Harris and Walz Don’t Believe in ‘Freedom.’ They Just Believe in Environmentalism

F reedom and innovation offer the best way to protect the environment, but some environmentalists — like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz — reject that approach, instead embracing the exact opposite of freedom in the name of saving the planet.

For the radical Left, the goal isn’t a cleaner planet but control over your life through social engineering. Democrats have a deep desire to treat human beings like cells in a spreadsheet to be manipulated into making abstract numbers add up as they think they should. In an Orwellian twist, the Harris campaign has wrapped its discussion of climate policies in the language of “freedom,” speaking at the DNC about “the freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.”

It’s smart to avoid specifics when your policies are unpopular. Harris barely mentioned global warming at the DNC because keeping quiet about her extreme agenda is good politics. “Her campaign aims to avoid alienating either side,” Reuters reported. “Several aides describe her plan on controversial energy issues as one of strategic ambiguity.” This works because modern global-warming activism is largely astroturf, not grassroots, with incredibly well-funded lobbying by green groups (often not-so-secretly funded by America’s enemies) driving the agenda. Said groups can read polling, and they know that open discussion of their policies would be devastating to Harris’s campaign in energy-rich swing states such as Pennsylvania.

“Climate is a third rail for the Harris campaign. Anything she might say about the need to curb fossil fuel use risks alienating swing voters, especially in critical oil and gas states like Pennsylvania,” Tim McDonnell, the climate and energy editor at Semafor, wrote.

So, the Harris campaign is trying to distract the public from her highly illiberal policies with vague platitudes about, of all things, freedom. New York Times reporter Lisa Friedman claims that the Harris campaign’s frequent use of the word in connection with climate policies is an attempt to appropriate it after “decades of Republicans seeming to own the messaging around freedom.”

There is a reason that Republicans are associated with the word: They generally support economically liberal policies that would unleash American ingenuity to tackle the day’s biggest challenges, including pollution and other environmental problems. Harris, on the other hand, seemingly wants to stunt or even kill off whole industries while massively increasing the budget deficit. During her 2019 presidential campaign, for example, Harris proposed $10 trillion in new global-warming spending. That’s more than twice the entire 2023 U.S. federal budget of $4.5 trillion. Even so, would a spendthrift and anti-freedom Harris plan at least work to bring down carbon emissions? The science says no.

A recent analysis of 1,500 global-warming policies across 41 countries found that almost 96 percent of measures intended to address the problem are ineffective or downright counterproductive. Only 63 of the policies examined caused a large-enough emissions reduction to be detected by the study. “We have a lot of policies out there that have not led to large emission reductions, and more policies do not necessarily equate to better outcomes,” researchers told the New Scientist.

Even as emissions decline in the U.S., they are soaring globally, mostly in countries with exactly the kind of command-and-control measures that environmentalists favor. In 2023, Communist China alone accounted for 35 percent of global carbon emissions, roughly three times more than America emitted, according to the International Energy Agency. American per capita emissions are down by almost 35 percent from their peak in 2000, while Chinese per capita emissions have more than tripled over the past two decades. There is nothing green about economic illiberalism, and environmentalists regularly praise the world’s biggest and fastest-growing polluter.

The reason for the decline in U.S. emissions isn’t heavy-handed government policy but the free market at work. The U.S. Energy Information Administration attributed roughly 68 percent of falling emissions to the “decreased use of coal and the increased use of natural gas for electricity generation.” Fracking, not government control, has caused emissions to drop sharply in 47 states and Washington, D.C., according to the Scientific American and other studies by the EIA. Naturally, Harris promised, on video during her 2019 campaign, to ban fracking, citing her record of targeting the practice as attorney general of California. An anonymous campaign spokesperson this year told Politico that “she would not ban fracking” after Republican nominee Donald Trump called her out for it.

Even research conducted and financed by generally left-wing institutions and nonprofits such as the Brookings Institution has shown for over a decade that market solutions such as nuclear and natural gas (both of which Harris once promised to ban when she co-sponsored the Green New Deal) are the best ways to reduce emissions, while heavily subsidized, Harris-favored solar and wind energy are the least effective.

The energy output of any process is a function of the raw power input, a fraction of which can be practically extracted. That fraction represents the efficiency of the process. Progressives erroneously fixate on the efficiency. After all, traditional water wheels are absurdly efficient, with some able to convert 85 percent of their energy input. Yet they were rapidly replaced during the industrial revolution by early steam engines, whose efficiency maxed out at around just 3 percent (modern combined-cycle gas turbines are about 60 percent efficient). This is because the raw power input of a steam engine is immensely greater than that of a water wheel, resulting in greater output overall. Most civilizations in history have therefore attempted to increase raw power, while only a few have focused on eking out efficiency gains. America’s goal shouldn’t be so-called energy efficiency — it should be clean energy that is cheap to meter.

Democrats look at the slow, agonizing process by which our ancestors mastered ever larger and more powerful energy flows and wish that 18th-century bureaucrats had shut James Watt down in the name of reducing global temperatures. It’s rather suspicious that the alleged solution to global warming that environmentalists demand today — ever more control, dressed up misleadingly in the language of “freedom” by the Harris campaign — is precisely the same demand they had long before global warming became a widely held concern. It’s almost as if social engineering and control are solutions in search of a problem.

While Democrats may have recently discovered the word “freedom,” their love affair with bans, regulations, and restrictions suggest they still don’t understand what it means. “It’s by far the most resonant word in the American political discourse — and for decades, Democrats let Republicans own it,” opines the far-left New Republic. It is a welcome development that Democrats such as Harris are starting to catch on to the fact that American voters like freedom. Now if only they would realize that the Orwellian use of the word to cover up their anti-freedom policies won’t fool anyone.