The Case for Kamala Harris in a Burning World
At this late hour, with so much at stake in this election, let’s get one thing straight: Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the American economy, to women’s reproductive freedom, and to democracy itself. But he is not a threat to the planet. Whatever happens on Nov. 5, Earth will be fine. During her 4.5 billion years spinning around the sun, our beautiful planet has been bombarded by meteors, cooked by volcanoes, and iced into a giant snowball. Earth doesn’t care about Trump. To her, he is a flea that shits on a gold-gilt toilet.
What’s at stake in this election is something more fragile: the stable climate that is the basis for civilized life as we know it. Because your job, your freedom, and your future are all dependent on the kindness and generosity of the Earth’s atmosphere. If we fuck that up, we’re all in big trouble — and so is every living thing around us. There is no democracy in a world ravaged by climate-driven war, disease, displacement, and economic mayhem.
What happens on Nov. 5 will go a long way toward determining whether Phoenix will be a habitable city in the years to come, whether wildfires will consume the West, whether the ocean will become a dead pool of jellyfish and coastal cities like Miami and Charleston become underwater theme parks. Do you, my friend, want to spend the rest of your days spun around by climate chaos in all its forms? Water shortages, blackouts, crop failures, skyrocketing insurance rates, new pandemics, flooded cities and towns, heat deaths, Category Six hurricanes that turn million-dollar condos into wreckage in a few hours. That’s the choice we have in this election. As Beyoncé said at a recent rally for Kamala Harris in Houston, “Our past, our present, our future merge to meet us here.”
FOR THE PAST 20 YEARS, I’ve written about the climate crisis at Rolling Stone and published seven books, including the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First. I’ve seen glaciers collapsing in Greenland and Antarctica. I’ve seen the bodies of people who died from extreme heat. I’ve seen starving polar bears and talked with water-panicked farmers. I’ve looked through a microscope at a malaria-carrying mosquito. I’ve been a mile underground in a Pennsylvania coal mine and in the middle of the Atlantic in an ocean research vessel. I’ve dove down to coral reefs in Australia that are bleached out by hot, acidic ocean water, and I’ve hiked through forests in Colorado that are being eaten alive by pine bark beetles. I’ve talked to scientists, politicians, activists, emergency room doctors, urban planners, clean tech entrepreneurs, and climate doomers who think we are all cooked anyway, so who the hell cares.
Here is what I’ve learned from all this: The climate crisis is real, it is happening fast, and we are not ready for what’s coming. Not even close. We are driving our gas-guzzling SUVs into a shitstorm the likes of which no humans have ever witnessed before.
I’ve also talked to people who see this whole thing very differently than I do. They show me junky graphs that argue the recent warming is just part of a natural cycle. Or they argue that China (or, sometimes, India, or just nameless Black/brown/yellow people in some distant land) are responsible for climate change. Or they believe the climate crisis is a scam cooked up by George Soros to steal your God-given right to burn fossil fuels. In their view, people like me, who talk bluntly about the risks of climate change, are all grifters who are trying to take away your hamburgers and your jacked-up Jeep and force you to eat bugs and ride an electric skateboard.
They’re wrong. But I’ve dealt with enough flat-Earthers to know that nothing I’m going to say here is going to change their minds. So right now, at this moment of decision, I just want to talk to people who are still tethered to reality and who are honestly trying to grapple with what’s at stake in this election.
Maybe you love Kamala. Maybe not. Maybe you’re cynical about politics and think it doesn’t really matter who is president. Maybe you don’t want to vote for her because of the ongoing horrors in Gaza. Or maybe you wish that she didn’t play footsie with frackers and was a fiercer advocate of the promise (and the inevitability) of the clean energy revolution.
But we live in the world we have, not the world we wish for. And in this world, the job of making sure Donald Trump is not the next president of the United States could not be more urgent.
There’s no room here for a crash course on climate risk. But here’s the news from just the past few weeks: NASA determined that 2024 was the hottest summer since modern recordkeeping began, and the hottest ten years have all been in the last decade. The UN called out “a massive gap between rhetoric and reality” in global action on the greenhouse gas pollution targets in the Paris climate agreement, and warned the world is now heading for as much as 3 C of warming, double the ambitious Paris goal. The 2024 Living Planet Report details “a catastrophic 73 percent decline in the average wildlife populations over just 50 years.” Science reported that global CO2 emissions from forest fires have increased by 60 percent since 2001. Forest fires have also shifted north and become more severe.
An open letter from 44 climate scientists from 15 countries warned that the collapse of the main Atlantic Ocean circulation system, known as AMOC, has been “greatly underestimated” and would have devastating and irreversible impacts on the climate in the northern hemisphere. And the highly regarded 2024 State of the Planet report began with these ominous words: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.”
TRUMP THINKS CLIMATE CHANGE is a hoax. He makes jokes about sea-level rise creating more oceanfront real estate and how wind turbines kill birds and whales. He talks about solar and wind power like they are toys and warns us that if we get too dependent on them, we might not be able to watch TV if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing — which is, to Trump, a technological failure that steals life of meaning and purpose. Project 2025, his 900-page policy wish list of actions he will take if he is elected, includes plans to dismantle NOAA, the federal agency that is responsible for climate science and weather data, as well as eliminate the National Flood Insurance Program, the only protection homeowners have against the increasingly devastating climate-driven flooding like Hurricane Helene delivered last month in North Carolina.
And oh, there is so much more. Trump has repeatedly said he intends to be “a dictator for one day,” in part so he can “drill, baby, drill.” He invited oil and gas execs to Mar-a-Lago recently to pitch them a deal, which boiled down to something like this: Donate a billion dollars to my campaign, and when I’m elected, I’ll give you whatever you want.
But to call Trump a climate denier doesn’t really capture what what’s going on here.
In fact, Trump is running a pro-climate chaos campaign. To him, a superheated planet is a feature, not a bug. Think about this way: The more chaotic our world becomes, the easier it is for him to stoke fear, build walls, deploy the military, and cosplay the Strong Man. He can play politics with disaster relief, giving federal money to his pals, or his constituencies. As for the people who die in heat waves or whose homes are washed away by bigger storms — well, most of them aren’t active voters, or if they are, they are likely to be Black or brown and so who the hell cares? For a vivid example of how this works, just look at Trump’s pal, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who signed a bill prohibiting shade or water breaks for workers during the hottest summer ever recorded in Texas. The workers who die during heat waves in Texas are likely to be Mexican migrants (who — let’s be honest — do most of the hard outdoor work in Texas). For Abbott, it was a way to look tough to his largely white supporters, with virtually no political downside.
Trump loves fossil fuels not only because he’s too stupid to grasp the promise of clean energy. He loves fossil fuels because the fossil fuel industry understands and embraces power in a way that is perfectly in sync with Trump’s politics. The architecture of the fossil fuel industry is all about centralized control — big power plants, big refineries, big pipelines. They are the pushers, we are the addicts. Renewables, on the other hand, are decentralized, democratic, and thrive on innovation, not political muscle.
No wonder Trump hates them.
SINCE SHE BEGAN her presidential campaign in July, Harris has not spoken forcefully about the risks of life on a super-heated planet. When pressed about it, she mentions that she cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provided about $370 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below their 2005 levels by the end of this decade. But Harris has not said much about how she will build on the success of IRA if she wins. Nor does she talk much about the astounding fact that clean energy jobs grew at more than twice the rate of the overall economy in 2023. By the end of last year, there were over half a million jobs in wind, solar, and energy storage in the United States.
That said, Harris’s record on climate is strong. She has called climate change “an existential threat.” As California attorney general, she prosecuted oil companies for environmental violations. During her short-lived 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, she released a $10 trillion climate plan that called for investing in renewable energy, holding polluters accountable, helping communities affected by climate change, and protecting natural resources. As vice president, she announced $1 billion in grants for states to address flooding and extreme heat exacerbated by climate change. “The science is clear,” she said. “Extreme weather will only get worse, and the climate crisis will only accelerate.’’
Why has she been so soft-spoken about it during the campaign? In a word, Pennsylvania. Clearly, Harris has made the calculation that talking too bluntly about climate risk or clean energy might imperil her standing with voters in that all-important swing state. But how how many voters are we talking about, really? Trump claims 500,000 workers in the state are employed by fracking, but that is (of course) bullshit. Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a think tank in Pennsylvania, calculates that only 18,636 jobs in the state can be directly attributed to fracking. If you count indirect jobs, the overall job figure would be about 55,000 — about one-tenth of Trump’s number.
Clean energy, on the other hand, employs nearly 70,000 workers in the state and is growing 50 percent faster than the rest of Pennsylvania’s economy.
It’s a tricky line for Harris to walk, to be sure. Especially considering the fact that Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 by only 80,555 votes.
But by speaking softly about the climate crisis and the promise of clean energy, Harris risks alienating young voters who understand very well the perils of life in a rapidly-warming world. “One thing people always say is that youth voters don’t turn out, but my answer is always it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they’ve never felt seen, or heard, or talked to,” one young Democratic organizer in Florida told The Guardian. “What’s different now is because we are all youth talking to youth, we understand our generation, we know how to talk to them. You don’t want an 80-year-old talking to a 20-year-old about climate change, or any issue. It just doesn’t work. We’re all 20-year-olds talking to 20-year-olds. We understand it, so it resonates.”
It sucks that we live in a country that’s so polarized and so tweaked by disinformation that one of the biggest threats to civilized life on Earth has barely been discussed in this campaign. But in the end, that’s on us, not Harris. The climate fight has always been a slow guerilla war in a malaria-infested swamp against an enemy with bigger guns and a lot more money. Americans have been silenced, lied to, and falsely comforted by people with a vested interest in denying the truth about what’s happening in our world and to the future we imagine for ourselves and our kids.
On Nov. 5, we have a chance to change that. A vote for Kamala Harris is not a vote to save the planet. But it is a vote to save ourselves.
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