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From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, executive producer and host Steve Curwood and managing producer Jenni Doering discuss Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s public comments on climate and the environment. 

JENNI DOERING: With a lot of excitement, Vice President Kamala Harris has garnered a majority of delegates for the Democratic nomination for president to oppose Republican Donald Trump. With President Biden’s decision not to run again, this race just got way more interesting. There’s a lot one could say, but let’s consider the environment and climate change.

STEVE CURWOOD: [Harris’s] career so far is in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s. For example, soon after law school [Biden] worked in some private law practices in Delaware, including one run by a prominent Republican. He then tried the defense side of criminal law, working as a public defender, and defied the odds when he won a local office and then a U.S. Senate seat by age 29. 

Kamala Harris started as a prosecutor right out of law school, working her way up the ranks and staying with the Democrats all along, ultimately winning elections as district attorney and then California state attorney general. At the local and state level she made her mark in a number of prosecutions, including environmental ones. As she recently told supporters at her campaign headquarters, she took on big oil companies, suing Chevron over hazardous waste and ConocoPhillips over gas station violations.

KAMALA HARRIS: As District Attorney, to go after polluters, I created one of the first environmental justice units in our nation. (cheers) Donald Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago and told big oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a $1 billion campaign contribution (boos).

DOERING: And while campaigning for the Senate seat vacated by Barbara Boxer in 2016, Attorney General Harris joined local prosecutors to bring criminal charges against operators of a failed oil pipeline that polluted roughly 100 miles of California beaches.

HARRIS: This case should serve as a stark reminder that any company that is operating in our state and transporting crude oil and doing it in a way that is irresponsible and in violation of the law will be held accountable. In this state, we value our environment. We value our pristine coastal communities, we value the precious wildlife and the oceans that we are proud to call a big part of California. And anyone who violates the law and endangers our wildlife in our oceans is going to be held accountable. 

DOERING: In the Senate, Kamala Harris was most visible when it came to the environment when she cosponsored the resolution calling for a Green New Deal. And she was to the left of Joe Biden on the Green New Deal in 2019 when she was campaigning in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

HARRIS: I am supporting the Green New Deal. We have to have goals … It’s a resolution that requires us to have goals and think about what we can achieve and put metrics on it. Some of them we’ll achieve, some of them we won’t, but if we don’t aspire … this is gonna be a bad ending. And I hate to sound this way. I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but it is very real and it is within our power.

CURWOOD: And she stayed steady on the environment even as she had to brush away derision about her green concerns.

HARRIS: And look, I care about the environment not because I have any particular desire to hug a tree, but I have a strong desire to hug a healthy baby. This literally comes down to clean air and clean water. And we have got to take this seriously and it’s imminent as a threat unless we correct course and do some serious work on changing our behaviors and adapting to what we know we can do. It is within our power to do it.

CURWOOD: Of course, history records that Kamala Harris dropped her campaign for president before any votes were cast, and ultimately she was tapped for vice president by Joe Biden. But even though Biden never called the Inflation Reduction Act part of a Green New Deal, at the end of the day it incorporated many of the concepts of the original resolution. And Vice President Harris echoed the Green New Deal when she spoke at Florida International University in 2022.

HARRIS: The climate crisis has exposed and intensified generations of economic and environmental inequities that have been present in communities across our nation. And our administration remains committed to addressing those inequities through environmental justice.

DOERING: Kamala Harris took that theme into the international area when she spoke at the 2023 U.N. climate summit in Dubai, two years after President Biden had returned the U.S. to the Paris Climate Agreement.

HARRIS: The United States of America will once again be a global leader in the fight against the climate crisis. Since then, the United States has turned ambition into action. President Biden and I have made the largest climate investment in the history of our country. And some have said the world—roughly a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.

DOERING: And at COP28 she detailed everything from clean energy investments to coastal resilience and forest protection. 

HARRIS: Today we are demonstrating through action how the world can and must meet this crisis. This is a pivotal moment, our action collectively—or worse, our inaction—will impact billions of people for decades to come. For as much as we have accomplished, there is still so much more work to do. And continued progress will not be possible without a fight.

CURWOOD: One of the resources Joe Biden is giving Kamala Harris beyond his campaign organization is his vast set of personal contacts in the international arena. That could make a difference for the climate emergency in the world, if she can successfully combine that with her drive for meaningful change as she navigates the entangled issues of emissions, fossil fuels and finance. 

DOERING: I’m glad we’re getting down to the real issues at heart here. But there is one viral clip we haven’t played yet, and guess what? It’s about trees.

HARRIS: My mother used to—she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ [LAUGHS] You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.

DOERING: This is getting play all over TikTok and Instagram, with coconut tree emojis to boot. Kamala Harris just seems to be one of those public figures who’s highly “meme-able,” and that’s attracting a lot of attention from Gen Z—some of whom are turning 18 just in time to vote this fall.

CURWOOD: With the climate emergency now so evident with the heat waves and storms and fires, Kamala Harris seems poised to attract votes from the climate concerned of all ages. Should the early excitement about her candidacy translate into winning the White House, she could come into office with a Senate and House ready to move beyond the record-setting climate actions of the Biden-Harris administration.