Meanwhile, Trump’s playbook, Project 2025, is a right-wing road map to environmental ruin and runaway climate disaster.
Vice President Kamala Harris is a climate and justice leader with two decades of public service on the frontlines of needed progress and change. She’s been a driving force in delivering the strongest climate action in history. She’s ready to build on those gains from day one as president.
She’s earned the chance to lead this country. To raise climate ambition even higher. To confront the climate crisis head-on in a way that creates jobs, drives innovation, cuts costs for our families, and makes the country stronger, more equitable, and more energy secure.
At precisely the moment we need to advance this progress, Donald Trump would rip it out root and branch as political payoff to billionaire oil and gas donors and other big polluters.
As president, Trump waged the worst White House attack ever against the environment and public health. He made a mockery of the fight for a climate-safe future, broke our promise to the rest of the world, and left our children to pay the price.
He’s pledged to do even worse if elected again, with Stone Age policies to slam climate progress into reverse. His playbook, Project 2025, is a right-wing road map to environmental ruin and runaway climate disaster, a plot so dark that Trump, who once hailed its “detailed plans” for his second term, now tries to hush it away from public view.
Nobody, though, is fooled.
And let’s be clear about one thing more.
A twice-impeached convicted felon, fraudster, and sexual predator, Donald Trump is the only president in history to try to overturn the results of an American election. That, in this country, is an unpardonable sin. It was an irrevocable betrayal of the oath Trump cynically took to protect the Constitution and an irredeemable affront to all we hold dear and all that holds us together as a nation. He’s unfit for any office of public trust anywhere in this country. He’s certainly not fit to be president.
Harris is a gifted leader of integrity and vision. She’s devoted her career to enforcing our laws, defending the Constitution, standing up to rapacious polluters, protecting low-income communities and people of color, and demanding action to prevent catastrophic climate change. She understands the need to act on climate. She grasps the opportunity to supercharge a generation of prosperity by making American workers and businesses the winners in the global shift away from the fossil fuels of the past to the cleaner ways that power our future. She knows how to draw on climate progress at home and lead by example abroad.
She’s spearheaded the charge to do all that as vice president, and she’ll advance progress further as commander in chief. She’s the climate champion we need in the White House.
She’s earned our trust, and we believe in her. She’s earned our support, and she’s got it. Most important of all, she’s earned our vote. Come November, she’ll have that too.
The strongest climate action in history
Two years ago this summer, Vice President Harris cast the tie-breaking vote that secured U.S. Senate passage of the strongest climate action in history—the climate and clean energy incentives, worth some $370 billion over 10 years, in the Inflation Reduction Act.
It’s since become one of the most successful congressional actions in decades, driving a heartland manufacturing renaissance with clean energy at its core.
Since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law on August 16, 2022, corporations have announced at least $125 billion of investment in factories to make solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and advanced batteries.
It’s creating more than 108,000 good-paying jobs for electricians, machinists, engineers, welders, pipe fitters, and others in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and three dozen other states, both red and blue.
More than 80 percent of this investment is going to places that need the help: disadvantaged counties where wages, employment, and college graduation rates are below the national average.
These incentives—opposed by every Republican in the Senate and the House—are strengthening the supply chain for the building blocks of a modern economy.
They’re saving our families real money, cutting electricity bills by as much as $38 billion by 2030, lowering the cost of installing rooftop solar panels and heat pumps, and making electric cars, new and used, more affordable for low-income and middle-income drivers.
And they’re making the country more energy secure by reducing U.S. reliance on the fossil fuels that fill the war chests of belligerent petro-states like Russia.
These measures are part of a strategic suite of measures that Harris has championed on behalf of the administration. They include new standards to reduce climate pollution from our nation’s largest sources: methane emissionsfrom oil and gas operations and carbon pollution from cars, trucks, and dirty power plants.
Taken together and done right, these measures have positioned the country to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Harris has the experience and commitment to build on that progress and cut that pollution even more, as the science says we must, to avert catastrophic climate change.
Justice and equity
The Inflation Reduction Act is also making the country more equitable, largely thanks to Kamala Harris, who first attended civil rights demonstrations as an infant in a baby stroller. “I have always thought of this issue through the lens of justice,” she says, “in large part because I was raised to think about fairness and equity.”
Harris has worked for environmental justice for two decades, starting in earnest in 2004 after she was elected district attorney for San Francisco and, later, attorney general for California.
As San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris created one of the first environmental justice units in the nation, protecting low-income communities and people of color who suffer disproportionate environmental hazard and harm.
In 2019, Harris introduced the Clean School Bus Act of 2019. Two years later, it became the foundation for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $5 billion worth of grants to help public schools, government agencies, and public interest groups replace aging buses with electric models.
In 2020, as a U.S. senator, Harris introduced the Climate Equity Act, a legislation that, two years later, framed up the environmental justice provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act.
And she’s been instrumental in implementing the administration’s groundbreaking Justice40 initiative, to make sure the benefits of more than $600 billion in federal investments from the climate and infrastructure laws go to historically underserved communities.
That includes, for example, more than $4.3 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, released in July of this year, to support efforts to make homes and businesses more efficient, to get more clean power from the wind and sun, and to put money in the pockets of farmers who practice climate and conservation measures.
Core to her environmental justice work, Harris has spearheaded the administration’s $15 billion initiative to address a widespread public health problem by replacing, over 10 years, the nation’s aging lead service lines. These lines, more than 9 million of them, contaminate home drinking water, a dire and avoidable problem that disproportionately impacts low-income communities and people of color.
Harris hosted a White House summit that brought together state and local officials, water utilities, labor unions, and others to share the lessons learned and detail ways to speed the replacement of pipes that expose families and especially children to toxic lead, which can impair development and have other detrimental impacts.
She’s convened major events focused on the issue in communities across the country, including Milwaukee; Newark, New Jersey; Philadelphia; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“The climate crisis impacts everybody, but it does not impact all communities equally,” she said last year, making the case for the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which helps to drive public and private investments in clean energy and efficiency in historically underserved areas. “Poor communities, rural communities, Native communities, and communities of color are often the hardest hit and the least able to recover.”
The public face of climate progress
Not surprisingly, Harris has been the tireless public face of the administration’s historic climate progress, traveling the country to meet with civic leaders, community activists, and others who are part of a national clean energy workforce that’s some 3.3 million strong, and growing.
She’s visited with electricians and engineers making solar panels in Georgia; machinists, toolmakers, and diemakers producing parts for electric cars in Michigan; and millwrights and electric bus assemblers in Minnesota.
And she led the U.S. mission at the COP28 global climate talks last December. There, in the face of furious opposition from the oil and gas industry, she helped to rally the world around a deliberate way forward.
World leaders agreed to wind down the absurd taxpayer subsidies—some $1.3 trillion each year—that prop up an oil and gas industry that takes in $3.5 trillion in annual revenues worldwide. They pledged to triple renewable power and double energy efficiency by the end of this decade. And they vowed to transition away from fossil fuels in favor of cleaner, more effective ways to power our future.
“Around the world, there are those who seek to slow or stop our progress. Leaders who deny climate science, delay climate action, and spread disinformation. Corporations that greenwash climate inaction and lobby for billions of dollars in fossil fuels,” Harris said at the global climate talks. “In the face of their resistance and in the context of this moment, we must do more.”
Holding polluters to account in California
As California’s attorney general, where she oversaw the nation’s largest state justice department, Harris advocated for local governments seeking to protect their communities from industrial threats and used her state authority to hold some of the nation’s biggest polluters to account.
Harris won a $24.5 million settlement with Chevron and, later, a $14 million settlement with BP over hazardous waste leaks from gasoline storage tanks. She stood up for communities on the frontlines of refinery pollution.
Harris joined with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice to hold Volkswagen to account for breaking California and U.S. emissions laws, resulting in a historic $14.7 billion payout to consumers who’d been cheated and to fund environmental projects and low-emissions technology.
And she led an investigation into whether oil and gas companies had suppressed internal research to stifle climate action, the findings of which supported a pending state lawsuit against the industry for damages.
Standing up for the environment and the Constitution in the U.S. Senate
After being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris introduced legislation to protect clean air, safe drinking water, and healthy marine life and coastlines. She cosponsored a bill to direct the EPA to research and mitigate the health threats of wildfires.
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Harris opposed the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Laying out the stakes for the nation, Harris warned that Kavanaugh might well be asked to rule on “whether a president of the United States can be held accountable or whether he’ll be above the law.”
And she argued compellingly against Kavanaugh’s record of handing down lower court rulings, “favoring big business over ordinary Americans, polluters over clean air and water, and the powerful over the vulnerable.”
It would be hard to write a more clear and concise description of the recent decisions made by this Court’s conservative supermajority.
With Kavanaugh’s help, the Court’s conservative justices have narrowed the EPA’s options for curbing carbon pollution; gutted the Clean Water Act; granted U.S. presidents sweeping and unjustified immunity from our laws; and made it harder for the federal government to protect the public from existing and emerging threats, including pollution, climate change, worker risk, stock market fraud, and hazardous food and medicine.
We’re experiencing, today, precisely the threats from conservative justices that Harris warned of and acted to try and prevent five years ago.
Kamala Harris for president
On July 21, the earth sweltered through its hottest day on record. The day after that, it was hotter still. In June, dangerous heat waves across much of the United States put 100 million Americans at risk.
Each of the previous 12 months was the hottest such monthsince global recordkeeping began, just as last year was the hottest on record, with this year on track to be as hot, if not hotter.
We’re seeing the results of global warming all around us, as seas rise, species collapse, croplands turn to desert, and wildfires, storms, and floods rage in cascading climate disasters that threaten our capacity to cope—as communities, as a nation, and as a global community of nations.
Last year alone, extreme weather and climate disasters killed nearly 500 Americans, cost the country $95 billion, and prompted insurance companies to hike homeowners’ premiums or drop coverage entirely in California, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, and other states.
What we do, or fail to do, over the next four years, will shape, for better or worse, our ability to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
The vast majority of the country wants our government to act. That’s why 73 percent of U.S. adults favor policies that support exactly the kinds of policies that Vice President Harris has been working for two decades to advance.
Since taking office in 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has delivered the strongest climate action in history: a strategic package of incentives and standards that have positioned the country to cut climate pollution 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
It’s a far cry from where things stood just 3.5 years ago, after the Trump administration shredded U.S. climate policy in its reckless fealty to fossil fuels. Trump—who’s called climate change a hoax, said wind turbines cause cancer, and urged drivers to burn more gasoline—has pledged to set back climate action a decade or more in a second term.
Every member of Trump’s party, in both houses of Congress, voted against the popular climate and clean energy legislation. Since it passed, they’ve tried more than three dozen times to gut it, and Trump’s Project 2025 calls for it to be repealed.
And those standards to cut methane pollution and cut the carbon footprint of our cars, trucks, and dirty power plants? Trump has vowed to scrap them—all of them—as part of his larger campaign to anchor our future in the dirty fuels of the past and condemn our children to climate catastrophe.
We owe our children better than that. Vice President Harris will deliver.
There’s no leader anywhere who is better prepared, more deeply committed, and more adept at what’s required to champion the climate action we need.
In two decades of public service on the frontlines of climate and justice progress, Kamala Harris has stood up for the kind of future we must create. It’s time for the rest of us to stand up for her. Come November, that’s what we’ll do.
