Andrew Lewin discusses the contrasting approaches of the political parties towards climate change. Exploring the potential impact of the Inflation Reduction Act by President Biden and the environmental initiatives of P.P. Harris, the episode delves into the policy perspectives shaping environmental action. From rumors about Republicans' strategies to combat climate change to the implications for the environment, this episode provides insights into current political dynamics influencing ocean conservation efforts.
Link to Article: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/young-climate-activists-favor-harris-biden-environment-rcna163745?utm_medium=climate.tue.rd.20240806&utm_source=email&utm_content=article&utm_campaign=email-2022
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Kamala Harris is gaining popularity among environmentalists as a more appealing candidate for the environment due to her track record of prosecuting oil companies and her co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal. Harris has a history of holding big oil companies accountable for their actions, securing settlements with Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips over their mishandling of hazardous materials. This proactive approach to environmental justice has resonated with many young voters and environmental organizations.
Harris's stance on environmental issues, coupled with her willingness to take on polluters, has positioned her as a candidate unafraid to tackle environmental and climate policy at its root, especially in holding polluters accountable. This contrasts with a more moderate policy approach seen in other candidates, including President Biden. Harris's commitment to environmental justice and her past actions as a prosecutor have garnered support from organizations like the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal Network.
Despite some shifts in her stance, such as no longer supporting a ban on fracking, Harris's overall environmental platform is viewed as more progressive than that of other candidates. Her emphasis on environmental policy and her history of standing up to big oil companies have energized the environmental community and provided hope for stronger environmental protections in the future.
Young voters and environmental activists are increasingly seeking more aggressive action on climate change, recognizing the severity of the climate crisis. In a podcast episode, it was highlighted that many young environmentalists and organizations view Kamala Harris as a candidate willing to take bold steps in tackling environmental and climate policy. Harris has a track record of going after big oil companies as a prosecutor and co-sponsoring the Green New Deal as a senator, demonstrating her commitment to holding polluters accountable.
The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization advocating for government intervention on climate change, endorsed Harris due to her history of holding big oil accountable for their actions. This endorsement signifies the support of young voters for Harris's approach to environmental issues. Additionally, Harris's early career work as a district attorney in San Francisco, where she created an environmental justice unit, further showcases her dedication to addressing environmental concerns.
Furthermore, Harris's settlements with major oil companies like Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips over their mishandling of hazardous materials demonstrate her willingness to take legal action against polluters. This proactive stance resonates with young voters and environmental activists who are looking for leaders unafraid to challenge powerful industries and prioritize environmental protection.
Overall, the episode emphasizes that Harris is perceived as a candidate who is not only willing but also capable of taking decisive action on climate change and environmental policy. Her track record of holding polluters accountable and advocating for environmental justice aligns with the desires of young voters and activists for more aggressive measures to combat the climate crisis.
One key takeaway from the podcast episode is the shift towards a focus on policy, especially environmental policy, in the upcoming election. The discussion highlights how Kamala Harris is being seen as a more progressive candidate on environmental issues compared to Biden. Harris's track record of holding big oil companies accountable and her co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal have garnered support from young environmentalists and organizations advocating for climate action.
The episode emphasizes that while Biden has made some environmental wins, there is a growing sentiment among environmental activists that more needs to be done to address the severity of the climate crisis. Harris's proactive approach in prosecuting oil companies and her commitment to environmental justice have resonated with many who are looking for stronger action on climate change.
The comparison between Harris and Biden in terms of environmental policy underscores a shift towards prioritizing candidates based on their stance on critical issues like climate change. Harris's willingness to confront polluters and push for stricter regulations sets her apart as a candidate unafraid to take on powerful interests in the fossil fuel industry.
As the election approaches, the podcast suggests that the choice between candidates is increasingly framed by their environmental policies. Harris's evolution on issues like fracking and her commitment to progressive environmental platforms signal a potential shift towards more robust environmental protection measures if she were to be elected.
Overall, the episode highlights the growing importance of environmental policy in the election discourse and positions Harris as a candidate who represents a more progressive stance on environmental issues compared to Biden. This shift towards prioritizing candidates based on their environmental commitments reflects a broader trend towards policy-focused decision-making in the upcoming election.
If you think President Biden was good for climate change and the environment by passing the inflation reduction act, well, a lot of environmentalists in the U.S. think that VP Harris will actually be better. And we're going to talk about why on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, let's start the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about action taking from a policy perspective. And look, it's all on your news feeds. It's on your TV. You can't get away from it. It's on the radio. It's on podcast. We're going to talk about the presidential debate. I know last time I talked about politics, I said, we're not going to talk about the presidential debate, but there is a significant difference in the parties and their approach towards doing something about climate change. And if you want to know how both parties are doing, on one side, you have the Republicans who are rumored, and even I guess the VP for the VP candidate for the Republicans, Vance, JD Vance, has come out or not has come out, but actually wrote the forward, I believe, for Project 2025, a notorious bill or a notorious plan of action that they think that the some Republicans think that Donald Trump should take when and if he gets into the presidency. And if you want to know how that's going to affect the environment, I'm going to link to an article on LinkedIn by a good friend of mine, Dr. or Dr. should be a doctor. Angelo Villagomez, he pointed out just all the resources you need to know how the Project 2025 is going to affect climate change, fossil fuels, environmental protection agency, NOAA, ocean conservation, NOAA weather service, Department of Interior, Antiquities Act, public lands, wildlife, and migratory birds. He's got all of that on here, and I think it's going to be an interesting read. So I'm going to link to that in the show notes. But look, the Democrats have passed and President Biden has passed the Inflation Reduction Act. This is an act that's all encompassing. It's supposed to help against reduce climate change, help reduce climate change, and also reduce inflation. And it's an act that is probably the most progressive act, has been touted as the most progressive act for climate to fight climate change than we've ever seen before. However, a lot of environmentalists and a lot of environmental organizations in the US and outside the US have criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough. And so, especially young environmentalists, and they want to see more action. And they also pointed out that Harris's record, Kamala Harris's record for prosecuting oil companies and her co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal are reasons for her to be that she will be a better president for the environment than President Biden. So there's a lot of excitement in the air. Look, it's been about a week since a bit a little over a week that you're hearing since you're hearing this that, well, I guess it's two weeks that Kamala Harris VP Kamala Harris has been named as the presidential candidate for the Democrats. And she has injected a lot of excitement. She got, she quickly became the nominee with the amount of money that she raised from a lot of different groups. People are happy. People are energized. There is this sort of new sort of look on the presidential campaign. You could see it before when Biden was still running, and it ran against Donald Trump, that people were not excited. People are like, "Are you serious? These are the only two out of the population of over 350 million. These are the only two people that we get to choose from." People were a little distraught. They were distraught not only at Donald Trump and his antics, but they're distraught by President Biden and his antics. He looks old. He looks older. He looks like he's having trouble putting words together during speeches. The last debate he did with Donald Trump was not very good. And so people were concerned, and a lot of people in the Democrats were very concerned. And so that's when we started to see this shift and started to see, "Hey, Kamala Harris is going to be the next presidential nominee." And nobody believed it. It was a long shot because President Biden had to be the one that was going to say, "No," and he finally did it. Whether he wanted to do it or not, he did it. And there's just been this new energy that in the election itself, the Republicans are trying to figure out what to do. They were attacking Biden for his age and the fact that he was messing up words and messing up people's names as he was introducing them, calling President Zelensky, who's Ukrainian, President Putin, who's a Russian and trying to invade his country. Obviously, not a good sign. And so now with Kamala Harris in as the nominee and as the candidate, holy cow, this has changed. And just as I'm recording this episode, it's been about a day since they, I believe it's Watts, is his name, the VP candidate for the Harris ticket. He's going to be on the ticket. He's going to be, if she gets elected President, he will be the next Vice President. But what's going back, and let's get away from that, and let's go into sort of her record against oil and gas companies. So, you know, there's, and why people are really following her. So representatives from 11 organizations devoted to elevating young voters, concerns about climate change, said Harris's record of going after big oil companies as a prosecutor and her co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal as a senator make her a more appealing candidate than Biden, despite his environmental win. So it's not saying that Biden was bad. Just Biden over the last little bit has approved oil and gas projects that were not expected to be approved and had a lot of controversy surrounding it. But when it comes to Harris, she has a history around holding big oil accountable in a way that we haven't seen and haven't been able to do for the last four years. This is said by Aru Shini Aijay, the 26 year old that's the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, which pushes the government for government interventions to address climate change. And the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of 19 progressive environmental and social justice organizations, including the Sunrise Movement, endorsed Harris this week, but had not previously issued an endorsement for Biden. So having these young environmentalists as part of the endorsement really helps the environmental movement. They represent a lot of people. And at one point, they were telling members when Biden was president, they were telling members, we're just telling them not to vote, which is something you don't want to do because that happened in 2016, when the Donald Trump became president and people were just abstaining from voting because they just didn't think, you know, Hillary Clinton was the right candidate. They didn't like Donald Day Trump. And all of a sudden they stopped. They didn't vote and people who didn't come out to vote, you know, lost to the people who came out to vote. And we saw a change in American history for, you know, several times. So now we're seeing that, hey, look, you know what, we're actually seeing, you know, activists, ages ranging from 16 to 29, you know, this is, this is huge. This is, we're going to start to see people come out in droves. We're going to start to see these environmental networks that want big changes against climate change to vote somebody in who has a history of going up against big oil and gas companies and saying, no, we're not letting you get away with this. And I think that's the big appeal when it comes to Harris. And I think that's, that's huge. Dana Fisher, director of the Center of Environment, Community and Equity at American University said, it's not that young voters are ignoring Biden's work on climate is that they want to see more. So the young people know it's not enough because they recognize how severe the climate crisis is. This is a quote from Fisher, from Dana Fisher. And so we're, we're constantly seeing this battle of like, how many votes can you get, right? That's what you want. You want as many people out as possible to get votes. And this is what you want. Like this is how you want people to vote. And so that's, and Dana Fisher, when she found out that people in the environmental networks were saying, Hey, you know what, don't even bother going on vote if it's going to be Biden or Trump. She was like, she was like, I was like, are you kidding me? This is a quote from, from Dana Fisher. Don't you remember what happened in 2000s? Because of course not. They didn't remember because they probably weren't alive or they were in diapers. But it's very hard to have a long view when you're younger. So it's hard to like, you don't know if you're repeating past mistakes. But since dry Biden dropped out of the race, Fisher said that youth climate activists that she's talked to are more likely to vote, which is great. That's what we want to see. So Harrison's young supporters have highlighted the settlements. She secured as California Attorney General with Chevron BP and Conoco Phillips over their handling of hazardous materials. Now, when you go after and you try and stop oil companies, you've stopped them in the courts. That's how it's been done historically. You can protest and you can, you can scream and yell at the top of your lungs. But to really get them to stop is through injunctions. It's through suing the government. And I remember shell when they were trying to drill on the North Slope in Alaska. This was highly contested. People were against it, but it would look like it was going forward quite a bit. Then a number of organizations banded together. They had a coalition, including, I believe it was the environmental defense fund, but don't quote me on that. But there were a number of environmental lawyers that sued the government, not the shell or the oil company, but sued the government because they said that the government did not hold shell to the proper accountability in the environmental assessment that they had to do before they were going to even think about drilling on the North Slope. So because they did that, they said they just breeze through some of the problems. And this is what happens quite often. If you don't get the right consulting firm and organizations and oil companies are going to be like, hey, you know what? Let's just breeze over some of the ramifications of consequence that can happen from drilling into wherever we're going to drill into. And we'll just be able to do that. A good consulting firm is like, no, we're just going to look at everything and we're going to see and we're going to make the proper assessment so that we can cover all of our basis because the good consulting companies out there, environmental consulting companies out there that work with organizations and the companies like oil companies have to stay in the middle. At some part, their government, some part, they're representing their clients, but they have to stay true to the science. They have to stay true to the conversation, not conversation, conservation. But that doesn't always happen. And in this case, it wasn't enough. And so the environmental lawyers were like, hey, let's go to the courts and let's get it. This is what Kamala Harris did when she was a prosecutor. She held the oil companies, Chevron, BP, Conoco Phillips, to a higher standard. They held it to account for their mistakes and they're not handling hazardous materials properly. Biden is a lot more moderate in terms of a policy approach, whereas Kamala isn't afraid to tackle environmental and climate policy in a way that really gets at the root, especially with polluters. This is said, Iris Zahn, 20 year old, a youth advisory board member at the Global Youth Storytelling and Research Lab, which engages youth leaders in climate environmental justice research. So Harris has brought up that early career work in some of her initial campaign appearances, which was great. She even said, as district attorney to go after polluters, I created one of the first environmental just environmental justice units in our nation. She said on July 22nd in Wilmington, Delaware, referring to her time as district attorney in San Francisco, Donald Trump stood at Mar-a-Lago and told big oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a $1 billion campaign contribution. This is why we got to take money out of politics. What continues to happen in this race is you start to see that one side is very much pro-environment. The other side is very much pro-revenue and pro-business and pro-privatization of the environment and allowing people to make hand over fist in terms of money and not pay the consequences for the consequences that they cause the rest of the people, not only in the U.S., but around the world. And so we're starting, you know, this article that I'm reading here and I'm going over as you can, as you can probably hear and tell or see if you're watching the video, it's a truth telling tale of how the environmental movement and the young movement is seeing this new candidate in Kamala Harris. This is something that is going to motivate people to go out and vote for the environment, which I think is wonderful. There's lots of reasons to vote on either side. I'm not trying to pick a side here. I have my side. I'm not even American, so I can't choose. I can't vote. But one tells me that, you know, the Democratic side is just more for protecting the environment, more for thinking straight when it comes to the environment, not rushing into things and paying the price after. And I think that's really important. So I think that's what's really good. However, something to realize is that, you know, although Harris said in 2019 that she would be against fracking if elected president, she no longer supports a ban and Dana Fisher says she doesn't want to turn people turn off people from the fossil fuel extracting states. She's not going to end up with a progressive, as a progressive platform as she had when she was in California. However, she is going to be more progressive than Biden. Is she going to be more progressive than Biden? I expect she will be. This is a quote from Dana Fisher. So look, we're starting to see this, this start to turn more towards people versus like people about policy. That's what people want. It's back towards policy. It's not choosing which is the worst of evil, it's choose who's putting up the best policy. And if you, if you look at the speeches, you're going to start to notice a lot more policy being put into place to say, hey, look, Colin Harris represents this Watts Governor Watts represents this. Sorry, I don't remember Watts's first name. This is all about policy. And that's what the election should be about. It's about policy, not about personal name calling, not about what they've done in the past. It's all about who would represent you best as a leader for the US. And that's what you should go on. Look at the policy. And if you're listening to this podcast and you want something for the environment, you kind of know which way you should be leaning. I'm not trying to tell you which way you should be leaning or which way you should vote. But if you're for the environment, there's clearly one party that's ahead of the other. In fact, like they're even criticizing their own president. That's a Democrat to say that president didn't do enough. And people want that are holding him accountable by not, you know, not saying he's going to be the nominee for the next year. But it's going to be Kamala Harris, who's got a track record going up against Big Oil. She's not afraid. She's braving this kind of way. She stands straight up to them and says, no, absolutely not. You're not going to get away with breaking the law. And that's final. And I think that's going to be a huge thing to see in the future. So that's it for today's episode. I just wanted to let you know, you know, when it comes to Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, we're starting to see more and more environmental policy pop up. And that's great to hear, right? And we'll see time will be tested. And the time will tell whether we are going to see more fossil fuel projects like approved, no matter who gets in, right? That's dangerous. We can't have that anymore. We can't have any new, you know, projects. And the reason why not well, there's a number of reasons why. But the main reason why is all that production is not going to go into production for another like 30 to 50 years. So what are we doing here? What are we really thinking about? And how much more oil do we have? And where is that? Where's all that going to go? How's that all going to be used? We're going to be talking about a lot of that and, you know, in the future as it comes up. But this I want to just kind of let you know, people are talking about the election. I try and stay away. But obviously I'm a little biased towards the environment, towards parties that support the environment. And that's what we're seeing here. And I think it's really nice to have that extra energy coming into a campaign. I think it's great to have that environmental energy coming to a campaign and really stirring up, you know, the environmental community to be like, Hey, this is really good. We have an option here to have better environmental policy on the already great policy that we have now. It can be improved. Let's improve it. And let's go. So that's it for today's episode. If you want to hear more news and you're, you know, you can't get it all from this podcast, you can sign up for our newsletter. If you go to speakupforblue.com/newsletter, I send an email every Monday to Friday. You're going to get an email in your inbox in the morning. You get three stories that have that I found that I think is interesting. You should be talking about in terms of marine science and conservation, as well as you get some job opportunities that I found online and on LinkedIn. And yeah, and you get all the latest podcasts that we produce here on the Speak Up For Blue network. So it's a lot of fun, a lot of stuff going on. But I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Oh, I almost forgot. If you want to get ahold of me, you can go on Spotify, leave a comment. You can go on YouTube, leave a comment. I answer as many as I can. And of course, you can go to Instagram at how to protect the ocean and send me a DM. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Angela. And have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.
