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When we spoke, Harris demonstrated a depth I didn’t expect – she geeked out over heat pumps, confessed her love of electric school buses and described the heavy burdens poorer communities face from air pollution. The more I learned about her background, the more I found a clear pattern: policy ideas that she championed became central to federal legislation. Our nation’s landmark climate law, which is turning two years old this month, has Harris’s signature all over it.
You can trace her influence by looking at her earliest days as a politician, then following the bills she sponsored as a senator, and finally examining her 2020 Presidential campaign platform. During the earliest days of the Biden-Harris administration, when the Build Back Better agenda was coming together, Harris made sure that her priorities stayed on the list: electric school buses, cleaner water and investments for communities.
While she hasn’t been given the credit, as vice-president, Harris has worked behind the scenes to champion her climate policies. And she’s managed to get a long list of her ideas signed into law.
As I’ve said before, he has limited power to say ‘no’ to a drilling permit once a lease is issued. So what he has done is sharply reduce the issuance of new leases:
That’s a very big deal, even if it isn’t anywhere near enough.
Actually fixing the problem means:
That requires power that neither Biden nor the climate movement has yet held.
What?
You say he can’t do anything except approve them, but he’s literally canceled some existing ones.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2023/0907/Biden-cancels-remaining-Alaska-fossil-fuel-leases-amid-criticism
How can he do that, but he’s forced to approve new ones?
Hell, at first he was very public about not approving them, until he did a 180.
Why do you think he is forced to approve them?
He’s done some good things, but only do to vocal public criticisms of his actions. Luckily that’s enough to show that if he wanted to, he could consistently be pro-climate.
He was able to cancel those ones because they were issued without proper environmental review and because they’d only just been issued. Even so, actually making the cancelation stick required winning a subsequent lawsuit.
Most other cases aren’t ones where lease cancelation would win in court.