Harris presidency fights big oil
Partlow 7/24 (Joshua Partlow is a reporter on the national desk of The Washington Post. He has previously worked as the bureau chief in Mexico City, Kabul, and Rio de Janeiro. He has also been a correspondent in the Post's Baghdad bureau. Partlow joined The Washington Post in 2003 as an intern on the financial desk and later worked for the Metro section covering the Maryland suburbs. He grew up in Olympia, Washington, “What a Harris campaign could mean for the fight against climate change”, 7/24/2024, Acc 7/27/2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/07/23/kamala-harris-climate-change-environment/) 顏
When Harris ran for president five years ago, she staked out a more liberal climate stance than her eventual running mate. Harris vowed to end federal support for the fossil fuel industry and immediately stop new oil leases on federal lands and waters. She endorsed a ban on fracking — which Biden did not — and proposed a $10 trillion plan to fight climate change, which she described as “an existential threat to us as a species.”
Some of her campaign promises got dropped along the way. During the Biden administration, oil permitting on federal lands and waters has outpaced the Trump administration. The Willow project — ConocoPhillips’s controversial drilling plan in the Alaskan Arctic — got the green light. The oil industry still gets tax breaks, although the administration raised fees for drilling on public land.
Despite this, environmentalists have praised the Biden-Harris administration for turbocharging the renewable energy economy — particularly through the Inflation Reduction Act — and tightening environmental regulations loosened by Trump.
“President Biden has done more on climate and clean energy than any other president by far, and we are eternally grateful,” Sittenfeld said.
As vice president, Harris — whose presidential candidacy Biden endorsed Sunday — cast the tiebreaking vote on the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which provides hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies for electric cars, solar panels and other clean energy technology. The law is expected to help reduce emissions about 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Harris has spent time on the road touting these achievements and last year led the United Nations COP28 climate summit in Dubai, where she said “we must do more” to halt the warming of the planet.
At an April event in Charlotte, Harris aggressively defended the Biden administration’s actions on climate change, saying the investments it had overseen ultimately will create millions of jobs, provide huge amounts of capital for clean energy projects and lower energy bills for many American families.
“When we invest in climate, we create jobs, we lower costs, and we invest in families,” Harris said.
The Biden administration worked to reverse many of Trump’s regulatory rollbacks that weakened pollution rules and made it easier for oil and gas companies to operate. It also enacted an EPA rule to limit tailpipe pollution in coming years, forcing a shift to zero-emissions vehicles that are expected to amount to more than half of new cars sold by 2032. Republicans and oil industry groups have criticized the effort to phase out gas-powered cars.
In the past, Trump mocked climate change as a “hoax.” As president he embraced coal mining and oil drilling, rolled back or eliminated more than 100 regulations designed to protect the country’s land, air and water, and pulled the United States out of the Paris agreement, the main forum for nations of the world to address the warming planet.
“It’s fair to expect a Harris Administration approach to climate and energy policy would follow the California model,” Kevin Slagle, a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association, said in a statement. “We could see EV mandates imposed nationwide, new production bans and further restrictions on fuel and energy choices.”