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The climate activist groups that spent more than a year staging protests against President Joe Biden’s energy policies are pursuing a new strategy with his would-be successor: Get Kamala Harris elected now, ask questions later.
Green activists are taking a do-no-harm approach to Harris’ candidacy, ditching demands for policy details and muting potential criticisms over reversing her past opposition to fracking. They say that’s because Harris has excited their base in ways Biden never did — never mind that he signed the biggest climate law in U.S. history.
Stoking that activist fervor was one of the main goals behind the climate groups’ months of pressuring Biden to take more dramatic action against fossil fuels. Now that that’s achieved, they can focus on their most important objective: thwarting Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has vowed to trash their agenda if he wins in November.
“We have to defeat Donald Trump,” said Brett Hartl, chief political strategist with the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, a group that has sued the Biden administration several times and challenged federal oil and gas drilling permits. “We don’t want to sabotage her campaign for no valid reason.”
Harris’ campaign also moved quickly to build trust with several progressive environmental groups that had not endorsed Biden’s reelection bid, officials from several of those organizations said, starting with a meeting July 28 just a week after Biden dropped out of the race.
That communication left the activists feeling heard in a way they had not always felt with Biden, environmentalists said afterward — they endorsed Harris three days later. Others said the abrupt switch at the top of the Democratic ticket made them shelve some of their traditional pressure tactics, arguing it was unreasonable to expect Harris’ team to fully flesh out a platform.
With Harris’ emergence, “the enthusiasm was different and palpable,” said Jeff Ordower, U.S. lead for the climate group 350Action, which had criticized Biden’s approval of the 600-million-barrel Willow oil project in Alaska. “A campaign is not just about policy points.”
“All the activists need to know is Kamala has pledged to take on Big Oil, details TBD,” said R.L. Miller, president of the Climate Hawks Vote PAC.
The progressive hush over Harris’ lack of policy details spans areas beyond climate. While Biden faced rancor over his handling of the conflict in Gaza, Harris has dealt with comparatively less blowback from Palestinian advocates who hope she will forge a different path if elected. Activists have likewise given Harris more breathing room to advocate tough border policies and walk away from her previous support for a Medicare for All government health care plan.
But the greens’ strategy of tabling potential disagreements with Harris and demands for finer policy details from her campaign carries risks. Harris has so far released few specifics on her environmental plans, aside from the brief invocation of “the climate crisis” in her speech and the 13 minutes of Thursday’s Democratic convention programming that highlighted the Biden administration’s $1.6 trillion climate, energy and infrastructure initiatives.
Harris’ campaign has also abandoned her previous calls to ban fracking — without explaining what prompted her switch — and hasn’t spelled out how she would wrest control of minerals supply chains from China or curb greenhouse gas emissions from sectors like steel and cement.
In contrast, at this point four years ago Biden — facing pressure from green activists to up his climate ambitions — had released a detailed policy blueprint that closely mirrored the actions he later took as president.
Republicans have seized on Harris’ dearth of policy details, portraying it as evidence of her unfitness for office or predicting she’ll eventually cave to the green groups’ demands.
“Kamala Harris has zero policy positions on her website and has yet to sit down for an interview because she’s incapable of defending her dangerously liberal record and flip flops on every single issue,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Kamala can’t be trusted by anyone.”
Environmentalists are “going to do whatever they can now, let her say whatever she needs to say to get elected,” said Neil Chatterjee, who chaired the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during the Trump administration. “And then once she’s elected, I think they feel pretty confident they’ll be able to pull her in their direction. So she may say today that she’s no longer for a ban on fracking. I think they feel pretty confident they’re going to get her there.”
Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said Harris was “proud to cast the tie-breaking vote” for Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which she said helped spur 300,000 new energy jobs.
“Vice President Harris is focused on a future where all Americans have clean air, clean water, and affordable, reliable energy while Trump’s lies are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” she wrote in a statement.
During the July 28 meeting, members of Harris’ newly spawned presidential campaign met with some of Biden’s frequent critics in the environmental movement, including the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, 350Action and Friends of the Earth Action. Ike Irby, Harris’ longtime environmental adviser, was on the video call, as was Jake Schwartz, a campaign aide focused on environmental voters.
The meeting was light on details, said Hartl, from the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund. At that point, the campaign had been operating for a week and admitted it was still hiring. Groups in attendance didn’t ask for or expect specifics, though a person familiar with the campaign’s efforts said the Harris team reiterated she would not ban fracking. (Such a ban would require Congress’ approval.)
That person said it is unlikely the campaign will soon release specific policy positions, though that may come in the future. It instead will highlight Harris’ broad vision and her record, such as pushing for lead pipe removal to expand clean drinking water, promoting electric bus manufacturing and advocating for bolstering resilience to wildfires and drought.
“I would not expect to see, at least in the near term, anything like what folks got used to in 2020 and 2019,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive details. “We’re going to demonstrate and show people kind of the direction she wants to take us.”
“People understand the context of where we are,” they added.
Environmental groups on the movement’s left flank want to avoid hindering Harris’ campaign with the pressure tactics they deployed on Biden, which included protesting at his Wilmington, Delaware, campaign headquarters and hounding his Cabinet officials at public events. They see Harris as a more natural ally to the activist base, which distrusted Biden during his 2020 primary — though they eventually pushed him to pursue and sign the most ambitious climate law in the nation’s history.
That Harris’ campaign was listening to them signified change, the groups said.
“The Harris team is far more open to addressing everyone in the room and not just the power broker types,” said Miller, from Climate Hawks Vote. “There’s definitely a bigger sense of belonging with the Harris campaign.”
Yet climate has so far taken a backseat.
Harris’ campaign released a policy blueprint last week lacking details on environmental issues. It received no mention in her first official campaign advertisement. A $55 million advertising push backing Harris that several environmental groups launched Monday did not even mention the words “climate change.”
Progressive environmental groups and more mainstream brands said they are unbothered.
In the weeks between Biden’s disastrous June debate performance and before he exited the race, Hartl said his organization had “given up” and was already strategizing about how to deal with a Trump presidency. 350Action and Friends of the Earth Action were still debating if they should endorse Biden.
But Harris’ emergence has energized the voters that those groups wanted Biden to galvanize with drastic climate steps, and they don’t want to spoil it.
“In a normal world, we would have pushed her harder. But this is just a crazy time,” Hartl said. “We can have policy debates later.”
Those groups are giving Harris space to be ambiguous.
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement that popularized the Green New Deal, called Harris’ fracking pivot an attempt to appear more moderate. But she refrained from denouncing the maneuver, saying the role of her group, which has not endorsed Harris, is to show a political upside in pursuing stronger environmental policies.
Shiney-Ajay said her goal isn’t hearing Harris say certain words, such as “climate emergency” or “Green New Deal.” The prize is committing to a grander vision, whether it’s encouraging affordable housing with stronger energy efficiency measures and greener materials or scaling up renewable energy.
“If I’m looking at the options around the election this November, there’s a lot of ways in which Kamala Harris will be immensely easier to pressure and change on that than a Donald Trump presidency would,” she said in a recent interview.
Stevie O’Hanlon, the group’s spokesperson, said members would begin calling young people next week explaining the climate stakes of the election and encouraging them to vote for Harris. But she said more specifics from Harris would help motivate young voters.
“Sunrise has a high bar for endorsement,” O’Hanlon said. “We frequently campaign for candidates, including Joe Biden in 2020, who we do not formally endorse. And I think, frankly — and this was true in 2020 — we did a lot more to help Joe Biden win than some groups that endorsed, and I think that will be true in 2024 as well.”
Environmental activists ticked through a number of policies they want Harris to pursue. That includes halting overseas oil and gas development through the U.S. Export-Import Bank, making Biden’s pause on approvals for new natural gas exports permanent and fully implementing the Inflation Reduction Act — even passing new legislation to build upon it.
But right now, they said their focus is on maintaining momentum. Miller noted the campaign is still just weeks old and that the Democratic National Convention, where climate change didn’t emerge as a major theme on the main stage until Thursday night, is more cheerleading than a policy forum.
The economy and cost of living are dominating the election, said Pete Maysmith, senior vice president of campaigns for the League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund. Environmental groups want to connect Biden’s and Harris’ legislative victories to that broader economic picture by highlighting Harris’ role in creating clean energy and manufacturing jobs.
“What we need to do is to get Kamala Harris elected, hopefully climate leadership in charge of the House and the Senate, then continue to move forward with ambitious climate policy,” Maysmith said. “There’ll be a lot of different conversations about what that exactly looks like.”
Not all groups agree with the approach. Collin Rees, political director at Oil Change U.S., which has not endorsed Harris, said that while she had a strong 2020 platform and Senate record, that is “ancient history in politics.”
The world, after all, is still careening toward disastrous levels of warming. The U.S. is the world’s top producer of oil and gas, the primary driver of climate change. And the nation is the second-highest emitter of planet-heating gases, behind China.
Rees warned that the Harris honeymoon period could end without fresh pledges, especially when it comes to unresolved issues that turned many progressives off to Biden, such as anger over the administration’s handling of Israel’s actions in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack.
“This is a deeply risky strategy; there’s certainly more energy for Harris’s campaign at the moment, but young people haven’t forgotten about the urgency of ending oil and gas expansion or the bombs we’re funding overseas,” he said in an email. “Another consequence is that the Harris campaign seems to be pandering to moderates and tamping down expectations, which carries its own dangers.”
