Harris speaks at the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, July 25, 2024.Jerome Hicks/ZUMA

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Vice President Kamala Harris all but locked up the Democratic presidential nomination last Sunday. It was also, incidentally, the single hottest day in this planet’s history.

That inauspicious timing reveals the incredible stakes for the 2024 race: for American democracy, for the entire world’s climate and environment, and for the very hope of a habitable future.

If Harris isn’t elected, Donald Trump has made very clear, over and over again, that he will work to scrap all of President Joe Biden’s hard-fought (and effective) clean-energy and pro-environmental initiatives, while granting fossil-fuel companies carte blanche to spew as many planet-heating gasses as they please. He’s already got a presidential record of ample regulatory rollbacks, international agreements canceled, and oil-industry glad-handing to show for it.

Harris is only a week into her top-ticket candidacy. With Election Day coming up, activists on the left and strategists on the right are scrambling to figure out just how the veep will campaign on this issue, and how they can leverage it toward their respective ends.

It’ll be tough to take much from the past few years. Yes, she is part of the presidential administration that has implemented the most ambitious climate agenda in United States history, and she cast the tie-breaking vote that allowed the imperfect yet much-needed Inflation Reduction Act to get through Congress. But she was never a central player in those processes like, say, Joe Manchin— who, in case you were wondering, is no longer running for president.

“Whichever way Harris spins it, she likely will use her law-enforcement background to go after the oil companies, and they very much seem to understand that.”

So to actually suss out Kamala Harris’ climate record and future ambitions, many have turned to her first presidential campaign in the 2019 Democratic primary as a hint to what more she could bring to the White House, climatewise. However, this is a mistake: That was a moment when she broadly aligned herself with the Green New Deal wing of Democratic contenders........

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