Why Kamala Harris has said the c-word only twice on the campaign trail

Americans everywhere are talking about the searing heat of the summer that just ended. Except in the political debate.

On both coasts and many places in between, about 100 cities have sweated and panted their way through the hottest summer on record. Roads buckled in Wisconsin and Washington state, New York’s Third Avenue Bridge swung open to allow ships to pass but so swelled in the heat that it couldn’t close again and Amtrak announced delays across its network as train tracks warped.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign in Savannah, Georgia, last week.Credit: AP

In August alone, the US Department of Health issued “extreme heat” health warnings for regions with a collective population of 57.7 million across 30 states.

“Intense heat domes sprawled across portions of the nation every week” from the beginning of June to the end of August, reported The Washington Post. The temperature in Las Vegas peaked at a record 48.9 degrees. Palm Springs in California hit 51.1 degrees.

“A historically hot summer in the US is on a July killing spree,” ran a CNN intro. Last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study reporting a 117 per cent increase in America’s annual heat-related deaths in the 24 years to from 1999 to 2023. Last year, 2325 deaths were attributed to extreme heat.

And the effects weren’t felt only in the air. “About seven in 10 Americans say in the last year extreme heat has had an impact on their electricity bills, ranging from minor to major,” an Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll found. Further, four in 10 reported that extreme heat had affected their sleep, pets or exercise routines.

California was struck by destructive wilrdfires during the American summer, the hottest on record.Credit: AP

And, for seven in 10 of the Americans who’d experienced some type of extreme weather in the past five years, climate change was considered to be a contributing factor, the poll found.

Yet while public concern over heatwaves and climate change reached an all-time high as measured by Google searches this summer, political debate ran cold.

The Democrats are the party of climate change action. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included spending on renewable energy subsidies and climate-related measures of historic proportions – $US783 billion ($A1.2 trillion) worth, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

And when the legislation encountered a stalemate in the Senate, with the vote tied at 50-50, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who cast the tie-breaker to pass it into law.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Biden rejoiced that “today offers further proof that the soul of America is vibrant”.

Harris had long shared the vibe: “We cannot afford to be patient,” she said in 2021. “And we are determined to meet our goal of a 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. We are absolutely determined to meet that goal. Again, we know that it is not something that is just a goal, it is an imperative.”

As she travelled the country this year announcing federal grants totalling $US20 billion for climate related projects, she told audiences: “When we invest in climate, we create jobs, we lower costs, and we invest in families.” So it’s an environmental imperative and an economic good, according to Harris.

But something seems to have changed in recent weeks. Since emerging as the Democrats’ candidate for the White House, Harris has mentioned climate change just twice in public, and both times only fleetingly.

That was then. Vice President Kamala Harris addresses the UN’s COP28 conference in Dubai last November.Credit: COP28

First was in her speech formally accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention. After promising to restore American women’s “reproductive freedom”, she said: “In this election, many other fundamental freedoms are at stake … The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.”

That was it. Note that she didn’t pose climate change as a problem to be solved in its own right but as an incidental issue that could be addressed indirectly as a bonus benefit from cleaning the air. By contrast, in the 2020 campaign Biden had called climate change an “existential threat”.

Second was in Harris’ sole broadcast interview to date as the candidate. In her interview with CNN last week, she said: “I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate.”

Why did she see fit to make this remark? Because she’d just confirmed in the interview that she had dumped her earlier promise to ban fracking. Fracking is big business in the swing state of Pennsylvania. It’s potentially the difference between winning and losing.

But having conceded to the fracking industry, she felt the need to reassure the majority of the country that she was still committed to addressing climate change nonetheless.

So Harris mentions climate change sparingly, and only when she feels she must. The question, as a Bloomberg headline posed it a couple of weeks ago, is: “Harris doesn’t talk about climate change. Why?” Bloomberg’s columnist, Mark Gongloff, assumes that she’s simply trying to avoid alienating the pro-fracking Pennsylvanians, and he’s partly right.

But there’s more to it. When I asked a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, a person not authorised to speak on the record, the answer was: “Young people care about climate change, but they also care about rising inflation and the cost of living, and we have to make sure we are not seen as having an elite conversation.”

“We have 20 to 30 frontliners in the House,” the adviser said, meaning incumbent Democrat members of the House of Representatives who are in danger of losing their seats in the November elections.

The party hopes to wrest back control of the House, which means they have to win a net extra five seats; they want to hold on to all their existing ones to maximise their chances.

“They can’t be answering questions on fracking every day.” So to avoid talking fracking, the Democrats are avoiding the larger question of climate altogether.

It’s a striking paradox; the worse the climate crisis gets, the less the party of climate action wants to talk about it.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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