By Willy Blackmore
Word in Black
There has been a wave of endorsements big and small for Vice President Kamala Harris since President Joe Biden announced that he would not run for reelection this year.
Some were very quick in coming, like Biden’s own endorsement, while others that took a matter of days were still slow enough to create some degree of controversy, namely that of Barack and Michelle Obama.
But on July 31, Harris got an endorsement that stands out because it’s one President Biden did not receive: The Green New Deal Coalition, which includes more left-leaning and youth-oriented environmental groups like the Sunrise Movement, is backing the vice president in the 2024 race against Donald Trump.
Harris — who served both in the Senate and as the state attorney general in California before becoming the first woman to serve as vice president — mostly shares President Biden’s climate record. But while the administration passed the largest climate bill ever, the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden has still been criticized by groups in the Green New Deal Coalition for not doing enough in the face of the climate crisis. The more left-leaning groups have also been highly critical of his approach to the war on Gaza. So any change at the top of the Democratic ticket is welcomed by the coalition.
“This has really lit a candle of hope for a lot of us that have been in the doldrums for the past year or so,” Kaniela Ing, the coalition’s national director, told Inside Climate News.
The one big material point of difference between Harris and Biden happened during the Obama administration. After plans were finalized to allow oil exploration off the California coast near Santa Barbara for new hydraulic-fracturing wells, then-attorney general Harris sued the federal government. Climate groups have not forgotten that she was willing to challenge Big Oil in such a manner (not to mention her own party), and they want to see more of that from the White House.
Harris was also a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal legislation in the Senate. In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, she ran on increasing federal spending on climate issues by $10 trillion over a decade, and also advocated for a carbon tax.
There’s a bit of identity politics at play in the endorsement, too, as there likely will be throughout Harris’s historic campaign: The Green New Deal Coalition believes that, as a Black woman, Harris will be an effective advocate.
Willy Blackmore is a freelance writer and editor covering food, culture, and the environment. He lives in Brooklyn.
This article was originally published on WordinBlack.com.
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