After weeks of intense media speculation and sustained pressure from Democratic lawmakers, major donors and senior advisers, President Joe Biden announced that he bows out of the presidential race. He is the first sitting president to step aside so close to election day. “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to step down and focus fully on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden said Sunday in a letter said.
He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” he said in another statement. Not long after, Harris announced via the Biden campaign that she intended to run for president. “I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said.
During his term, President Biden managed to pass into law a surprising number of important policies with a razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate. His crowning achievement is signing the Inflation Reduction Actor IRA – the largest climate spending bill in US history, with the potential to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. In announcing his withdrawal, Biden called it “the most important climate legislation in the history of the world.”
Despite his legislative successes, the 81-year-old Democrat could not withstand widespread backlash after a debate performance in June in which he appeared frail and many in his party saw him as ill-equipped to lead the country for another four years. He will leave office with a portion of his proposed climate agenda untouched and the USA still projected to miss his administration’s goal of reduce emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030.
Former President Donald Trump has vowed to undo many of the policies Biden accomplished if he becomes president, including parts of the IRA. And many of his key advisers and former members of his presidential administration contributed to it a blueprint which advocates scrapping the vast majority of the country’s climate and environmental protections. Whichever Democrat opposes Trump has a weighty mandate: protect America’s already poor climate and environmental legacy from Republican attacks.
With Biden’s endorsement, Vice President Harris, a former US Senator from California, is the favorite Democratic nominee, but that doesn’t mean she will automatically get the nomination. There are less than 30 days until the Democratic National Convention on August 19th. The thousands of Democratic delegates who have already cast their ballots for Biden will either decide on a nominee before the convention, or hold an open convention to find their new nominee – something that has not been done since 1968.
As vice president, Harris argued for allocating $20 billion for the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aims to help disadvantaged communities facing climate impacts, and has regularly promoted the IRA at events, the bill’s investments in clean energy jobs, including installing energy-efficient lighting, and replacing gas furnaces with electric heat pumps. She was also the highest-ranking US official to attend the international climate talks COP28 last year in Dubaiwhere she announced a US commitment to double energy efficiency and triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. At that same conference, Harris announced a $3 billion commitment to the Green Climate Fund to help developing countries adapt to climate challenges Politico reports that the amount was “subject to the availability of funds”, according to the Treasury Department.
“Vice President Harris has been integral to the Biden administration’s major climate accomplishments and has a long record as an impactful climate champion,” Evergreen Action, the climate-focused political group, said in a statement.
Harris took some flak for using a potentially overstated “$1 trillion over 10 years” figure to describe the Biden administration’s climate investments. She got that sum from adding up all the administration’s major investments over the past four yearssome of which are only vaguely related to climate change.
As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris suggested a $10 trillion climate plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 on the campaign trail, including 100 percent carbon neutral electricity by 2030. Under the plan, 50 percent of new vehicles sold will be zero-emission by 2030; and 100 percent of cars by 2035. But that proposal, like similarly ambitious proposals on climate change released by other Democrats during that election cycle, was nothing more than a campaign wish list. A better indication of what her climate change plans would look like as president — even better than her record as vice president, since much of her agenda was set by the Biden administration — may be buried in her record as San Francisco’s district attorney of 2004 to 2011 and as Attorney General of California from 2011 to 2017.
As District Attorney, Harris created an environmental justice unit to address environmental crimes affecting San Francisco’s poorest residents and prosecute several companies including U-Haul for violating hazardous waste laws. Harris later touted her environmental law unit as the first unit in the country. An investigation found that the unit had filed only a handful of lawsuits, and none of them were against the city’s major industrial polluters.
As attorney general, Harris secured an $86 million settlement from Volkswagen for outfitting its vehicles with emissions cheating software and investigated ExxonMobil over its climate change disclosures. She too filed a civil lawsuit against Phillips 66 and ConocoPhillips for environmental violations at gas stations, which ultimately resulted in an $11.5 million settlement. And she conducted a criminal investigation from an oil company about a 2015 spill in Santa Barbara. The company was found guilty and convicted on nine criminal charges.
“We need to do more,” Harris said at the end of last year at the climate summit in Dubai. “Our collective actions, or worse, our inaction, will affect billions of people for decades to come.”
Clayton Aldern contributed writing and reporting to this article.