Presumptive Democratic party nominee Kamala Harris has a history of endorsing energy policies that lie far to the left of the President she hopes to succeed.
Now that Joe Biden has withdrawn from his re-election bid and Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, it is important to examine what a Harris-led set of energy policies would look like. The Vice President has never really been involved in formulating and enacting energy policy, but her public utterances on the topic through her years in public office in California and Washington, DC make clear that she holds views that run to the left of even Joe Biden.Here are some examples:
While mounting her first run for the U.S. Senate in 2016, then-California Attorney General Harris endorsed the concept of bringing her state’s costly cap-and-trade scheme with her to the nation’s capital. She also endorsed then-Governor Jerry Brown’s proposal to ban plastic straws.
Climate Wire reported July 9, 2024 that, “One of Harris’ last acts as the California attorney general, just weeks before she entered the U.S. Senate, was to sue the Obama administration over its plan to allow fracking off the Pacific Coast.”
Once elected to the Senate, Harris set about opposing most of Donald Trump’s energy plans, including the effort by Trump’s Department of the Interior to offer up to 90% of US offshore waters for oil and gas leasing.
Also, while Senator, Harris chose to become a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, a radical plan to use climate alarm as the impetus to transform the entire US economy introduced by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) in early 2019.
