A month ago, it seemed unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would achieve the goals she set out to achieve as a 2019 presidential candidate. But more than five years after dropping out of her first presidential race, she finally faced off against Donald Trump at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia in what will likely be the only debate between the two candidates before Election Day.
Harris and Trump are polar opposites on a range of issues from national security to the economy to foreign policy, but perhaps nowhere are the candidates more at odds than on climate change: One sees rising temperatures as an existential threat, while the other believes climate science is nonsense.
The divide was on full display in the final minutes of the hour-and-a-half-long debate, when ABC News Live Prime host and debate co-moderator Lindsey Davis asked both men what they would do to combat climate change. Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has repeatedly implied that climate change is a hoax spread by China. “What we know is that it’s very real,” she said. “Ask anyone who lives in a state that’s experienced these extreme weather events if they’ve been denied home insurance or had their rates increased.” Over the past two years, private insurers have begun dropping policies in fire- and flood-prone states, such as California and Florida.
While Harris noted the existence of these worsening problems, she didn’t say what she plans to do about them, instead pointing to the current president’s investments in climate change: “As Vice President, I’m proud to have invested $1 trillion in our clean energy economy over the past four years and increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” Harris calculated the trillion-dollar figure by adding up all of the administration’s major investments over the past four years, some of which are only vaguely related to climate change.
Trump never answered the question, instead making convoluted claims about domestic auto manufacturing and falsely claiming that Biden has received millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They are trying to ruin our country,” he said.
During his four years in office, Trump cut numerous environmental and climate regulations, appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices who made it harder for the federal government to police pollution, and withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international pact to slow global warming, though Biden later rejoined it.
Before Tuesday’s debate, it was expected that Ms. Harris would point to her accomplishments as district attorney for San Francisco, where she created the nation’s first environmental justice unit aimed at punishing corporate polluters, or her tenure as California’s attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar settlement with Volkswagen over its efforts to cheat emissions standards. But Ms. Harris didn’t bring those receipts to the podium.
Instead, Harris doubled down on her recent efforts to get voters in battleground states like Pennsylvania, rich in natural gas, to forget her anti-fracking stance in the 2019 presidential election. At the time, Harris said she supported banning fracking, but recently walked back that position. “I don’t ban fracking,” she said early in the debate. “In fact, I voted in the runoff for the Inflation Control Act, which opened up new fracking licenses.” The Inflation Control Act is also the largest climate change investment in American history, a point Harris failed to make.
Instead, she advocated for an energy strategy that many Republicans have proposed over the years, similar to the “all means possible” approach to increasing America’s energy independence. “I’m in favor of investing in diverse energy sources and reducing our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.
“Harris has spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the youth climate action group Sunrise Movement said in a statement. “We want to see a realistic plan that matches the scale and urgency of this crisis.”
Harris wasn’t the only one to speak passionately about oil and gas during the debate. Trump frequently brought up energy-related staples onstage, sharply criticizing Biden and Harris for gasoline prices, which have soared again this year. The day after the election, Trump claimed that if Harris wins, “oil will die, fossil fuels will die.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said they aim to end the country’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels in the near future.
Trump also addressed renewable energy sources, saying he’s a “big fan of solar power” but Democrats are “taking over entire deserts to get their energy from that,” possibly referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has approved 33,500 acres, some of which are desert, for solar installations starting in 2021.
When the debate ended, it was not clear whether Harris had achieved her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she was not the anti-fossil fuel crusader Trump was trying to make her out to be, but she left Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: from pop icon and Pennsylvania native Taylor Swift.
“I’ve done my research and I’ve made a decision,” Swift wrote on Instagram shortly after the debate ended. “I will be voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President in 2024.”
Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this article.