While United States Vice President Kamala Harris had very little to say about climate change last week as she accepted her party’s nomination in this year’s presidential election, one of her advisors is proposing massive action on clean energy if she wins the November 5 vote.
The omission during the four-day Democratic National Convention stands out, given Harris’s strong track record on climate issues. As vice president, she cast the tie-breaking vote to get the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s landmark climate initiative, adopted by the U.S. Senate. Before that, she co-sponsored the Green New Deal in the Senate and, as California attorney general, prosecuted fossil fuel companies.
Analysis by Politico, Axios, the New York Times, and others this week quoted climate activists and leaders from across the U.S. praising Harris’ record and that of her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—and speculating that their relative silence on climate might be strategic. They could be avoiding the risk of alienating voters in swing states like Pennsylvania, for example, or skirting a fight they stand to lose. Or perhaps they’re planning a later policy announcement on the issue.
Indeed, environmental groups are so confident in Harris’ commitment—and the lack thereof on the part of her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump—that several major groups joined forces to launch a US$55-million advertising campaign supporting her in key swing states, writes the Times.
There are other signs that Harris will make the climate and energy transition a priority if she wins the presidency. On August 20, while the Democratic convention was in progress, Foreign Affairs—the elite, 100-year-old magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations—published an essay by Brian Deese, an economic adviser to the Harris campaign and former director of the National Economic Council under Biden.
Deese writes that a Harris administration, if elected, should undertake a “Clean Energy Marshall Plan.” The original Marshall Plan was a huge, post-Second World War initiative by the U.S. to help rebuild Europe’s war-torn nations. It ended up benefitting the U.S. economy too, as American companies that had ramped up production for the war manufactured many of the goods Europe urgently needed.
“The new Marshall Plan should aim to help countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change: the United States’ partners in the developing world,” Deese writes. “Developing countries and emerging markets will need access to cheap capital and technology to transition away from fossil fuels quickly enough to halt global warming.”
There are new economic instruments that would make such a plan less costly, in relative terms, than the original Marshall Plan, Deese adds. But he does warn that other countries might seize this initiative before the U.S.
“Unfortunately, the United States has yet to offer a full-throated answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the $1-trillion infrastructure project Beijing designed to expand its influence across the globe,” Deese writes. “And now, some leaders in China are calling for Beijing to go even further and develop a Marshall Plan–style approach to drive clean energy adoption in developing countries.”
In the same essay, Deese proposes a new Clean Energy Resilience Authority to create more resilient supply chains for the clean energy transition. Under that authority, he suggests, “the U.S. should lead a coalition of partners to build access to processed critical minerals” and also create a strategic reserve capability for such minerals—something like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The Biden initiative closest to Deese’s ideas is the IRA, which Deese was instrumental in getting through Congress. Now, Trump’s pledge to repeal the Act is creating problems, particularly on the home territory of his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, reports CBC News.
The Cleveland-Cliffs steel plant in Middletown, Vance’s home town, is slated to receive up to $500 million for a low-carbon retrofit, one of many projects in Republican districts that are promised IRA funds that haven’t yet been spent. Trump’s vow to repeal the IRA threatens not only this crucial funding but also the 170 new permanent jobs, 1,200 temporary union construction jobs, and the 2,500 existing jobs tied to the project. The fate of other IRA-backed projects, in both Democratic and Republican regions, also hangs in the balance.
