Peter Murphy
Peter Murphy is Senior Fellow at CFACT.
Vice President Kamala Harris is one election away from winning the White House and accelerating America’s climate hysteria that is already well underway thanks to the outgoing President Joe Biden.
“There is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” then-Sen. Harris said during a CNN-sponsored town hall back in 2019, during her ill-fated run for president.
That same year, she threw her support behind the Green New Deal, proposed by New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey. That is a plan that would spend trillions of taxpayer dollars to “transition” America from oil, gas and coal sources to so-called wind, solar and batteries – or, rather, to subjugate the nation to an all-powerful green state under the command of the federal government.
Harris later teamed with AOC to introduce the Climate Equity Act, which was a confusing, word-salad of a bill to address climate “injustice” in “front-line communities” using the familiar means of creating a massive new federal bureaucracy.
During Harris’ short-lived campaign for president, which crashed and burned months before the 2020 caucus and primary votes, she called for a climate pollution fee that would “make polluters pay for emitting greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.” Typical of so many climate falsehoods, Harris conflates carbon emissions with “pollution.”
In his letter to the nation announcing he was dropping out of the presidential race, President Joe Biden boasted that he had overseen passage of the “most significant climate legislation in the history of the world” – an apparent reference to his misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. This “significant” legislation included hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate welfare for companies to build wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles and other climate-related projects.
Because, after all, the U.S. is “the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change – still the second largest today after China” said a story posted by the climate-rabid media outlet, Yahoo News. Expect a President Harris to double down on such unscientific drivel.
In a modern historical anomaly, Harris is poised to become a major party’s presidential nominee without a single caucus or primary vote, which is a throwback to the old days of party bosses and smoke-filled rooms at convention time.
Still, Harris is among the most privileged Americans to ever become a presidential nominee of a major political party, though not without difficulties. Her parents were both college professors, but they divorced when she was young. Following law school, Harris became a prosecutor in the Alameda County attorney’s office. With the assistance of her politically powerful mentor and very close friend, the charismatic California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, she was appointed to several public jobs, elected as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, and then U.S. senator.
After becoming a senator, Harris began running for president. Her 2020 presidential campaign helped reveal her radical positions on climate and a host of other issues and enabled her to get on the short list of vice presidential choices.
With Biden’s mental and physical decline now so obvious, Harris has become the beneficiary of a ninth-inning political coup d’état against the president, engineered by Democratic Party leaders, who pressured him to drop his re-election campaign on the eve of the party’s nominating convention.
Harris is no Scranton-born, working-class pretender, who rode Amtrak. She does not have any record of political centrism, moderation or bipartisanship, which Biden practiced off and on throughout his career and helped him win the presidency in 2020.
By contrast, Harris is a product of the one-party state of California, who supported destructive policies on climate change, energy, crime and welfare that helped spark in California high fuel costs, declining living standards and a population exodus.
The election of 2024 will have climate change on the ballot, as did the 2020 election. The big difference this time is that Americans have experienced more than ever the inflationary and detrimental effects of climate policies with no impact on climate change.
And, it is not a supposed moderate candidate making the climate sale to the public, but a true believer, Kamala Harris.
This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller and was republished by CFACT.
