Kamala Harris has made tackling corporate price-gouging and raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy cornerstones of her economic platform. She seems to be leaning into some of the Biden administration’s more populist talking points about making life more affordable for ordinary people—earning her plaudits from progressives and predictable freak-outs from Republicans, editorial boards, and economists both on the right and in the discipline’s still mostly orthodox mainstream. So far, however, the Harris campaign hasn’t extended that clear-eyed populism to its climate politics.

Consider the Democratic Party platform for 2024: “To lower prices, Democrats will also keep working to boost supply, fix supply chains and promote competition, especially for essential items like gas and groceries that families depend on,” the party document promises, while boasting that the Biden administration oversaw record levels of oil and gas production. Other parts of the platform talk enthusiastically about “reducing Big Oil’s hold on our economy,” and ding Trump for being beholden to fossil fuel executives.

That’s a pretty wonky jumble of contradictions. And it echoes the Biden White House’s disjointed approach to energy: boosting renewables as the industry of the future; accosting Big Oil for price gouging; then bragging about how much oil and gas they’re producing. The core of the administration’s economic pitch for climate action—reflected in the Inflation Reduction Act, perhaps its signature legislative accomplishment—has been that investing in the energy transition will revive American manufacturing and create millions of jobs. Following suit, green groups backing Harris have launched a $55 million ad campaign across several swing states, aiming to sell the administration’s climate measures to voters on their economic (rather than environmental) benefits. Insofar as this administration has explicitly challenged Big Oil it’s generally for price gouging—not polluting, or having spent decades stalling progress to reduce emissions.

It’s easy to understand how the Biden administration, and by extension the Harris campaign, got into this bind:........

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