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      Kamala Harris defends policy stances and shares plan for office in first major interview

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      Kamala Harris sat for her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee with CNN’s Dana Bash alongside her running mate, Tim Walz, on Thursday, and defended her shifts on certain policy issues over the years and her support for Joe Biden.In the interview, which was taped from Savannah, Georgia, earlier Thursday, the vice-president said her highest priority upon taking office would be to “support and strengthen the middle class” through policies including increasing the child tax credit, curtailing price gouging on everyday goods and increasing access to affordable housing – all policies that she has announced since she started campaigning for the presidency.Harris also shared how the president shared with her his decision not to continue running for re-election, a first public retelling of that moment. She said she was making breakfast with her family, including her nieces, and was just sitting down to do a puzzle when the phone rang, she said.“I asked him, are you sure? And he said yes. And that’s how I learned about it.” As far as whether she asked for his endorsement or he offered it, she said: “He was very clear that he was going to support me.”“My first thought was not about me, to be honest with you, my first thought was about him,” she said, adding that history will remember Biden’s presidency as transformative.Harris defended Biden, saying she had no regrets about supporting his re-election before his decision to leave the race, despite concerns over his age and acuity. She said serving as Biden’s vice-president has been “one of the greatest honors” of her career and that Biden has the “intelligence, commitment, judgement and disposition that the American people deserve in their president”, adding that the former president, Donald Trump, “has none of that”.She also touted the Biden administration’s work to restore the economy after the pandemic, pointing to capped insulin costs, the current inflation rate of under 3% and increases in US manufacturing jobs. “I’ll say that that’s good work,” she said. “There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”Harris explained her changes in positions on issues such as fracking and immigration by saying her “values had not changed”. On fracking, she said she made clear in the 2020 debate that she no longer supports a ban, and that as president she would not ban fracking. She added that she takes the climate crisis seriously but believes: “We can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”On immigration, Bash pointed to a moment when Harris raised her hand to indicate she believed the border should be decriminalized, asking if she still believes that. Harris said she thinks laws should be followed and enforced on immigration and noted that she is the only candidate in the race who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations.She also said she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet if she wins, though she didn’t have a specific Republican or position in mind.“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” she said. “I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican.”She quickly cast off a question about Trump’s comments that she “happened to turn Black” in recent years: “Same old, tired playbook,” she said. “Next question, please.”The interview narrowly met a self-imposed timeline Harris set for a sit-down interview, which she promised would happen by the end of August. It comes less than two weeks before the first scheduled debate between Harris and Trump, planned for 10 September on ABC.Harris and Walz conducted the interview while on a bus tour around the Savannah, Georgia area as part of a whirlwind tour of the US since they took over the Democratic ticket.Harris has gotten criticism from across the political spectrum for not doing an on-the-record interview with the media since she started running for president. After the CNN interview was set, Republicans also criticized the joint interview with Walz and that the interview was pre-recorded and not live.Before the interview, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance posted on Twitter/X: “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview” alongside a clip from the 2007 Miss Teen America pageant where a contestant garbled an answer about Americans not knowing geography, rambling about “like such as South Africa -and the Iraq, everywhere like such as”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWalz answered a few questions during the joint interview, though Harris largely led the campaign’s responses.Walz has faced scrutiny over misstatements and exaggerations he has made about his time in the national guard and about the specific fertility treatments his wife used. He didn’t explain in depth why he made these comments, instead saying that he speaks candidly and passionately. In one comment, he claimed he carried weapons of war in war, which he did not (he was not deployed to a war zone). He said that comment came after a school shooting and his grammar wasn’t correct. “I think people know me. They know who I am. They know where my heart is,” he said.“If it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog,” he said, referring to recent Republican attacks on him. “The one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another service member in any way. I never have and I never will.”Bash brought up two key moments from the Democratic convention: Walz’s teenage son, Gus, crying and saying “that’s my dad” as his dad took the stage, and an image of one of Harris’s grand-nieces looking on as Harris gave her acceptance speech.Walz said his son’s reaction was “such a visceral emotional moment” that he was grateful to experience.Harris, who has not spoken much about how her win could break glass ceilings, said she was “deeply touched” by the photo and found it “very humbling” while saying: “I am running because I believe I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”It’s unclear if Harris will start doing more media interviews as she continues on the campaign trail. As some commentators on CNN noted before the interview aired Thursday, increasing the frequency of interviews makes it less likely that each one becomes the topic of intense scrutiny and fixation like the CNN event became.Trump reacted to the interview on Truth Social, saying simply: “BORING!!!” More

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      Environmental activists urge Kamala Harris to go big on climate: ‘She’s got to seize the moment’

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      As Donald Trump accuses Kamala Harris of waging “war on American energy”, some advocates are pressing the vice-president to embrace a bold climate message at the Democratic national convention this week.Harris will have a major opportunity to lay out her key platform as she accepts the Democratic party’s presidential nomination on Thursday evening. Some are hoping climate features heavily in her speech.“There’s a moment here and we think she’s got to seize it,” said Saul Levin, legislative and political director of the progressive advocacy group Green New Deal Network.Harris’s candidacy has excited much of the climate movement, with scores of green groups, including Levin’s, endorsing her presidential run. At a Wednesday meeting, influential climate hawks such as Ed Markey, the Massachusetts senator; Gina McCarthy, the former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator; and Robert Bullard, the esteemed environmental justice scholar and advocate encouraged climate voters to stand behind Harris.But Harris has yet to release an official plan to take on the climate crisis. Unlike Joe Biden, who placed climate at the heart of his 2020 presidential run, Harris has so far only mentioned the issue in passing on the campaign trail. And though the issue has been woven into Democratic national convention events, it has not yet been a central focus of the convention.“It’s a bit of a bummer that it hasn’t gotten more time,” said Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay Campaign, which focuses on climate accountability.Harris may find it difficult to make bold climate promises amid Trump’s attacks. At a campaign stop in Pennsylvania this week, the former president called Harris a “non-fracker”, though she has distanced herself from past support for a fracking ban, disappointing climate advocates.Trump has also repeatedly claimed Harris wants to ban red meat and “get rid of all cows”. In response, she said she enjoys eating the occasional cheeseburger but added that Americans should be incentivized to eat a lower-carbon, healthier diet.Amid this pressure from the right, some climate advocates have said they will stand behind Harris no matter how much she mentions climate.“Regardless of whether this issue is in the speech or not tomorrow night, we know Vice-President Harris is an environmental champion,” said Michelle Deatrick, who chairs the Democratic National Committee’ Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis. She said Harris’s record speaks for itself.Recent polling from progressive group Data for Progress and environmental organization Climate Power shows that a strong majority of US voters prefer Harris’s approach to climate.It’s an indicator that focusing on climate is “good politics”, said Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesperson for the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement.“Climate is one of the issues where voters trust Harris the most over Trump,” she said. “To capitalize on that, she needs to talk about it.”An ‘existential threat’The 2024 Democratic party platform approved on Monday refers to the climate crisis as an “existential threat” and “a consequence of delay and destruction by people like Donald Trump and his friends in Big Oil”.It also includes a commitment to “making polluters pay”. It’s something DiPaola said she was “stoked” to see, though she added that she’d eventually like to see “less vague language about how they’re going to make climate accountability real”.Additionally, the platform underlines the creation of hundreds of thousands of clean-energy jobs and highlights the historic green investments spurred by the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).But Levin says he hopes Harris lays out plans to go beyond the IRA and increase investments in green jobs, public transit and renewable power. Though the bill constitutes the largest downpayment on climate policy in US history with hundreds of billions of dollars in green funding, experts say that is a fraction of what the US must ultimately spend.“We can’t just say, oh, we did the IRA, so we did climate and now let’s move to another issue,” said Levin. “The IRA made tremendous progress, but it was just a start.”He said some aspects of the platform, including pledges to double funding for public transit and cut down public subsidies for oil companies, inspired hope that a bolder climate platform will emerge.That platform and Harris’ rhetoric, said DiPaola, should lean “populist,” said DiPaola.“Voters are frustrated with corporate power and influence,” she said. “She can ultimately appeal to both climate-motivated voters as well as economically motivated voters … by highlighting the need to clamp down on big oil’s greed.”‘Big oil’s hold on our economy’Though the Democratic party platform rails against “big oil’s hold on our economy”, the Democratic convention itself has not been unfriendly to the industry. The American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest fossil fuel lobby group, participated in several events this week.Oil major ExxonMobil sponsored two Wednesday panel discussions hosted by Punchbowl News on the sidelines of the convention, one of which featured the firm’s senior director of climate strategy and technology and a representative from gas lobby group the American Gas Association.Activists with environmental non-profits including Friends of the Earth, Oil Change International, and Climate Hawks Vote disrupted the event.“I am here because Exxon lied and people died,” chanted RL Miller, the Climate Hawks Vote founder and a former Democratic National Committee member, before being escorted from the room.Federal data shows Exxon has poured $111,500 into Republican congressional campaign committees. Collin Rees of Oil Change International, who took part in the protest, said if the party is looking to take on big oil, the company “should have no platform at the DNC”.War in GazaGaza solidarity protesters interrupted a meeting of the environment and climate crisis council at the convention on Wednesday, chanting “free, free Palestine”.“If you want to show some political courage, go and interrupt one of Donald Trump’s rallies,” responded Jamie Raskin, the Maryland representative, who had been speaking. “Anybody who interferes with that is objectively helping Donald Trump … so cut it out.”Some climate groups, however, are pushing for the Harris campaign to stop supporting Israel’s deadly war in Gaza by issuing an arms embargo. Among them is the Sunrise Movement.“Young people want a livable world for our generation and generations. We want everyone to have clean air and water and safe homes,” said O’Hanlon. “Everyone must have those rights and freedoms, including Palestinians.” More

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      Extremist or mainstream: how do Tim Walz’s policies match up globally?

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      Within hours of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, being chosen by Kamala Harris to be her Democratic presidential running mate, Donald Trump and team began attacking him as a “dangerously liberal extremist”.Trump surrogates seized on Walz’s record of expanding voting rights for former felons, combatting the climate crisis, and other measures as proof that Harris-Walz would be the “most radical ticket in American history”.If you step back from the melee, and look at his gubernatorial acts through a global lens, they appear anything but extreme. From the perspective of other industrialised nations, what Trump denounces as leftwing radicalism looks little more than basic public welfare provisions.Far from being militant and revolutionary, initiatives such as paid family leave, free college tuition and rudimentary gun controls – all championed by Walz in Minnesota – have long been regarded as middle-of-the-road and unremarkable in large swathes of the world. Through this frame, it is not Walz who is the outlier, but his Republican critics.Here are how some of Walz’s most impactful reforms compare with the rest of the world.Free school lunchesView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn.” That was Walz’s sardonic reply to CNN when he was asked about having introduced free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota schoolkids. The 2023 measure puts Minnesota among just eight US states that offer school meals at no cost to all children, no matter their family’s income.Around the world: Several countries provide free lunches for their children nationwide. Sweden, Finland and the three Baltic nations all provide meals at no cost for all schoolchildren irrespective of income, and many more European countries provide targeted or subsidised meals. Even a developing country such as India ensures access to lunch for more than 100 million kids daily.“The idea of offering free meals to all students during the school day is hardly new – many countries already do so,” said Alexis Bylander at the Food Research and Action Center, a US anti-hunger organisation. “Numerous studies show the benefits, including improving student attendance, behaviour and academic success.”Combatting the climate crisisView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: In February 2023 Walz signed legislation committing Minnesota to having all its electricity produced by wind, solar and other clean energy sources by 2040 – an even more ambitious timeframe than adopted by California, America’s sustainable energy leader. The legislature also passed more than 40 climate initiatives, including expanding charging infrastructure for electric vehicles and introducing a new code for commercial buildings to cut energy use by 80% by 2036.Around the world: By global standards, Minnesota’s ambitions do not stand out. Some 27 countries have written into law target dates by which they will become net zero – that is, stop loading additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In the developed world, Finland is leading the way, pledging to be net zero by 2035, and to begin absorbing more carbon dioxide than it produces by 2040. In December, almost 200 countries at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai agreed to call on all countries to transition away from fossil fuels and for global renewable energy to be tripled by 2030.Child tax creditView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: Last year the governor signed into law a child tax credit program for low-income Minnesota families. The measure sought to fill the hole left by a federal scheme that expired in 2021 after Congress failed to extend it. The Minnesota plan is the most generous of its type in the US, offering $1,750 per child and reaching more than 400,000 children.Around the world: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the forum of high-income democracies, reported in 2018 that 34 of the 35 countries with available information provided their people with some form of family benefit including tax credits. The OECD compared the value of family benefits for two-child families, measured as a percentage of average earnings, across 41 countries and found that the US came in at No 40, with only Turkey being less generous in its support.Basic gun controlsView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: The governor identifies as a proud gun-owner and hunter, and he accepted Harris’s invitation to be her running mate wearing a camo hat. That didn’t stop him in May 2023 enacting a slew of gun safety measures, including requiring all private sales of handguns and semi-automatic rifles to go through an FBI background check that looks for evidence of criminal or mental health risks. The changes also introduced a “red flag law” that allows relatives and other interested parties to intervene when someone is in danger of injuring themselves or others with guns.Around the world: International comparisons show that Americans own vastly more guns than civilians in other rich countries – 121 guns per 100 Americans, compared with five guns per 100 people in the United Kingdom. The number of gun killings per 100,000 people is also vastly higher: 4.12 in the US, 0.04 in the UK.Other countries also have much tougher gun controls that make those introduced by Walz look weak by comparison. Canada requires gun buyers to have a licence to possess or acquire a firearm and first time applicants have to wait a mandatory 28 days; it also imposes mandatory safety training and a ban on military-style rifles that does not exist in the US. The UK also bans some semi-automatic rifles and most handguns. Japan tightly restricts gun ownership, banning most guns other than air guns and a few other special categories and even then requiring owners to submit to annual inspections.Paid family and medical leaveWalz’s record: House File 2, enacted by the governor last year, gave Minnesotans access to up to 20 weeks in every year of partial wages to cover medical leave after a life-changing diagnosis, mental health leave, or time off to care for a new baby. “Paid family and medical leave is about investing in the people that made our state and economy strong in the first place,” Walz said as he signed the bill.Around the world: The US is the only OECD member country without a national law giving all workers access to paid leave for new mothers. Thirty-seven out 38 OECD countries offer national paid maternity leave – the only exception being the US. France, which holds the top spot, allows mothers and fathers to take paid leave until their child is three years old.The US is also one of only six countries with no form of national paid leave covering either family or medical leave in the case of a health concern.Voting rights for former felonsWalz’s record: The governor signed a bill that restores the vote to more than 50,000 Minnesotans who have been convicted of a felony. The Trump campaign denounced the measure as evidence of Walz’s “dangerously liberal agenda”, which is ironic, given that Trump himself, as a convicted felon, will only be able to vote for himself in November thanks to a similar reform in New York.Around the world: A report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in June concluded that the US was an “outlier nation in that it strips voting rights from millions of citizens solely on the basis of a criminal conviction”. In 2022, more than 4 million people in the US were disenfranchised on those grounds. By contrast, when HRW surveyed 136 countries around the world, it found that the majority never or rarely deny the vote because of a criminal record, while those with restrictions tend to be much less draconian in their approach than US states. More

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      ‘The dumbest climate conversation of all time’: experts on the Musk-Trump interview

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      Donald Trump and Elon Musk both made discursive, often fact-free assertions about global heating, including that rising sea levels would create “more oceanfront property” and that there was no urgent need to cut carbon emissions, during an event labeled “the dumbest climate conversation of all time” by one prominent activist.Trump, the Republican US presidential nominee, and Musk, the world’s richest person, dwelled on the problem of the climate crisis during their much-hyped conversation on X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by Musk, on Monday, agreeing that the world has plenty of time to move away from fossil fuels, if at all.“You sort of can’t get away from it at this moment,” Trump said of fossil fuels. “I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows.” The former US president added that rising sea levels, caused by melting glaciers, would have the benefit of creating “more oceanfront property”.Trump, who famously once called the climate crisis a “hoax”, also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration did not open up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling, claimed baselessly that farmers are having to give up their cattle because of climate edicts and that a far greater threat is posed by the prospect of nuclear war.“The one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” Trump pondered during the exchange.Musk, meanwhile, said it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry, the key driver of planet-heating pollution, and that the only imperative to ditch fossil fuels was that they will one day run dry.“If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of the electric car company Tesla. “We do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil and gas.“We still have quite a bit of time … we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.”Musk said the main danger of allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere was that at some point it will become difficult to breathe, causing “headaches and nausea” to people. This would occur with CO2 at about 1,000 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere, more than double the current record-breaking concentrations.Scientists have been clear that current global temperatures are hotter than at any point in human civilization, and probably long before this time too, which is causing mounting disastrous impacts in terms of heatwaves, droughts, floods and the destruction of the natural world.Governments have agreed to restrain the global temperatures rise to 1.5C above the preindustrial era, with researchers warning of cascading catastrophes beyond this point. The world faces the steep task of rapidly cutting emissions in half this decade, and then to net zero by 2050, to avoid these worst impacts.Despite Trump’s claims of new beaches, sea levels are rising faster along the US coastline than the global average, with up to 1ft of sea level rise expected in the next 30 years – an increase that equals the total rise seen over the past century, US government scientists have found.Instances of significant flooding have risen by 50% since the 1990s, with millions of Americans set to be affected as homes, highways and other infrastructure are inundated. In Florida, where Trump has his own coastal property at Mar-a-Lago, several insurers have decided to exit the state due to the increasing costs of flooding from the rising seas and fiercer storms.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and Musk’s discussion on the climate crisis, therefore, “spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity”, according to Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org. McKibben wrote it was “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”.“The damaging impacts of climate change, and in particular from more extreme weather events, such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, more intense hurricanes, are actually in many respects exceeding the predictions made just a decade ago,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist and author. “It is sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here.”Mann said that if CO2 levels get so high breathing becomes difficult, then the impacts of the climate crisis “will be so devastating as to have already caused societal collapse. It’s actually Elon’s ill-informed and ill-premised statements that are causing headaches and nausea.”Mann added that Trump’s statement that sea level rise will lead to more oceanfront property “does not betray a lack of understanding of climate physics. It betrays a lack of understanding of grade school geometry.”During his election campaigning, Trump has routinely denigrated electric vehicles but has recently changed his stance towards them after an endorsement from Musk, who previously described himself as a moderate Democrat.Trump, the former president convicted of 34 felonies, has vowed to undo the “lunacy” of Biden’s climate policies should he return to the White House, with his presidency expected to unleash a glut of new oil and gas drilling, accelerate gas exports and remove the US, once again, from the Paris climate agreement. More

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      Harris helped pass one of the strongest climate laws. Her policies don’t stop there | Leah C Stokes

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      Two years ago this week, I watched as Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote for the largest climate investment in American history. It was an emotional moment. After decades of inaction, the US had finally passed a climate law – one of the strongest climate laws in the world.I didn’t know it then, but a month later I would get a call asking if I would like to interview the vice-president about climate policy.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.Earlier this year, Harris announced a $20bn investment in green banks that will reduce pollution in communities across the country. This was no coincidence – she was a key advocate for the idea well before it was written into law. In 2020, she was just one of five senators who backed a national climate bank.Harris was also an early supporter of a plan to ensure clean energy workers had higher unionization rates. And sure enough, the climate law gives funding bonuses to projects that pay workers prevailing wages.Similarly, when she was running for president in 2020, Harris argued that electric vehicle incentives should be targeted to low- and middle-income families. Up to that point, it was overwhelmingly wealthier Americans who were using government incentives to buy an electric vehicle. Now, thanks to the climate law, low- and middle-income Americans can get up to $7,500 off a new electric vehicle, and $4,000 off a used one.Throughout her career, Harris has been a vocal advocate for environmental justice. Two decades ago, when she was district attorney for San Francisco, Harris set up the state’s first environmental crimes unit. As she said back in 2005: “Crimes against the environment are crimes against communities.”It’s not surprising, then, that Harris continued to focus on protecting communities. Back in 2011, when Harris was California’s attorney general, she filed a lawsuit against cargo terminals in the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports for polluting nearby communities through diesel exhaust. Months later, she reached a settlement, requiring the terminals to protect nearby communities. This idea also became part of the big federal climate law, with $3bn to cut pollution from ports. In total, that landmark law includes more than $40bn in investments for disadvantaged communities – the largest investment in environmental justice in American history.In policy after policy, Biden’s signature climate bill bears the marks of Harris’s influence.And it’s not just one climate law that Harris has shaped. The bipartisan infrastructure package also included billions in funding for programs she championed.As a senator, Harris introduced a bill in 2019 that would electrify school buses, and just two years later, Congress committed $5bn to the effort. Today, almost 200,000 kids are riding clean buses to school every day – a very fast change for a legislative body that’s known for taking decades to get policies passed.The water investments in the bipartisan package were also Harris’ ideas. She was the lead author on legislation that would replace lead pipes. Today, $15bn is being spent on this effort across the country, and the Biden-Harris administration is on track to replace 1.7m lead pipes. And she was particularly vocal on drought funding, traveling to Lake Mead to drum up media coverage and get the bill passed.If she hadn’t focused on these investments, making over 150 calls to legislators as they negotiated the bipartisan bill, they likely would have fallen out of the package. It’s not as if Republican senators had co-sponsored legislation with Harris on electric school buses or lead pipes.When it comes to protecting people and the planet, Harris has been ahead of her time. After decades of effort, her vision for a cleaner environment has slowly but surely made its way into law.Every single one of the last 13 months has broken a global heat record. The climate crisis isn’t stopping, and we can’t afford for federal climate policy to stop either. While the federal climate laws passed during the Biden-Harris administration will help us cut pollution at an unprecedented pace, they will not hit our goals without further action.Missing our climate goals is all but guaranteed if Trump wins. In his own words, Trump has said he would be a “dictator” on day one to “drill, drill, drill”.The planet will bear the scars of Trump’s first term for decades. And that was under a Republican administration that was ill prepared to govern. This time, there are extensive plans to dismantle federal climate policy if Republicans retake the White House. Project 2025 – a Republican manifesto authored by several Trump insiders – is a detailed vision to demolish the Environmental Protection Agency, eliminate the National Weather Service and roll back our federal climate laws.This year’s presidential election could not have higher stakes. Whoever wins will run the White House until early 2029. And scientists are clear: we have to cut carbon pollution in half by 2030 to meet our climate goals. The next president will hold power during these crucial years. It’s not surprising, then, that 350 climate leaders have come out in support of Harris.A couple weeks ago, when I learned that Harris would be running for president, I was out with my three-year-old daughters, picking raspberries on yet another unseasonably hot day. I thought back to my interview with the vice-president, remembered how her eyes lit up when she talked about climate action and felt something strange: hope. I knew that if Harris became president, the world would be safer for my daughters to grow up in.At the end of our conversation two years ago, I asked Harris about the future of climate action, and she surprised me by talking about her role heading up the National Space Council. She said that astronauts can see how fragile the Earth is when they see it from space. That perspective gives them a vision that we must protect the only planet we call home.“We must act with a sense of urgency. We must be swift,” Harris told me. “We still have so much more to do.”

      Leah C Stokes is an associate professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Short Circuiting Policy More

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      Kamala Harris memes are all over the internet. Will tweets and TikToks turn into votes?

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      In a series of events over 24 hours that would have been unimaginable a week ago, Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, secured the backing of Joe Biden and key leaders, brought in a record-breaking $81m, and became the face of brat summer.“kamala IS brat,” pop star Charli xcx declared on Sunday, a reference to her new album released last month that has launched countless memes declaring it the season of the brat. A brat, in the British singer’s own words, is “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.Brat was having a moment, Kamala was having hers, and the two came together in cultural union via a tidal wave of posts – largely from younger Americans – like videos with the pop star’s music over clips of the vice-president’s frequently shared coconut tree remarks.Harris’s campaign quickly embraced the memes, adopting a lime green Twitter/X background in the same aesthetic of the Brat album. The internet went wild.Now the question is what it might mean for Harris’s chances come November. Will tweets and TikToks turn into votes?While this year’s election drew plenty of memes and online engagement, there was little excitement about the rematch of Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 78, and instead a pervasive sense of cynicism.Young people had reported feeling disengaged and apathetic about the upcoming elections, and US politics in general. In a US News-Generation Lab poll of voters 18-34 from early July, 61% of respondents agreed that the upcoming election would be among the most important in history, but nearly a third said they would probably not or definitely not vote.Of those who said would not or were unlikely to vote, 40% said it was because they didn’t like any of the candidates, and 15% said they were turned off by politics.After Biden’s widely criticized debate performance, and amid growing calls for him to bow out of the election, there was a flurry of Harris-related memes. The KHive, as Harris fans have been called, seemed rejuvenated by the renewed interest around her.The memes and posts surged after Biden announced that he would step aside, and that he was endorsing Harris, including videos of her with music from Chappell Roan and Kendrick Lamar, and along the way the tone of the content shifted from oftentimes just ironic and silly to something more earnest.“It went from being just shitposting to shitposting into reality and as it became more and more real people also understood what power this could actually hold and what this could actually mean,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital and political strategist who has worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York, and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman.She views the furor around Harris among younger voters as both about Harris but also something larger. “It’s about the potential for something new, it’s about a political party that can be agile and make adjustments based on what they are hearing from the people.”“I think it is really exciting and bringing a lot of energy and hope to folks that haven’t felt this way in some time and for young people that maybe haven’t had a moment of hope like this in politics before.”The buzz online is bringing results, said Marianna Pecora, the communications director for Voters of Tomorrow. The gen-Z led liberal advocacy organization had its best fundraising day in history, Pecora said, and saw more apply to join a chapter or start a chapter in two days than in the last month combined.Priorities USA, one of the largest liberal Super Pacs, told the Guardian on Tuesday that after Biden endorsed Harris, it saw a notable increase in the share of young people who said they plan to vote in the upcoming election.It’s also brought a sense of joy and excitement not often seen in politics, Pecora said, particularly for a generation that came of age during one of the most difficult periods in recent history from growing political turmoil and the rise of far-right extremism in the US to Covid-19.“We’ve had this history as young people not seeing a system that really works for us and not having too many figureheads that are really fighting for us,” said Pecora, who was 13 when Donald Trump was elected.While polls show that Harris – like Biden and Trump – has struggled with favorability ratings, she has helped elevate issues that are important to younger voters, including abortion rights and Israel’s war on Gaza.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris, a biracial woman who is set to be the first Asian American and black woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, is an appealing candidate to gen Z voters, who are among the most diverse generation in US history, said Yalda T Uhls with the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at the University of California, Los Angeles.This year 41 million members of gen Z will be eligible to vote, and nearly half of them are people of color.A report from the center published last year that surveyed people from ages 10 to 24 found that adolescents are most interested in hopeful uplifting content of people beating the odds. “I feel like that’s the Kamala story,” Uhls said. That same study also found that in their entertainment, older teens were most interested in seeing a Black woman as the hero of a story.“Maybe young people have been waiting for this. They have been waiting for a candidate they feel is representative of them,” said Uhls, who co-authored the report and also grew up with Harris.But while Harris’s entry into the race has energized young voters, they also want to see real policy proposals that align with the issues most important to them, experts say.“Whether this translates to a large surge in youth voter turnout in November may come down to whether the new Democratic nominee also can convince young voters of a credible plan to address the existential threats they see in their everyday lives,” said Sarah Swanbeck, the executive director of the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans, pointing to the climate crisis, protections for democratic institutions, and economic policy that will improve social mobility.The events of this week have marked a special moment for young women, said Pecora. Young women for decades have been the arbiters of culture, she said, and this moment is tying the culture of young women to the vice-president.“We know we’re the margin of victory and that is translating into how this is happening online. It’s no coincidence to me that young women who have become the base of the Democratic party, who are fighting for reproductive freedom, their culture is the culture that is becoming mainstream with this movement,” she said. (Conservatives have frequently railed against the growing number of unmarried women supporting Democrats.)“It’s showing that we have power and sway in this world where young women are typically told wait your turn or let a man do it.”Uhls, the UCLA scholar who has studied gen Z, said she predicts the enthusiasm of the last few days will make a difference in November.“I think it’s going to translate to votes,” Uhls said. “Young people get most of their news and political information from social media. Some of them have written about this but they are thrilled that someone is actually marketing to them.”Still, Harris’s path to the White House is tough. The latest poll from PBS News/NPR/Marist found that if the election were today, 46% of voters would support Trump and 45% would vote for Harris, a close race though within the margin of error. The outcome of November’s election is expected to be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.But, Pecora said, the discourse about the election that is unfolding online is also happening elsewhere between friends and family at dinner tables and in classrooms, Pecora said.“That engagement is taking itself into people’s conversations, into their homes, into their communities. That’s where voters are turned out,” she said. “The energy that’s happening online is not siloed to the internet. It translated to dollars, and those dollars are translating to real organizing capacity and an ability to turn out young voters in November.”And so, Democrats say, there’s hope. More

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      James Inhofe, former Republican senator who called climate change a ‘hoax’, dies aged 89

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      Republican former senator James Inhofe, a climate denier who once brought a snowball to the chamber floor in a stunt attempting to disprove global warming, died on Tuesday at the age of 89.Inhofe resigned as senator for Oklahoma in January 2023, suffering long-term effects of Covid-19. Elected in 1994, his time as the state’s longest-serving senator was notable for his ultra-conservative positions on numerous issues, including calling the climate emergency “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.His death was announced on Tuesday in a family statement, which stated the cause was a stroke.The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican ally during Inhofe’s chairing of the Senate’s armed forces and environment committees, was among the first to pay tribute.“The people he served, a group much larger than the proud residents of the Sooner state, were better for it,” a statement from McConnell’s office said.“Jim’s diligent stewardship of massive infrastructure projects transformed life across the heartland. His relentless advocacy for American energy dominance unlocked new prosperity across the country. And his laser focus on growing and modernizing the US military strengthened the security of the entire free world.”As perhaps the most vocal Senate Republican climate denier, he called the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a “Gestapo bureaucracy”, opposed efforts by Democrats to cap greenhouse gas emissions, and pursued lucrative tax incentives for domestic oil and gas producers.His widely ridiculed snowball stunt came in 2015, during a rambling speech during which he claimed climate conditions on Earth were the work of a supreme being, and attempted to discredit a Nasa report that found that 2014 was the hottest year recorded globally to date.“My point is, God’s still up there,” Inhofe said during a 2012 interview during promotion for his book focusing on global warming as “a conspiracy”.“The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is, to me, outrageous.”According to Open Secrets, between 1989 and 2022, Inhofe received campaign donations worth almost $4m from energy producers.As chair of the Senate armed services committee, Inhofe was an advocate for a large US military presence on the world stage, and supported sizable defense spending budgets to pay for it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFollowing the scandal over US service members photographed abusing prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, Inhofe said he “was more outraged at the outrage” than the torture of the inmates.Inhofe was born on 17 November 1934 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city he served as mayor from 1978 to 1984.He was elected to the state house in 1966, aged 31, and state senate three years later.His career in Washington DC began in 1986 as a US congressman for Oklahoma’s first district, and he won re-election three times before stepping up to the Senate in 1994 when Republican incumbent David Boren became president of the University of Oklahoma.A keen aviator, Inhofe married his wife, Kay, in 1959, and they had four children. A son, Perry, died in a solo airplane crash in 2013.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      David Lammy faces a world in turmoil: five key concerns for foreign secretary

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      UkraineMore than two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, the conflict drags on. Ukrainian forces are depleted and they need foreign weapons. Support for Ukraine crosses most party lines in Europe, but if Donald Trump wins the US election and cuts or limits the flow of arms, Europe may struggle to fill the gap. Lammy will want to shore up public support, bolster European collaboration, and map out what resources the continent can collectively offer Ukraine if the US steps back.GazaLabour’s stance on Gaza cost it several seats, and Lammy will face scrutiny on issues including arms sales to Israel. Labour is committed to recognising Palestinian statehood “as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution”, but has not given a timeline. Starmer is unlikely to want to risk alienating the Biden administration by making unilateral moves in the run-up to the election.US presidential electionView image in fullscreenOne of the UK’s main diplomatic roles has been as Washington’s ally in forums like the UN, and an interlocutor between the US and Europe. But US politics are in turmoil, with Joe Biden’s bid for a second term hanging in the balance. Lammy will have to prepare for the possibility of working with a Trump administration.EuropeStarmer say he wants to keep Brexit out of politics but his commitment to growth means forming an economic relationship with the UK’s biggest trading partner. Ties to Europe will be particularly important if Trump win. A meeting of the European Political Community, held at Blenheim Palace later this month, will be a key first step to building a shared vision for the continent.Climate changeDespite heavy criticism for watering down commitments to clean energy, Labour has laid out ambitious plans to lead global efforts on climate change, building on British diplomatic reach and technological expertise. The potential loss of progressive allies in France or the US could make a British role important globally. But as the impact of a warming world become increasingly evident, Labour may open itself up to charges of hypocrisy if domestic policies don’t measure up. More