US President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from this year’s presidential race upends the contest only weeks before Democrats meet in Chicago to confirm their nominee. Biden, 81, is the first sitting US president not to seek re-election in decades.
He has been a uniquely consequential leader on climate, most notably by signing the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the largest investment in reducing emissions and boosting clean energy in US history. Biden pledged that the US would halve its emissions by 2030. He rejoined the Paris agreement after former US president Donald Trump pulled the US out of it and created the role of special presidential envoy for climate, among other actions. That presents a stark contrast to Trump, 78, who has called for gutting the IRA, and frequently bashes electric vehicles and wind power.
Biden endorsed US Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him, and she said she intends to win the nomination. Many Democrats were quick to endorse her, including Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the Congressional Black Caucus, but there are still many unknowns.
Challengers could emerge, leading to a contested or brokered convention. Here is a rundown of the climate resumes of Harris and her potential running mates if she clinches the nomination.
KAMALA HARRIS
As vice president, Harris has often acted as spokesperson for her boss’s climate priorities at home and abroad. She was one of several administration officials who fanned out across the US last year to tout the one-year anniversary of the IRA. Harris, 59, stood in for Biden at last year’s COP28 climate summit, where she announced that the US would contribute US$3 billion to a climate aid fund for developing nations.
In 2019, when Harris launched a presidential bid, her climate agenda was more ambitious than Biden’s. She supported a carbon tax and proposed US$10 trillion in private and public climate spending. She also said she would work to ban fracking. That prompted Republican attacks when Biden became the Democrats’ nominee and chose her as his running mate.
In the US Senate she sponsored climate equity bills and backed an effort by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline. However, she chose to leave the Environment and Public Works Committee — which her predecessor Barbara Boxer had chaired — in favor of a seat on the judiciary.
Harris has a record of fighting oil and gas companies, and prioritizing environmental justice in particular. In 2016, as California’s attorney general, she sued Southern California Gas Co for a methane leak near Los Angeles that led to the evacuation of 4,000 families. She sued BP the same year for contravening storage laws at roughly 780 gas stations. Both the utility and BP eventually agreed to pay millions to settle the cases.
GRETCHEN WHITMER
Whitmer reportedly does not plan to challenge Harris for the nomination.
Whitmer, 52, won a second term as Michigan’s governor in 2022. In her first term she signed an executive order to make the state’s economy carbon neutral by the middle of the century, with an intermediate goal of cutting climate emissions to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
A legislative package she signed into law last year moved the state’s climate priorities forward. Under its clean energy standard, Michigan should produce all of its energy from clean sources by 2040.
“Once I sign these bills, Michigan becomes a national leader on clean energy,” Whitmer, a former state lawmaker, said at a signing ceremony. “Together, we are protecting our air, our water and our land, while focusing on taking climate change head on.”
Her administration moved to shut down an oil pipeline in the Straits of Mackinac that she and other opponents say threatens the health of the Great Lakes, but a plan to replace the pipeline has continued.
JOSH SHAPIRO
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro endorsed Harris on Sunday.
He took legal action on climate while the state’s attorney general, including joining a 2018 lawsuit that accused the Trump administration of failing to control methane emissions from oil and gas operations. His office brought criminal charges against several companies for environmental crimes.
Running for governor in 2022, Shapiro said he supported “responsible fracking,” while declining to say whether he would keep Pennsylvania in the the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multistate cooperative to limit carbon emissions.
Shapiro in March announced a plan to fight climate change, calling for legislation that would create a carbon-pricing program to replace the RGGI — currently the subject of a legal challenge that has reached Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court — and to require utilities to buy half their electricity by 2035 from sources that are mostly carbon free.
However, some activists have criticized Shapiro’s environmental record as governor, including an agreement with natural gas company CNX Resources Corp. The governor’s Web site touts the mitigation steps that CNX agreed to, such as widening setbacks for wells near schools and hospitals.
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