What If Kamala Harris Is Wrong About Voters’ Climate Views?

When running for president in 2020, Joe Biden pledged to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, ban all new oil and gas drilling (including fracking) on public lands, spend $2 trillion on clean energy and infrastructure, and rejoin the Paris climate accord. Multiple environmental groups dubbed it the “most ambitious climate platform in history.”

In Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention last month, she mentioned climate change only once. When asked about it during the presidential debate, she responded that “I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” and elsewhere she bragged about being “the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.”

Why is Harris so much more reluctant to talk about the climate crisis than Biden was in 2020? Why is she so much more reluctant than she herself was in 2020? And why is she embracing the so-called “all of the above” approach to energy, portraying clean energy as a complement to fossil fuels rather than an eventual substitute?

One answer I’ve repeatedly seen suggested is that she’s responding to voter preferences, and voters care less about climate change in 2024 than they did in 2020. “Fewer Americans today see climate change as a ‘very serious problem’ than they did three years ago,” The Hill reported in May, based on a Monmouth University poll. “Democrats see talking about the environment as a lose-lose proposition,” The Washington Post reported in August. (And rightly so, the piece seemed to suggest, finishing with a quote from a voter who said, “The environment is not my top thing.… Sorry.”) Bill McKibben, trying to divine Harris’s climate positions after Biden withdrew from the race, acknowledged that “since most of what we know about her stands on energy and climate date from the 2020 primaries, it’s important to remember the context. We were pretty near peak-Greta … and polls were showing that the number one issue for many Democratic voters was climate change.”

But it’s not clear that voters actually do care less about climate in 2024. (It would be remarkable if they did, given that we continue to smash temperature records and severe weather records and the home insurance industry seems to be fleeing entire states now.) The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change conduct some of the most comprehensive annual surveys on American public opinion on climate change. When I asked YPCCC director Anthony Leiserowitz whether he was seeing numbers suggesting people care less about climate change today than they did in 2020, he observed that, on the contrary, voters’ views on whether global warming should be a major presidential priority have “been pretty consistent among all party/ideological groups at least back to 2018/2019.”

The liberal Democrats making up the party’s base now claim global warming as their fourth-highest priority. But that’s actually not a big shift from ranking it second or third, for example, and it doesn’t seem to be because they care less. Rather, abortion (their current second-highest priority) seems to have become especially urgent for respondents after Roe was overturned, and “free and fair U.S. elections” (their top priority) likewise—presumably after Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Have voters, then, grown more fond of drilling and fracking, in a way that would explain Harris’s shift? Also no. “In 2022,” Leiserowitz wrote to me via email, “‘energy independence’ did shoot up considerably as a voting priority, but that was almost certainly driven by spiking gas prices at the time. Its voting priority has since dropped back to 2020 levels.” The same pattern was observed in voters’ support for expanding offshore drilling or drilling on public lands. “I don’t see anything in these numbers that suggests American voters are now more supportive of ‘all of the above’ than they were in 2020,” he wrote.

So why is the Harris campaign hitting this message so conspicuously? One possibility, previously discussed in this newsletter, is that they’re playing to Pennsylvania—the state most likely to decide the 2024 election. This explanation has some intuitive appeal: Although Biden would have been eyeing Pennsylvania in 2020 as well, the Harris-Trump race in Pennsylvania is much tighter right now than it was at this time in 2020.

But there are problems with this story too. Leiserowitz pointed to a prominent New York Times report this week that suggested that low natural gas prices, not fracking policy, are the “big energy issue” in the state right now, while Pennsylvanians remain worried about fracking’s effects on groundwater.

Perhaps a more persuasive explanation for the difference between Biden 2020 and Harris 2024 has to do with primaries. Facing Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary seemed to draw Biden leftward on climate change. Harris, by contrast, didn’t face a Democratic primary in 2024. (And notably, when she competed in the 2020 primary, she favored banning fracking.) Primaries require candidates to court the party’s base, rather than centrists and swing voters.

If part of the narrative around Harris’s silence on climate change is that voters care less than they did in 2020, the second part of the narrative is that her silence doesn’t really matter. “I am not concerned,” Governor Jay Inslee told the Times when asked about this, espousing the common view that Harris’s job right now is to beat Trump and that “when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will.” The Times also quoted Biden climate adviser Gina McCarthy saying, “Nobody’s worried about how many times she talks about climate change.”

While campaign promises don’t determine governing, they do frame the window through which the governing is evaluated. Biden ultimately retreated from several of his climate campaign promises, but the fact that he had promised to end drilling on federal lands was part of why his administration’s lease auctions and speedy approval of drilling permits got as much attention as they did. Should Harris win in November, there won’t be any such climate pledges to hold her to.

The Harris camp may consider that a plus, of course. But it could cause problems down the road: As TNR’s Kate Aronoff has repeatedly observed, Democrats have struggled to tell a compelling story about climate change and the policies that could ameliorate it. That makes it hard, she writes, for them either to win big in elections or to build support for their climate policies. At some point, party leaders will have to start drafting and testing a better strategy—and given climate scientists’ increasingly frantic warnings these days, sooner would be better than later.

Good News/Bad News

Inside Climate News reports on NASA’s effort to “revive” commercial supersonic air travel, despite projections that the supersonic planes would burn anywhere between three and 10 times as much fuel as conventional planes.

Stat of the Week
662%

That’s how much higher the emissions from Big Tech’s data centers likely are than officially reported, according to new analysis by The Guardian.

What I’m Reading

These states tried, and failed, to cut food waste. One succeeded.

Food waste accounts for half of all food-system greenhouse gas emissions globally, according to the U.N., and in the U.S. emits the equivalent of 50 million cars on the road per year. California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Massachusetts were the first five states to pass laws tackling food waste. But of those, only Massachusetts’s law worked, according to a new study. The Post’s Anna Phillips explains why:

The study identified several factors that could explain Massachusetts’ success.

First, the state had built the most extensive network of food-waste-composting sites, making it relatively simple and affordable for businesses to divert food from landfills and incinerators. Massachusetts’ law had no special exemptions and was easy for business owners to understand. Massachusetts also increased the cost of not following the rules and had conducted the most compliance checks.

“By contrast, there is almost no enforcement in other states,” the study’s authors wrote. The effect of [the] other four bans, or lack of effect, “suggests widespread noncompliance with US food waste bans—i.e., that food waste is still being landfilled despite the bans,” they wrote.

Read Anna Phillips’s full report at The Washington Post.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.