A month in the past, it appeared unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would ever attain a aim she got down to obtain as a presidential hopeful in 2019. However at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night time on the Nationwide Constitutional Middle in Philadelphia — five-odd years after she dropped out of her first presidential race — Harris lastly confronted off in opposition to Donald Trump in what’s going to probably be the one debate between the 2 candidates earlier than Election Day.
Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed to one another on points starting from nationwide safety to the financial system to overseas coverage, however maybe nowhere are the candidates extra at odds than on the matter of local weather change: One thinks rising temperatures pose an existential risk, the opposite thinks local weather science is nonsense.
That gulf in views was placed on full show within the final minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC Information Stay Prime host and debate co-moderator Linsey Davis requested the pair what they’d do to battle local weather change. Harris, who answered the query first, was fast to level out that Trump has implied on many an event that local weather change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we all know is that it is extremely actual,” she mentioned. “You ask anybody who resides in a state who has skilled these excessive climate occurrences who’s now being denied house insurance coverage or it’s being jacked up.” Prior to now couple of years, non-public insurance coverage firms have begun dropping insurance policies in fire- and -flood-prone states like California and Florida.
Whereas Harris identified the existence of those worsening issues, she didn’t say what she plans to do about them, selecting as an alternative to quote investments in local weather change made by the present president. “I’m proud that as vp, during the last 4 years, now we have invested $1 trillion in a clear power financial system, whereas now we have additionally elevated home gasoline manufacturing to historic ranges.” She received that $1 trillion sum by including up the entire administration’s main investments over the previous 4 years, a few of that are solely vaguely related to local weather change.
Trump didn’t reply the query in any respect, as an alternative making a convoluted level about home car manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden is getting hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from China and Ukraine. “They’re promoting our nation down the tubes,” he mentioned.
Trump slashed scores of environmental guidelines and local weather laws throughout his 4 years in workplace and appointed three conservative Supreme Court docket justices who’ve since made it more durable for the federal authorities to clamp down on air pollution. He additionally withdrew america from the Paris Settlement, a worldwide pact to gradual planetary warming, although President Biden later reentered it.
Earlier than Tuesday’s debate, it appeared probably that Harris would cite her file as district lawyer for town of San Francisco, the place she shaped the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed toward penalizing firms for polluting. Or her tenure as California Lawyer Normal, when she investigated oil firms and secured a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the corporate’s makes an attempt to cheat smog emissions requirements. However she didn’t deliver these receipts to the rostrum.
As an alternative, Harris doubled down on her current efforts to make swing state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania overlook in regards to the anti-fracking place she took throughout her 2019 presidential marketing campaign. On the time, Harris mentioned she was “in favor of banning fracking,” however she lately walked that again. “I can’t ban fracking,” Harris mentioned early within the debate. “Actually, I used to be the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Discount Act, which opened new leases on fracking.” The Inflation Discount Act additionally occurs to be the one largest funding in combating local weather change in American historical past, one thing Harris selected to not level out.
Moderately, she advocated for an power technique that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over time: one thing resembling an “the entire above” method with the intention to increase American power independence. “My place is that now we have received to put money into various sources of power, so we cut back our reliance on overseas oil,” she mentioned.
“Harris spent extra time selling fracking than laying out a daring imaginative and prescient for a clear power future,” the Dawn Motion, a youth local weather motion group, mentioned in an announcement. “We need to see an actual plan that meets the dimensions and urgency of this disaster.”
Harris wasn’t the one one keen to speak oil and gasoline on the debate. Onstage, Trump continuously returned to a well-recognized set of energy-related speaking factors. He skewered President Biden, and Harris by affiliation, for prime gasoline costs, which spiked once more this 12 months. He claimed that the day after the election “oil shall be useless, fossil gasoline shall be useless.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever mentioned that they purpose to remove the nation’s huge reliance on fossil fuels within the close to future.
Trump additionally went after sources of renewable power, saying that, whereas he’s a “large fan of photo voltaic,” Democrats have commandeered “an entire desert to get some power out of it.” Trump might have been referring to elements of the American West the place the Bureau of Land Administration has accepted 33,500 acres of land, a few of it desert, for photo voltaic installations, since 2021.
As the talk wrapped up, it wasn’t clear whether or not Harris had succeeded in her aim of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she’s not the anti-fossil gasoline crusader Trump has been working to pin her as. However she did depart Philadelphia with not less than one coveted endorsement: pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift’s.
“I’ve achieved my analysis, and I’ve made my alternative,” Swift wrote in an Instagram put up shortly after the talk ended. “I shall be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz within the 2024 presidential election.”
Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this text.
