On one of the most consequential nights in the 2024 presidential race, the fate of our entire planet received all of 120 seconds. In fact, Harris several times praised the expansion of oil and gas development under President Joe Biden’s administration and doubled down on her promise not to ban fracking. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump were each allotted one minute to discuss their plans for fighting the climate crisis during the September 10 presidential debate.
However, she did cast the deciding vote for the largest climate bill in world history, but let’s forget about that.
The article is more of a critique on the political landscape surrounding climate change in America for the past 20 years. It mentions all the presidents since Bush and how the talk has changed but the fact that it’s still not enough. Despite it being a big issue for voters.
But for more than 20 years, the networks running the presidential debates — and the candidates on the debate stages — have decided that climate change is simply not critical enough to voters to warrant substantial attention. Never mind that more than a third of voters in the U.S. say that global warming is “very important” to their vote, or that an additional 25 percent say they would prefer a candidate who supports climate action — to pundits, climate change is an ancillary issue. Very soon, however, this will have to change. Polls show that climate change is a top issue for young voters in particular, and that 85 percent of young voters can be moved to vote based on climate issues.
It does critique her stance on fracking but I consider that fair game since she did vote for it and advocate for it in the debates.
As Kate Aronoff wrote for The New Republic, Harris could have put forward a number of facts about fracking’s failures, rather than wholeheartedly embracing it. Oil and gas companies depend on billions of dollars in annual tax subsidies, for instance, including a massive bailout during the pandemic in 2020. “Fossil fuel companies thought [fracking] was too expensive to be worth doing until the federal government poured billions of dollars’ worth of funding into basic research and tax breaks,” Aronoff wrote. “But leading Democrats, including Harris, seem incapable of talking about the downsides of fossil fuel production.”
This is not a situation in which everyone, including oil and gas companies, can get a slice of the climate solutions pie. Science shows that fossil fuels must be phased out expeditiously for the health of the planet. But the severity of this crisis — and the aggressive action necessary to abate it — is not adequately captured in Harris’s debate response. In fact, her embrace of fracking and her focus on boosting oil and gas development alongside clean energy production is emblematic of one way in which Democrats and past Republicans have historically overlapped on the climate issue.
First, climate was actually brought up during the recent debate, which is a damn sight more than what has happened in the past. Why? Because, although the issue has gained importance it still isn’t as important as some think it should be.
Second, Harris is trying to win an election and if she doesn’t the subject is mute.
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