the only issue or the top issue, but right now she’s denigrating climate policy, boasting about oil and gas exports, playing to the right,” he said. “But the terrible disasters of Helene and Milton provide an opening to show how climate is very closely connected to people’s lives and economic struggles. I don’t think it’s too late.”
The youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement, which also endorsed Harris, is also demanding she “change course”, noting Trump is gaining ground in swing states.
“In 2020, Joe Biden won because he ran on bold climate action and economic justice, showing that you can both win swing voters and the Bernie Sanders base,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the group’s communication director. “In the last 20 days, we’re giving everything we’ve got to contact millions of people and turn out young voters to elect Harris. What we’re asking is that the Harris campaign help us do that.”
