RL first first met Kamala Harris in 2015 as she was serving as state Attorney General and running for Senate. Her commitment to environmental justice goes back even further: as San Francisco's district attorney, Harris created the office's first environmental justice unit in 2005. During her time as California's attorney general, she opposed Chevron's proposed refinery expansion in Richmond, and she criminally prosecuted a fossil fuel entity for a 2015 Santa Barbara oil spill. In 2015, she told me that she intended to sue Exxon for what it knew (but lied to the public) about climate change in the 1970s, and I confirmed that her office had a file open. (Alas, she ran for Senate and her successor, Xavier Becerra, chose to ignore the case against Exxon.)
Speaking of the Senate, Climate Hawks Vote endorsed her for Senate in 2016.
She signed the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge in 2019 – and she elected to sign it with RL and climate hawks. During her short lived Presidential campaign, she also pledged support for a Green New Deal.
In Biden’s White House, she’s backed him up on critical policy fronts, engaged youth voters, and spoken up for environmental justice. Among the many, many tiebreaking votes she cast in the Senate, she was the 51st vote for the Inflation Reduction Act. And she was the highest-ranking US official to attend the international COP talks in Dubai last fall.
In the Biden White House and at DNC events, she’s touted the California model: yes, we can have both strong environmental protections and a strong economy, no false choices here.
Best of all, because of her strong background as a prosecutor speaking out for communities hit hard by environmental injustices, there's a strong sense brewing that she'd be even tougher on polluters than Biden has been.
And a critical fact you must know about her: Donald Trump is afraid to debate her. Of course he is. She’s a prosecutor and he’s a convicted felon.
Together, it’s time for climate hawks to flock together and defeat Donald Trump and his toxic brand of politics. It’s time to unite around the eminently qualified Vice President. It’s time to win! We’ve got a planet and a democracy to save.
