Talking Shop: Digging Into VP Kamala Harris’s Climate Record

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Hello and welcome to another talking shop with Covering Climate Now. I’m Mark Hertsgaard. I’m the executive director and co-founder of Covering Climate Now. I’m also the environment correspondent for the Nation Magazine. Our subject today, vice President Kamala Harris’s climate record and how it might affect the US presidential election. Covering Climate Now is a collaboration of 600 plus news outlets that reach billions of people around the world. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do better coverage of the defining story of our time. At our website coveringclimatenow.org, you can find a list of our partners, you can sign up for our newsletters, check out our resources and our newsroom trainings, and you can apply to join us as well.

So to today’s topic, in the days immediately following Kamala Harris’s emergence as the de facto presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, a remarkable number of US news outlets ran stories about her climate record and how it might affect voters choices in November. There were stories on ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Time, and I could go on. This was a much needed departure from the past. Climate change was essentially absent from news coverage of the 2016 and preceding elections, and it wasn’t much better in 2020. But in 2024, the editors and the reporters on the politics desks of some of the biggest names in news have evidently decided that climate change matters.

So the question now, will news outlets stay with the climate story for the rest of the campaign? You can see links in the chat to some of that initial coverage of Harris and her climate change policies. You’ll also find there stories by today’s panelists, and whether you work at a local or a national or a global news outlet, whether you’re here in the United States or overseas, that bunch of coverage provides a very good starting point for you to get up to speed to make climate change a core part of your campaign coverage between now and Election Day in the United States, which is November 5. The fact is most voters know relatively little about the climate record and future vision of Kamala Harris or that of her running mate, Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz. Ditto for the climate record and vision of former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator, JD Vance.

We in the press have a civic responsibility to provide voters with the information they need to make informed choices, especially at this crucial moment in the climate emergency. The science is very clear. Heat-trapping emissions must fall dramatically over the next four years and beyond to avert irreparable harm. That science means that 2024 was always going to be a de facto climate election. The next 90 days will show whether the press treats it that way or not. So to discuss how we can do that, Covering Climate Now has assembled a stellar panel of colleagues. I’ll introduce them in a moment and pose questions to them for the first half hour and then in the second half hour, as always, your questions and their answers.

So let me begin here. Zoya Teirstein, she is a staff writer at Grist where she covers the politics and health angles of the climate story. Her writing has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Wired, and the Associated Press. Also, Scott Waldman. Scott covers the White House and climate change for Politico’s E&E News. His work has also appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Scientific American, and Science. And finally, Justin Worland. He’s a senior correspondent at Time where he writes about energy and climate change and how both of them are reshaping the world around us. Please join me now in giving a warm virtual welcome to all three of our panelists. Thank you all for being here today and taking time out. It’s a very busy time on the climate beat, so we really appreciate you being with us today.

First question, Justin, I’m going to start with you because you wrote something right after Kamala Harris emerged as the presumptive nominee that I thought was really quite astute. You wrote, “Before this week, climate change has played a backseat role in the conversation around this year’s election, but energy and climate’s role in the race may have changed, and it’s not clear how that will play out.” So 10 days from writing that, what role do you think climate change is playing in the 2024 campaign and above all, how should we as journalists be covering it?

Justin Worland: Well, thanks, Mark. It’s good to be back here. So I mean, I think it’s still too early to say, I think would be the short answer. When I wrote that, I mean, I think there were a few interesting things. One, President Biden obviously has been a remarkable champion in many ways for climate, and yet that issue had sort of faded in the campaign. I mean, so much focus on his age, on the antics of former President Trump that climate was just sort of, I don’t know, like I said on the back burner. The reason I argued that Harris’ entrance into the race changed things was really twofold. One, because there was a lot of energy from young people who are concerned about climate and excited about her and her record. And her record is, I think it’s fair to say at least rhetorically more aggressive than Biden’s.

She has in the past talked about suing oil companies. She’s talked about… Really leaned into environmental justice. And so she’s really exciting to, I think, a lot of people who are concerned. On the flip side, we already see the ways in which her record has been painted as more radical by some on the right. It’s a talking point in places like Pennsylvania. Is she going to ban fracking? She’s come out very quickly and said that that’s not actually her agenda, but that has created a different way in which climate and energy take a sort of a front stage role in the campaign. How should we be covering it? I mean, I think it’s interesting because this is a campaign like no other. Obviously any opportunity there is to inquire about what her climate agenda might be, I think it’s incumbent upon us as journalists to do that.

I suspect that they’re not going to be too eager to give out lots of detailed policy agendas. And I mean, I’m a journalist, so I want them to give us more information, but I also understand that from a political perspective. I guess I would just close by saying, and this is how I close the story you referenced, I think readers should just be very clear about what the choice is here. I mean, the choices between somebody who denies the science of climate change, would perhaps, if not completely undo, chip away at some of the most significant climate policy that we have, and between somebody who, while we don’t know the exact details of how she would pursue a climate agenda, we know that she would at least preserve what we have and try to move the ball forward. And I just think that needs to be abundantly clear, even as we start to see perhaps some policies that not everybody agrees with. So that would be my high level take.

Mark Hertsgaard: Justin, let me ask a very quick follow up question before I go on to Zoya Teirstein at Grist. Part of how we cover it as journalists, we have to win the argument first with inside of our own newsrooms. And as we know, campaign coverage is usually decided by the politics desks. It’s not by those of us who are on the climate beat. Do you sense at Time and in your conversations with your colleagues at other news organizations that there is a shift now on the part of the editors and the reporters on the politics desks? After many years of ignoring climate change, did they finally get it that climate is an issue that’s worth their attention?

Justin Worland: Well, I think that’s the case at Time. It helps that I’m situated in Washington and I can walk over and talk to the folks doing climate coverage in our bureau down here. I think that political coverage is pretty knee-jerk. Oftentimes, it follows the ball and whatever the conversation is. And so climate can come in and out without necessarily getting the focus, the attention. And so that’s why a reset moment like having Vice President Harris as the nominee creates a new opportunity. I think, and well, I’m sure we’ll get to this later, Tim Walz as the vice presidential candidate also does that, I mean, given his climate record and the way he talks about climate. So I think we maybe have a reset moment here where we can get editors’ attention again after having lost it.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks. That’s Justin Worland with Time Magazine. Switching now to Zoya Teirstein at Grist, Zoya as Biden’s Vice President, Kamala Harris is obviously linked to his climate policies, above all the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest single climate investment in US history. But you wrote in your piece for Grist that perhaps the most valid indicator of what Harris might do as president is her record in California where she was a district attorney of San Francisco. She was the attorney general for the state. She was a US senator for the state all before she became vice president. So take us through that and what do journalists most need to know about those years?

Zoya Teirstein: Definitely, and thanks for having me on, Mark. It’s an interesting question because it’s like as in California, she had more latitude to do what she felt like she wanted to do, whereas as vice president, she’s sort of been under the Biden administration’s decision-making authority and she kind of does what she’s told to do in some respects, which is the role of vice president to some extent. In California as district attorney, she established the very first EJ, Environmental Justice unit in the country and the aim of that was to go after polluters. And she did that to some extent. She went after… an investigative reporter named Lee Fang discovered that she went after a handful of polluters. Some of them were not too large though. She got some criticism for that. It wasn’t particularly aggressive, that unit. But then you can see as Attorney General, she went after other polluters. She investigated ExxonMobil, she looked into massive oil spills that were affecting communities in California.

So I think to some extent, her experience as a prosecutor and her work in California can inform her climate agenda as potential President of the United States. I’ve been thinking about this a lot though since I wrote that article and I’ve been also working on pieces about Tim Walz and looking at what a president could really achieve and what Tim Walz brings to the ticket. And we’ll talk about that more later. But I just want to add one thing, which is to some extent following through on the IRA and the investments that the Biden administration has made in climate change is sort of the largest thing that she can do for climate action in the United States.

I mean, the truth of the matter is that it’s unlikely that Democrats are going to control both the House and the Senate, that there likely won’t be a Democratic trifecta. And so what can you really do? How can you really advance change? And I think in large respect, her experience as vice president, figuring out how to communicate about the IRA and how to talk to voters about it is really part of the message there. So I would look at that and also at her experience in California as sort of some clues as to what might happen going forward.

Mark Hertsgaard: One of the things I really took from your piece was that her time in California, there was a very strong environmental justice commitment on Kamala Harris’s part. And of course, you see that in the Inflation Reduction Act as well, where 40% of the revenues are supposed to be directed towards historically disadvantaged communities. And as you just said, we’re going to see that if she does get elected president. The IRA will still be rolling out then. Those tax credits go on for a long time. So this is an opportunity for… For those of you who are covering the elections from a local newsroom angle, that’s one way in is to talk about… Just to trace those IRA numbers, IRA monies I should say, and how much they are really reaching those historically disadvantaged communities.

Zoya, before I go to Scott, you also talked about a couple of other things that Kamala Harris did before she came to the Vice President’s office, and have I got that right that it was really a very strong environmental justice push that she had?

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, I mean, establishing the first ever EJ unit in the country as district attorney of San Francisco is a big step. However, I will note that there has been an investigation of that unit since and it found that she went after largely small scale polluters, which is an interesting story there. It’s like how do you get the big guys on the hook, the refineries, Chevron, Exxon, those sort of big fish? I think she’s gotten more experience since then doing that. So as AG, she investigated Volkswagen and secured an $86 million settlement from that company. She has a 90% lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters for her time in the Senate. So you can look at her history and her record on a lot of climate environment bills, which is also fruitful, I think, for people looking into how to cover this. But I will just say, and I think all my fellow panelists would agree with this, it is sort of reading tea leaves.

As Scott said earlier in our pre-call, I mean, you don’t really know. And the thing about this election cycle and how condensed it is that in 2019, reporters like us, we had plenty of time to figure out what these candidates were all about. I mean, it was a whole different landscape. Folks can remember. It was like every candidate was trying to one up each other with a larger climate plan and they were coming under intense scrutiny from activists and other folks. And so it was almost like a free for all on climate. That is not the case now. Climate change, if you notice… You can watch Kamala’s campaign video. Climate change is not mentioned in that. So there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason why the Inflation Reduction Act is not called the Climate Reduction Act. There’s a reason that politicians are not embracing climate change entirely as they campaign. I personally think that might be okay, and I can talk about more… I can discuss why I think that is later if you’d like. But yeah, at this point, we just don’t have the same latitude that we had in 2019.

Mark Hertsgaard: Zoya Teirstein with Grist, making a very, I think, original observation, I’ve not seen this yet, that Kamala Harris’s introduction video does not mention climate change. Turning now to Scott Waldman. He covers the White House for Politico’s E&E News. Scott, in your piece that you wrote at this time, you were talking about that Kamala Harris’s climate record, especially in terms of environmental justice, could help her “win back young climate voters” as the headline on your piece put it. Now, polls show, as I’m sure we all know on this call, that most voters don’t even know what the Inflation Reduction Act is, much less what “climate justice” means. So a question to you, Scott, is how can we as journalists, how can we explain those things in our coverage in ways that connect non-specialists with low information voters and the people who are going to decide the course of this election?

Scott Waldman: Well, I think the secret is getting out to local communities and looking at, for instance, the real-world impacts of the grants under the IRA, but also looking at real-life examples of people, EJ communities that are suffering from some form of pollution. There’s typically horrific stories about personal health related to living near a refinery or a coal storage facility in my hometown of Baltimore that’s right on the harbor. I mean, right near the harbor. These are places and a lot of reporters on this call, you may not cover Washington closely, but there’s a real value, particularly for those of us in Washington to get out and cover some of these local communities.

Actually, my story’s not out yet, but I’ve missed out on some of the Harris coverage because I actually went to a community that’s really benefiting from an IRA grant and a pretty big one. I’m not going to say the community now just because the story’s not out yet, but I was shocked and I talked to dozens of people over three days. So few people had heard about this grant, which really was going to have a meaningful impact on the key employer in their region. And I found a handful of people that did know about it, and some of them were saying, “Well, it’s still not going to influence my vote. I’m still going to vote for Trump,” or “I was going to vote for Harris no matter what.”

So I think what we really need more of is just local stories that illustrate the challenges that EJ communities face and how politicians are or are not doing anything to help them.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s such an interesting point, Scott, and it’s a reminder that what we in the press and the media do is to bring these kinds of information and analyses to the public. The public can’t possibly follow everything that’s going on in politics as closely as one would like in order to make an informed vote. They’re busy raising their kids, going to work, et cetera. This is our job as journalists is to try and make this all clear.

So in that regard, I want to ask a quick follow up, Scott, same thing I asked to Justin. E&E is part of Politico. Politico is part of almost the definition of an inside the Beltway News organization. Is it your sense at Politico and your colleagues at other newsrooms in Washington that the editors and the reporters on the politics desks, are they finally having their wake up moment on climate change?

Scott Waldman: Yeah, Politico a few years ago, it has the reputation of inside the Beltway coverage, but I think that’s a little outdated. They bought E&E News. We have dozens of reporters just covering these type of issues every single day. We generate dozens of stories and Politico puts them right on their home page. We’re right alongside a story about what the latest inside information is from the Harris or Trump campaign. They’ll have a story about heat worker deaths. I think frankly, a lot of organizations should do more of that. One of our focuses is to connect what’s happening with policy to the population, but also to just to politics to the race. What’s the race look like today? Oh, hey, there’s a whole postal worker died in Baltimore last week because of extreme heat. Is that a front page story for us? Oftentimes, it is. And it’s compared to we’ll tie it right to the election to which politicians have said what about that issue and explore it in more depth.

I think more organizations should look for everyday stories, particularly as we’re now really focused on politics and the election in this highly unusual cycle. I feel like there’s a danger of climate stories that a lot of organizations falling through the cracks, but as you said before, and as my two colleagues, I’m sure we’ll agree, this is a climate election, if there ever is one. The difference between the candidates is very stark. Trump denies the reality of climate change to begin with, and he has made it very clear he will target any and all climate policies that Biden has enacted just as he did for the Obama policies that he inherited when he first entered office.

So I’d like to see more outlets actually covering this on a pretty much daily basis, even if Harris herself isn’t talking about climate a lot. I’ll also note, last night, just related to the observation that climate or her rollout video for Harris didn’t even mention climate, she didn’t mention it on stage last night. Neither did Walz, who has one of the strongest climate records in the country as a governor, and certainly among all of her other possible picks. Neither one of them even in passing referenced climate in what was essentially an hour of talking and rolling out the full campaign.

Mark Hertsgaard: That’s Scott Waldman with Politico’s E&E News, and he just made a headline jump in my head for somebody who can write this story, “Why aren’t Kamala Harris and Tim Walz talking about climate?” That’d be a good story.
We all know that our dear colleagues on the politics desk like to follow polls. So if you are a journalist and you’re having trouble in your newsroom convincing your editors and colleagues that climate needs to be part of your campaign coverage, refer them to the polls that come out from Yale’s Climate Change Communication Program. They are the gold standard in public opinion polling on climate change, and they find that roughly 70%, that 70% of the American public wants to know more about climate change. So your audience wants this.

Now, I’m going to switch gears slightly here, and I mentioned earlier that we have international colleagues on this call and the world press follows US elections so closely because the US elections have an enormous influence on the rest of the world. The US is an economic superpower, military and cultural superpower, and it is also a climate superpower. So some of those colleagues have submitted questions and I’d like to share a few of them. I want to start with a question from, and pardon me if I’m mispronouncing your name here, from Mr. Ken Isaji of Nippon Television. That’s one of the big TV networks in Japan. He asks a very straightforward question, how do you evaluate a candidate’s climate record? He wants to compare Kamala Harris’s record to that of a number of leading Japanese politicians. So how do you do that? Justin, you’ve done a lot of international reporting. Do you want to tackle that?

Justin Worland: Sure. Well, I think it’s challenging. We got into this a little bit with Kamala Harris just because her career, she started as a prosecutor. She was a District Attorney, but also Attorney General in California, and that is a very difficult thing to map onto a lot of politicians who have more of a legislative track record. Her time in the Senate was very short. You can use some of the metrics Zoya talked about. The League of Conservation Voters scorecard, which was one metric, but quite frankly, I think it’s just very hard with her. Other folks, it’s interesting in some ways, her vice presidential pick, Tim Walz has a remarkable track record of enacting big climate legislation, and so you can just pick apart that legislation and compare that more easily with somebody who’s had experience as a governor or as a legislator and what they’ve supported. So yeah, I don’t really have a good answer, especially given her resume.

Mark Hertsgaard: Scott, Zoya, do you want to chime in on that? Feel free.

Zoya Teirstein: Scott, you want to take it?

Scott Waldman: I just agree wholeheartedly with Justin as I’m sure you do too, Zoya. I think one way to look at it is to go back and see how she’s talked about it. The White House has transcripts for every event she’s done. Harris was unique in that she actually did make climate a priority certainly in the first part of her vice presidency. She made a point to go to college campuses and talk with young voters on it. She did some round table discussions in a few places. I would go back to those areas and see how she’s talked about it.

And Zoya mentioned this on our pre-call before we were in the session, but Harris, it’s worth looking not only at how Harris has talked about it, but also what she’s done in the past, but also what she’s going to do in the future. What we really know is that the biggest thing she can do is preserve the Inflation Reduction Act, as Zoya observed. The Inflation Reduction Act has just barely begun to take shape. One of the stories we did at Politico was looking at how the grants have gone out the door and about 20% of the money from a collection of climate related bills has gone out. So that’s still a fairly small amount. Now, there’s some red tape, there’s some delay with states. There’s all kinds of reasons, but there’s also just government inaction to some degree. So why have those grants been slow to come out?

Well, it seems like the next four years are going to be more transformative certainly on climate policy if Harris were to be elected than the last few years have been. That was just setting the stage. It, of course, all goes away if Trump’s elected, but Harris really is going to have to drive what’s already out there, and that’s going to be a tremendous climate policy for her to pursue and to look at the inefficiencies, why has only 20% gone out and where she can improve it.

Zoya Teirstein: And I’ll just add that for international coverage, I’m of course based in the US in New York, so I don’t want to be prescriptive about any of this. But I have been covering elections and disasters in France, Brazil and India as part of a larger project Grist has just launched about how disasters affect politics. And the impetus of course for that is that we argue, and I’ve become quite radicalized on this, so forgive me covering climate now, but my perspective is that climate change as a policy, when push comes to shove, doesn’t really affect how voters think about their vote. It’s more that perhaps disasters in these invisible and constant ways are reshaping political life in the US and abroad.

And so to that end, we’ve been looking at, for example, horrible floods in Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil, and how lack of preparation among mayors and governors in that state is affecting politics there. How are people voting post those horrific floods, the worst environmental disaster in Brazilian history potentially, you have these far right mayors and this far right governor who refused to invest in climate resilience. I think that’s a fascinating story.

The same thing is true in Northern France where there are horrific floods and that whole region has gone very far right recently. How is flooding and how do disasters generally affect people’s political inclinations? I think there’s so much to be said there, and when it comes to gauging how politicians are reacting to those issues, how they’re either encouraging like Marine Le Pen, encouraging people to go further right, or further into their political foxholes versus people more like Tim Walz who are trying to build coalitions around getting people prepared for climate change.

There are so many stories, particularly internationally, particularly around extreme heat, flooding, hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, which of course is not climate related. But regardless, there are constantly stories about that coming to light just because we live in such a crazy time when there’s compounding disasters. So that would be my recommendation is to look at how politicians are using disasters and disaster aid and disaster money to shape political life and shape elections abroad.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thank you. And let me add in also having myself done quite a lot of climate reporting around the world, including in Japan. For our colleague in Japan — a point that I made earlier that I think applies to pretty much every country — if you want to evaluate any political candidate’s record and vision on climate change, the key thing to remember is the science. The science. And the science says that we, humanity, have got to radically rapidly phase out fossil fuels over the next four years and beyond. It’s all very well to build up clean energy like the Inflation Reduction Act does. That’s important. But if you don’t, at the same time, radically reduce the amount of emissions, all the clean energy in the world is not going to make much difference. So look at what a candidate is saying about that. It’s very easy to use the carrot of green energy, and that is important, but we also need the stick to stop the dirty energy, or none of the rest of it’s going to matter very much.

Let me now ask another question from one of our overseas colleagues that actually relates to this. And again, as I said, we, as journalists, there’s oftentimes a temptation that we evaluate a candidate’s positions solely on the basis of what their opponent says about them. But what really matters in the case of climate change is what science says about a candidate’s positions. So for Harris, that means exploring an issue that is raised by our colleague Tara Peterman at Irish Television, longtime partner of Covering Climate Now, happy to say.

As a candidate in 2019, Kamala Harris called for decarbonization of the economy by 2040, the year 2040, but how does that square with the fact that the Biden administration, which she served as vice president, approved more oil and gas licenses than even the Trump administration did? And to be more specific, and to Tara Peterman’s question, would Harris as president likely approve or block the expansion of liquid natural gas exports, export terminals, rather along the Gulf coast? Liquid natural gas terminals along the Gulf coast, described by our colleague Bill McKibben as one of the great climate bombs that are waiting to go off, and that must be stopped to preserve any chance over 1.5 degrees.

So who wants to tackle that? What’s your take on how we explain issues like that, like the liquid natural gas and get answers from the Harris campaign about? Because I’m sure that she’s going to try not to answer that. I think it’s Justin’s turn, but anybody can speak up.

Justin Worland: I’m happy to take that. I want to take it, I’ll get to the sort of explicit question, but I want to start with something. I met Governor Walz last year and I found him to be fascinating, fascinating because he executed this agenda, but also because of the way he talks about these things. And I just pulled up a quote that he said to me, “I’m going to tell you what my pro tip of the day is. If you want to run for governor, don’t propose a gas tax and don’t say you want to build a power line.”
He did both of those things. He raised the gas tax and he passed a law that allowed them to build more transmission, and he has a great approval rating in Minnesota. And so I guess my point is as journalists, it’s our job to interrogate, but there is, I think, a slim chance that Kamala Harris is going to talk about wanting to stop LNG in this campaign or that she’s going to go, to Mark’s point, and talk about the scale of emissions reductions in stopping fossil fuels that meets the science because she thinks it’s politically challenging.

And I think it’s our job to explain what that science is, but also to know in our heads that there is a reason why they’re making a political calculation. And again, hold their feet to the fire, but recognize the context of that. So yeah, I mean, to your question, I don’t know. I suspect that in this dynamic, in this sort of current energy dynamic, that she would continue.

I went to a conference, just to be frank, where Jennifer Granholm spoke about the LNG pause and said, “Yeah, in a year, this is not going to be a thing that you’re going to have to deal with.” This was an oil conference. Not a thing you’re going to have to think about. So I suspect that a future Kamala Harris would continue the administration’s policy unless there’s some sort of dramatic change in energy markets. I think there’s a political reason for that.

I think, to Mark’s point, it doesn’t align with the science, and we can analyze and evaluate that. But I also think there’s a reason why you don’t necessarily want to telegraph your cards about huge fossil fuel reductions when that’s politically unsavory to a good part of this country, and frankly, a good part of the base that she needs to win and to vote for her.

Mark Hertsgaard: And to be clear, the current policy, correct me if I’m wrong, is a pause on approving those terminals.

Justin Worland: Right?. And is a pause on new terminals, but the existing, well actually we were supposed, yeah-

Zoya Teirstein: It got overturned by a federal judge, so it’s no longer.

Justin Worland: But the administration’s policy was a pause, which was meant to end essentially right after a new administration or the same administration had a second term, but it was overturned, so whatever. So it’s a wash.

Mark Hertsgaard: But let’s get clear on this. Zoya, can you speak a little further? So a judge overturned it. What’s the status today?

Zoya Teirstein: Well, it’s unclear. So honestly, it’s complicated and it’s still being hashed out. But the Department of Energy still needs to figure out whether it wants, the Biden administration needs to figure out whether it wants DOE to shift the way that it looks at LNG projects. If it’s going to decide to go for a full-blown pause, or a ban, however you want to say it, it’s going to have to go through a different avenue, which it can do. It’s just not doing that right now.

So LNG in this country, I don’t think we should actually get into it now because we will run out of time. It’s such a hot topic and there’s so much to say. But basically the reason why that pause was put in place to begin with is because the Biden administration wanted to assess both the climate impact of these projects, but also the effect that exporting so much LNG was having on US domestic prices, so natural gas prices.

So it’s this two-fold issue that still needs to be investigated ultimately because it’s unclear how damaging, I mean, as everyone here probably knows LNG is marketed as a bridge fuel. Is it actually a bridge fuel? Lots of questions remain. So I’ll leave it there. We can discuss more if you’d like to talk about LNG, but that’s where things are, this tenuous place where the DOE could make more aggressive moves at the direction of the Biden administration. I don’t know if he’ll choose to do that between now and the elections or not.

Mark Hertsgaard: Very helpful. For those asking about whether-

Scott Waldman: One more question.

Mark Hertsgaard: Scott, hold on one second, because I’m coming to you. I’m going to ask one more question of you, Scott, but before I do, I want to just remind everybody, you’re welcome to submit your questions. There’s a number of questions already in the queue that we’ll be going through, but submit some more and we’ll get to as many of them as we can.

Scott, last question from me, which is kind of the elephant in the room, and you’ve referred to it twice already in your comment, so I’m going to push you a little further on it. We’ve got a situation where on one hand you have one party and one candidate who literally denies the science and wants to, if anything, accelerate global warming with more emissions. And on the other hand, you’ve got a party and a candidate who embrace the science and however imperfectly are at least trying to do something about the emissions.

My question is a question of journalistic craft. How do we as journalists be true to that reality, that factual reality, but without giving our audiences the impression that oh, we’re editorializing, we’re against Trump and for Harris or for climate action and against climate denial? It’s kind of a tricky balancing act, isn’t it?

Scott Waldman: It is. And I think the key is just to quote exactly what Trump is saying. You don’t need to editorialize or analyze in your story, just to have his very direct and clear comments. You can also use your … In paying attention to what he’s saying, you can also look at some of his previous behavior. So for instance, when we look at what might be some Trump policies related to energy, I think we can absolutely still rely on Project 2025. It’s written by many former Trump officials, including a number of them who are widely expected to go right back into a second Trump administration. So I know the campaign has really tried to distance itself because Democrats have had success sort of clobbering them over the head with that, because again, both sides don’t want to get super specific on policy.

And one other point, just to go back to what we were talking about with Harris and one of the questions about her record or the Biden record with fossil fuel production, I think you can absolutely expect that fossil fuel production will continue at the levels that it is now. One thing politicians have learned is that gas prices, which inflated gas prices quickly could spike inflation in the overall economy because we’re still such an economy so reliant on fossil fuels, it’s one of the ways that people can actually see in their daily lives. And even if they’re not getting gas that day, they’re looking at what the price is as they’re commuting to work.

She’s not going to want to come in and make a bunch of aggressive moves immediately and start shutting down production that causes those prices to spike because nothing’s going to dip her popularity quicker than that. So this is a transition period, even though the science says it should be far more aggressive on our climate policy. But you can’t just switch off the economy overnight and make it not reliant on fossil fuels and completely reliant on renewables. We’re not there today. You can do everything you can to get close to all renewables as you can, but that’s still going to take more than a decade, even under the most optimistic scenarios.

So Harris will, I think, if she’s elected, come out with some dramatic defining climate policies of her own. I don’t think it’ll be a fossil fuel ban. It could be some limited LNG export ban, which you can also make a very good political argument it’s better for the country since it keeps our own prices down if we’re not selling as much LNG around the world. So I think that you’ll see a continuation of what we see now layered in over time with some more aggressive policies that define her own take on it.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks. That’s Scott Waldman with Politico’s E&E News. Now to a question from Al Ortiz of CBS News. Quote, “The link between the immigration issue, including our southern border, and climate change is still not often discussed, but climate change is a factor helping to drive large migrations of people around the world. Don’t news organizations need to make this link more explicitly in our political coverage?” Unquote. That’s from Al Ortiz at CBS News. Who wants to tackle that?

Scott Waldman: I can go just quickly because I’ve written about it. Harris understands that, and a lot of organizations, I know I’ve written about it, my organization has written multiple stories. The best way to think about climate is as a threat multiplier. And when you add in other pressures in some countries around the world, particularly Central America and Mexico and elsewhere, climate change exacerbates a lot of preexisting problems, which drives immigration. So I think there’s been some great coverage, and I totally agree with Al that it needs to be more of an everyday type of story, looking at how climate is creating this pressure point in countries where drought is destroying the crops and people have nowhere else to turn.

But also, as we know, there’s been research that drives conflicts. We should look at various conflicts around the world to see how climate is driving. I don’t think climate is driving Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but there’s other smaller conflicts, particularly oftentimes in other smaller Middle Eastern countries or somewhere on the African continent, that have at their roots some sort of climate threat making preexisting conditions worse.

Mark Hertsgaard: And I think we can also count on the fact that there’s going to be a lot of news pegs in the weeks ahead, potential news pegs to talk about climate and migration because the Republicans have made it clear they’re going to be attacking Kamala Harris. They’re inaccurately labeling her the Biden administration’s quote unquote “border czar,” but they’re going to try and hang that around her head.

And so if you or your colleagues in the newsroom want to do those stories, one other source you can turn to is the former Secretary of State, John Kerry. I was just on a call with him the other night where he talked about his bafflement that the security implications of climate change are still not entirely breaking through outside of the specialist climate expert realm and to the general public. So Kerry is a very accessible guy and obviously an authoritative voice. So that’s a story that all of us, I think, will have the opportunity to grab onto in the weeks ahead. Zoya, were you about to say something there? Did I cut you off?

Zoya Teirstein: Just super quickly, I was going to say that climate change, a lot of the migration that climate change spurs actually happens internally within countries. And for a good example of that, you can look to the US. Already this is happening in communities in Louisiana, in California, et cetera. And so it happens invisibly, but there’s ways to figure it out.
I’m working on a story right now about Lake Charles and how it was affected by disasters for a whole year and what that did to the demographics of the place. And so I was just going to note that there’s plenty of stories here domestically too. It doesn’t have to be so many people are coming from, going to have to move out of Africa. There are stories domestically that are just as pertinent, and it needs to be handled with some care as well.

Mark Hertsgaard: Yeah, and the essential background reading on this is a relatively new book came out in March called On the Move by Abrahm Lustgarten. On the Move. He’s with ProPublica, and also wrote the initial piece that became that book in the New York Times Magazine. We reviewed it in our weekly newsletter, Climate Beat, which of course is free. All you have to do is sign up for it.

A couple more questions here that have come in. Let me take one from, and again, pardon, if this is a mispronunciation of your name, Selin Ugurtas. Quote, “I’m wondering how Republican voters feel about the Inflation Reduction Act and Trump’s stance on climate change.” Justin?

Justin Worland: It’s a good question. I mean, I think we alluded to this a bit earlier. 70 something percent of Americans have never heard of the Inflation Reduction Act. I think you have to go community by community. So 75% of Americans have never heard of it. So what do Republicans think? I think probably not much if you’re looking at the average person, but if you go community by community, you’ll start to see the implications of the climate related spending and job growth and new factories, particularly in what’s been called the Battery Belt, which is a region that stretches from Michigan and Ohio down into the southeast into Georgia, South Carolina.

And so of course there’s a lot of enthusiasm there about these new manufacturing jobs, including some people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far right provocateur, who says, “Well, solar, I guess I kind of like solar. It’s fine.” Because there’s a solar manufacturing facility that just has been built in her district.

I think there is, on the flip side, and I think this is something to be attuned to for all reporters and local communities, maybe following local races, an attempt to weaponize the Inflation Reduction Act, to conflate it with rising energy prices. You hear this from Trump when he talks about the Green Deal, and I could with more time pick out a few places around the country where I’ve seen this in congressional races. This is, I think, a significant threat, the way in which some folks are trying to turn it into something it’s not. But I think the bottom line is most people actually just don’t think about the Inflation Reduction Act much at all.

I do just want to make, if I may, just connect this with one other point, which is I think it’s important that we take seriously some of this potential backlash, and we think about from a global context, I did some reporting in Europe, or you could look at Australia, the way in which these messages that come in response to climate policy about how scary it is actually poses a threat to further growth in the climate project and emissions reduction. So in Europe, we see the backlash, which isn’t going to undo the European Green Deal, but has created this effect of almost a pause. In Australia, there was a whole debate over a carbon tax more than 10 years ago, and it made the issue unpalatable for a decade.

So I just think it’s important to think, when you think about the Inflation Reduction Act, how is it playing out on the ground, also look at the backlash that might be happening, the way that it’s being weaponized. And we really want to make sure that we’re finding ways to tell the truth and combat that and say, “No, the IRA is not driving up energy costs. That’s inflation, that’s global markets, etc.”

Justin Worland: That’s inflation, that’s global markets, et cetera. Sorry, just connecting a few dots there.

Mark Hertsgaard: I urge everyone to read the piece that Justin published on this, correct me if I’m wrong, Justin, isn’t it called, “How to Avoid a Climate Backlash”?

Justin Worland: Yeah.

Mark Hertsgaard: And we will, my colleagues will put it in the chat, I’m sure, shortly. You mentioned the Battery Belt, Justin, and that just happens to segue nicely into a question that came in from Anthony Flint, but I’ll get to that in just a moment. First, I want to say, if you are a journalist and you’re wondering, what do the people in my market area think about whatever it is, climate change, Trump’s position on climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act, again, the best source of information on this is the Yale Program on Climate Communication. And they’ve got a very cool tool that literally, you can look county by county within the United States county by county and see what the public opinion is on climate issues and from science, politics, et cetera.

And I think there’s even breakdowns demographically, male, female, et cetera. Hopefully one of my CC Now colleagues can put up a link to that in the chat, but it’s the Yale Program on Climate Communication and highly recommend them. Really, again, it’s good ammunition when you’re going to those 10:00 AM story meetings and you’re trying to sell the editor on that story, to have in your back pocket, here’s what our readers are, here’s what our viewers or here’s what our listeners think about climate change, because one of the things we’ve learned at Covering Climate Now, there’s a lot of outdated information, especially on the part of our colleagues who are gatekeepers, who are the story assigners about what people really think about climate change. They’re kind of behind the times. People are much more interested now to know.

So now to the question from Anthony Flint regarding the Battery Belt, “Is the Biden administration’s clean energy manufacturing push, which we’re seeing in the so-called Battery Belt, are you seeing an impact from that push on politics?” Just heard from Justin. Zoya, Scott, you just were out there, so why don’t you answer?

Scott Waldman: Yeah, I should mention that breaking news this morning is that 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Mike Johnson asking him to request that Trump preserve elements of the IRA, should he become president. So you’ve got 18 lawmakers, notably Marjorie Taylor Greene was not one of them, not shockingly, but her district is receiving some of the biggest benefits from the IRA already on the ground, already creating jobs. It would be devastating to her district to lose the funding before the projects are complete.

But for those of you around the country that have some projects, look and see who these politicians are and what project is going on in your district and talk to them about, “Hey, you’re sort of going against the grain here. You want to save the IRA.” So I think we see in the polling too, if you don’t call it the IRA, don’t talk about climate change, but ask people, do you want new factories to be built? Do you want less concerned about what they’re actually producing in those factories and do you want this in their community? It’s wildly popular. Data for Progress has done some polling on that and I believe Yale probably has as well. So that’s another way to sort of localize the story to your community.

Mark Hertsgaard: Scott, could we prevail upon you if you can, can you put a link to that breaking news in the chat here? I had not heard that, that 18 House Republicans. That is very interesting. We’ve heard that by the way in the past on the part of Republican mayors and some governors around the country. But I think this is a new wrinkle and certainly worth following up. Okay, next question. And Zoya, I’m coming to you on this please. And this is from Simona Capisani, “An interesting point you made that Harris and Walz did not mention climate change on the stage, but Walz did mention ‘clean air and pure water’. Maybe that was a veiled reference. My question is, is it our job as journalists to connect these dots more explicitly?”

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah, I think that that was very purposeful, “clean air and clean water”. You can see Republicans doing that a lot. Donald Trump talks about that a ton, clean air, clean water. He doesn’t talk about climate change, climate policy, except to say that it’s not real. I think when it comes to connecting the dots, yes, of course. There are two stories in America. There’s the story that science tells about climate change, and the story that politics tells about climate change. And both have been around for pretty much the same amount of time. The science came first, but politics followed not long after. And so to explain to readers the very complicated ways in which the unique political landscape in the US effects talking about the science of climate change, would require so much. I think that a good place to start might be to talk about obviously the science.

I think that Covering Climate Now has done a great job of making that clear, but I also think there’s another story happening, and we’ve kind of been touching on this the whole panel, which is that… Let me draw an analogy or a parallel, there was a lot of talk about quiet quitting a while back. I think the same thing is happening with quiet climate policy, and this is the hill that I will die on, it is more effective to do it quietly in the US. Climate change is so politicized in this country that the only way to get it passed is to call it the Inflation Reduction Act. You know what I mean? With no mention of climate change. So we can talk more about this. I think it deserves its own panel, honestly, but I really do believe that when it comes to climate change policy, the future of such a thing will look a lot more like permitting reform, like talking about factories opening, about batteries, red states getting their grids more reliable, that kind of thing. I think that’s how it will look.

So the role of the journalist, and it’s a big job, especially for someone who’s not used to covering climate change, is to come in, get acquainted, not swallow any BS, but also make it clear that, “Okay, these things are happening.” And I can point to that and say, “Permitting reform, in some respects, climate change policy. It’s important to recognize that.”

Mark Hertsgaard: That calls back to mind what Justin said about his interview with Walz and how, “Don’t say that you’re going to build a pipeline, don’t say you’re going to put out contracts, but do it quietly”-

Justin Worland: Transmission line, not a pipeline.

Mark Hertsgaard: …which results in the headline of, “Why aren’t they talking about climate change?” Well, maybe it’s smart not to use the words. Go ahead, Justin.

Justin Worland: No, I was just saying a transmission line, not a pipeline.

Mark Hertsgaard: Oh, sorry.

Justin Worland: But I just want to underscore that very quickly and just say, I think I don’t have a position on the strategy, but I think it’s our job as journalists to connect those dots, especially for our readers who might say, “Oh, I thought they were going to do something good on climate,” and we have to explain, “Well, here’s why this is climate policy and here’s why it falls short and here’s why it doesn’t,” or whatever, but it’s our job to explain that.

Mark Hertsgaard: Very well said. We have time for one more question before we break because we always stop at the top of the hour. And this one comes from our colleague at NBC News, Chase Cain, who asks, “If Harris backs away from her previous support for the Green New Deal, would you view that as a permanent shift or just a temporary shift to win moderate voters?” Anybody can take that. Go ahead, Scott.

Scott Waldman: I think the way to think about the Green New Deal is, it’s a menu. It’s a bunch of policy options. So yes, she worked with the AOC to introduce that, but I don’t see any world in which she institutes all those reforms and policy ideas. But do I think she’s going to choose from it? Absolutely. Just as Biden did, the Inflation Reduction Act takes tons of ideas from that, as well as Jay Inslee’s climate policy. So I think we’ll see more of that, but I don’t think the framing should be, did she back away from the Green New Deal? It’s, is she still implementing parts of something she supported? The answer is yes, but again, think of it as a menu rather than a single policy.

Zoya Teirstein: Yeah. And the Green New Deal is a good example of a policy that Democrats let get away from them entirely. Republicans co-opted that immediately and Democrats did not work hard enough to figure out how to… I mean, they lost that battle. Green New Deal is anathema. No one wants it, apart from progressives, of course. And there’s a lot of policies in there that, you’re right, Scott, that Kamala will likely pull from. But to say, “I support the Green New Deal right now,” would be… I just don’t see that happening.

Justin Worland: I would just offer very quickly, I think that the Inflation Reduction Act is the sort of crumbs, or it’s more than crumbs, but what remains of the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal was this idea for big federal spending, trillions of dollars, it got whittled down to $370 billion, though it might cost quite a bit more. And that was the result of a long arc of climate policy following Waxman-Markey’s failure, right? This was after, in 2009, not passing a cap-and-trade legislation, the environmental movement, the climate Movement said, “What is our next thing?” And for years tried to figure it out and came to the idea of big spending, which eventually became branded as the Green New Deal, it passed, and now we’re in a new era. And we’re in a new era where we politicians, policymakers, have to implement the Inflation Reduction Act and we have to figure out what the next turn is.

And so I think litigating the Green New Deal, it just seems like that was yesterday, and what comes next? I think that’s actually the most fascinating story. Kind of to Zoya’s point, what is the new thing that comes out of all this? Is it even called climate policy? Is it trade policy? Is it… Whatever. So I don’t know. I guess I feel like the Green New Deal is yesterday and I want to know what comes next.

Mark Hertsgaard: This is a wonderful way to bring this hour to a close, because it underscores the importance of how we talk about climate change. We started Covering Climate Now five years ago to break what we saw as the climate silence within the mainstream media. And that has happened, there’s no more silence. We are talking about it, but how do we talk about it is a big deal, and no one has more influence over that I would submit than we in the news media. We’ve just seen in the last month an incredible illustration of the power that the media has, one of the greatest powers there is in politics, to decide what gets talked about and what doesn’t. Literally, that political media frenzy managed to drive a sitting president out of his reelection campaign. So we have enormous responsibility not just to talk about these things, but to talk about them in a way that is accurate, of course, and timely, but that reaches people where they are and tries to give them the information they need to be informed voters in November.

Towards that end, we are so grateful that you’ve been with us this hour, and I want to extend my deep thanks to our three panelists, Justin Worland at Time Magazine, Scott Waldman at Politico’s E&E News, and Zoya Teirstein of Grist Magazine. And finally, of course, you can find all of this here at our website at Covering Climate Now. We’ll send out a video of this within 24 hours for any of your colleagues who may have missed it. If you haven’t already signed up for our newsletter, Climate Beat, and our special newsletter on the elections called Climate on the Ballot. We will have a special three-day online conference on how to make climate change part of your coverage of the 2024 elections. That’s taking place September 17, 18, and 19. More information again at our website. And so until next time, this is Mark Hertsgaard on behalf of Covering Climate Now, wishing you all a very pleasant day.