A month ago, it seemed unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would ever achieve a goal she set as a 2019 presidential hopeful. But at 9 p.m. Tuesday night at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia — five years after she dropped out of her first presidential race — Harris finally faced off against Donald Trump in what will likely be the only debate between the two candidates before Election Day.
Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on the issue of climate change: one thinks rising temperatures pose an existential threatthe other think climate science is nonsense.
That gulf in views was on full display in the final minutes of the hour-and-a-half long debate, when ABC News Live Prime Host and co-moderator Linsey Davis asked the two what they would do to fight climate change. Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has implied on many occasions that climate change is a hoax propagated by China. “What we do know is that it’s very real,” she said. “You ask anyone who lives in a state that has experienced these extreme weather events, who is now being denied home insurance or it’s being shelled out.” In recent years, private insurance companies have begun dropping policies in fire- and flood-prone states such as California and Florida.
While Harris pointed out the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them, choosing instead to cite investments in climate change made by the current president. “I am proud that as Vice President we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy over the past four years while also increasing domestic gas production to historic levels.” She got that $1 trillion amount against adding up all the administration’s major investments over the past four yearssome of which are only vaguely related to climate change.
Trump didn’t answer the question at all, instead making a convoluted point about domestic vehicle manufacturing. He then falsely claimed that President Biden was getting millions of dollars from China and the Ukraine. “They are selling our country down the tubes,” he said.
Trump cut numerous environmental rules and climate regulations during his four years in office and appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices which has since made it harder for the federal government to crack down on pollution. He too the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreementa global agreement to slow planetary warming, although President Biden re-entered it later.
Before Tuesday’s debate, it seemed likely that Harris would mention her record as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she formed the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at penalizing companies for pollution. Or her tenure as attorney general of California, when she investigated oil companies and obtained a multibillion-dollar joint settlement from Volkswagen over the company’s efforts to cheat smog emissions standards. But she didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.
Instead, Harris has redoubled her recent efforts to make state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania forget about the anti-fracking position she took during her 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “in favor of banning fracking”, but she walked it back recently. “I will not ban fracking,” Harris said early in the debate. “In fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened up new fracking leases.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the single largest investment in the fight against climate change in American history, something Harris chose not to point out.
Instead, she advocated for an energy strategy proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something that resembles an “all of the above” approach to advancing American energy independence. “My position is that we need to invest in diverse energy sources, so we reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” she said.
“Harris has spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”
Harris wasn’t the only one eager to talk oil and gas at the debate. On stage, Trump frequently returned to a familiar set of energy-related talking points. He blasted President Biden, and Harris by association, for high gas prices, which rose again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuels will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said that they aim to eliminate the country’s heavy dependence on fossil fuels in the near future.
Trump also went after renewable energy sources, saying that while he’s a “big fan of solar power,” Democrats have “a whole desert command to get some energy out of it.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has 33,500 hectares of land approvedsome of it desert, for solar installations from 2021.
As the debate concluded, it was not clear whether Harris had succeeded in her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she was not the crusader against fossil fuels that Trump had worked to establish her as. But she left Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon, and native Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift.
“I did my research, and I made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “I will cast my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 presidential election.”
Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.
