Kamala Harris has made tackling corporate price-gouging and raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy cornerstones of her economic platform. She seems to be leaning into some of the Biden administration’s more populist talking points about making life more affordable for ordinary people—earning her plaudits from progressives and predictable freak-outs from Republicans, editorial boards, and economists both on the right and in the discipline’s still mostly orthodox mainstream. So far, however, the Harris campaign hasn’t extended that clear-eyed populism to its climate politics.
Consider the Democratic Party platform for 2024: “To lower prices, Democrats will also keep working to boost supply, fix supply chains and promote competition, especially for essential items like gas and groceries that families depend on,” the party document promises, while boasting that the Biden administration oversaw record levels of oil and gas production. Other parts of the platform talk enthusiastically about “reducing Big Oil’s hold on our economy,” and ding Trump for being beholden to fossil fuel executives.
That’s a pretty wonky jumble of contradictions. And it echoes the Biden White House’s disjointed approach to energy: boosting renewables as the industry of the future; accosting Big Oil for price gouging; then bragging about how much oil and gas they’re producing. The core of the administration’s economic pitch for climate action—reflected in the Inflation Reduction Act, perhaps its signature legislative accomplishment—has been that investing in the energy transition will revive American manufacturing and create millions of jobs. Following suit, green groups backing Harris have launched a $55 million ad campaign across several swing states, aiming to sell the administration’s climate measures to voters on their economic (rather than environmental) benefits. Insofar as this administration has explicitly challenged Big Oil it’s generally for price gouging—not polluting, or having spent decades stalling progress to reduce emissions.
It’s easy to understand how the Biden administration, and by extension the Harris campaign, got into this bind: There’s a defensible case to be made for focusing on the positive aspects of climate action rather than on cutting fossil fuels, and for touting the Biden-Harris administration’s real-world achievement. Yet applying the same talking points that work for grocery prices to prices at the pump has left Democrats ostensibly committed to reducing emissions in an awkward spot: essentially, arguing for unlimited and ever-expanding fossil fuel production. Gas and groceries—paired under the same heading in the platform—are alike insofar as they are things that most people need to buy regularly. But they’re sold by very different industries, and applying the same talking points to both doesn’t work very well.
There’s an alternative available: pointing out how much of a scam the fossil fuel economy is, and the mounting, everyday costs of the climate crisis it’s exacerbating. If the Harris campaign and Democrat more broadly are serious about winning elections and building support for climate policy in the future, they should start crafting a more coherent way to marry the party’s embrace of economic populism with its professed commitments to decarbonization.