Kamala Harris talks climate damage amidst a summer of record heat and extreme weather

Vice Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris took the president’s chair in the U.S. Sen­ate a year ago and cast the tie-break­ing vote for what Har­ris described Tues­day as “the largest cli­mate invest­ment in Amer­i­can his­to­ry.” All fifty Sen­ate Repub­li­cans and all 207 House Repub­li­cans vot­ed against the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act.

The vice pres­i­dent has tak­en to the road late­ly, cel­e­brat­ing the leg­is­la­tion, which com­mits $369 bil­lion over a decade to fund­ing and tax cred­its and clean ener­gy tech­nolo­gies with the goal of reduc­ing harm­ful emis­sions while increas­ing rede­ploy­ment of the Unit­ed States toward a future no longer behold­en to the pol­lu­tion belch­ing fos­sil fuel economy.

The Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act broke a decades-long impasse in com­mit­ting the U.S. to reduce its car­bon foot­print, and ful­ly engage a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry econ­o­my that moves away from the burn­ing of coal, oil, and petro­le­um gas. It is the mar­quee achieve­ment of the Biden-Har­ris administration.

The invest­ment is com­ing none too soon. “It is clear the clock is not just tick­ing, it is bang­ing,” Har­ris told a crowd at the McK­instry, a Seat­tle based firm which has been a nation­al leader in ener­gy-effi­cient build­ing construction.

In a swel­ter­ing gym, on a day when Seattle’s tem­per­a­ture reached 94 degrees Fahren­heit, Har­ris spoke of a plan­et warm­ing and suffering.

“Every day around the world, the impact of the cli­mate cri­sis is stark and it is vivid,” said the veep, to a sup­port­ive crowd. She made note of parts of Amer­i­ca “choked by drought, washed out by floods and dec­i­mat­ed by hurricanes.”

The voice of Kamala Har­ris is increas­ing­ly heard these days.

For more than two years, she has been tied down in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., hav­ing to cast tie-break­ing votes in the Sen­ate, and becom­ing part of a close-knit Joe Biden oper­a­tion that has worked togeth­er for more than forty years.

Har­ris is a for­mer Cal­i­for­nia attor­ney gen­er­al and San Fran­cis­co pros­e­cu­tor. She emerged dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion as a sharp, no-non­sense, take-no pris­on­ers inter­roga­tor of the for­mer president’s fre­quent­ly unqual­i­fied and clue­less appointees.

The Seat­tle vis­it, which con­sist­ed of stops tout­ing the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act and head­lin­ing a pricey Demo­c­ra­t­ic fundrais­er in Med­i­na, brought Har­ris togeth­er with an equal­ly no-non­sense for­mer Sen­ate col­league – Sen­a­tor Maria Cantwell.

Cantwell has tout­ed the eco­nom­ics of a clean ener­gy econ­o­my. She was first to point out, after trips to Chi­na ear­ly in this cen­tu­ry, that the Chi­nese were forg­ing ahead in such fields as solar pan­els and wind power.

She argued that the Unit­ed States had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to do good for the plan­et, and its own econ­o­my. She fought for tax advan­tages of util­i­ties invest­ing in wind pow­er, and spoke out in frus­tra­tion when tur­bines for wind farms in Cen­tral Wash­ing­ton came from Den­mark and Germany.

The Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act has changed all that. “The IRA is ten years of pre­dictable invest­ment so that com­pa­nies like McK­instry and oth­ers can do the inno­va­tion that is going to give con­sumers a choice,” Cantwell said.

Har­ris has just recent­ly been to Dal­ton, Geor­gia, and vis­it­ed a solar pan­el man­u­fac­tur­er that will be employ­ing 2,500 people.

All told, she added, “175,000 new clean ener­gy jobs” have flowed from that tie-break­ing Sen­ate vote last year. Touch­ing on anoth­er long-time Cantwell cause, the veep said “thou­sands of miles of new high volt­age trans­mis­sion lines” are under con­struc­tion to car­ry green ener­gy from source to market.

“We are rebuild­ing America’s man­u­fac­tur­ing, we are rebuild­ing Amer­i­can inno­va­tion,” Har­ris declared. Of Cantwell, her for­mer Sen­ate col­league, Har­ris allowed: “She is tru­ly one of our nation’s great cli­mate leaders.”

Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee, whose sev­er­al-month 2020 pres­i­den­tial bid helped sup­ply Pres­i­dent Biden with a cli­mate plat­form, spoke excit­ed­ly of clean ener­gy projects in East­ern Wash­ing­ton. He was recent­ly at the ground break­ing for a sus­tain­able jet fuel pro­duc­tion plant in Moses Lake. A con­nois­seur of hyper­bole, Inslee has described the East­ern Wash­ing­ton city as “the new Kit­ty Hawk.”

Both Har­ris and U.S. Ener­gy Sec­re­tary Jen­nifer Granholm gave a nod to clean ener­gy devel­op­ment in the Inland Empire. And not by accident.

Repub­li­can U.S. Rep. Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers led House floor oppo­si­tion to the Infla­tion Reduc­tion. McMor­ris Rodgers has cham­pi­oned con­tin­ued sub­si­dies for the petro­le­um indus­try, coal min­ing on pub­lic lands, and expe­dit­ed per­mit­ting for new pow­er plants – despite sum­mers of drought and wild­fires in her con­gres­sion­al dis­trict, which includes a big swath of the Inland Northwest.

“Here in Wash­ing­ton state, you have endured dead­ly heat waves and dev­as­tat­ing wild­fires,” Har­ris noted.

Ener­gy Sec­re­tary Jen­nifer Granholm spoke before Har­ris and stressed the good news, not­ing that com­pa­nies have announced $110 bil­lion in clean ener­gy projects dur­ing the year since Har­ris’ vote broke a tie in the Sen­ate. “The Amer­i­can ener­gy sec­tor has nev­er been more elec­tri­fy­ing,” Granholm joked.

She pre­dict­ed eighty per­cent of the nation’s elec­tric­i­ty will come from clean ener­gy sources by 2030. Biden has set a goal of one hun­dred per­cent clean elec­tric­i­ty by the year 2035. “We are back in the game, baby,” Granholm joked.

Har­ris, Inslee, Cantwell and Granholm were on what might be called polit­i­cal hal­lowed ground. Then-Sen­a­tor Barack Oba­ma vis­it­ed McK­instry’s SoDo cam­pus in 2008 for a morn­ing immer­sion in the poten­tial of clean ener­gy build­ing tech­nol­o­gy. He then went on to greet a crowd of 17,000 at (then) KeyAre­na, and pro­ceed­ed to dom­i­nate Washington’s pres­i­den­tial precinct caucuses.

Half a year lat­er, he was elect­ed the forty-fourth Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States.