If her record is any indication, her presidency would shackle America with unprecedented levels of ‘green’ bureaucracy and fiscal irresponsibility.
If her record is any indication, her presidency would shackle America with unprecedented levels of 'green' bureaucracy and fiscal irresponsibility.
P resumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris wanted to spend almost twelve times more money on global warming than Joe Biden. Clearly, she didn’t think her boss went far enough.
During her unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Harris proposed $10 trillion in new global-warming spending. That’s more than twice the entire annual U.S. federal budget of $4.5 trillion in 2023.
Harris’s apparent belief that Biden isn’t spending enough on global warming is even more shocking given that Biden hasn’t exactly been stingy with taxpayer dollars in this area.
Biden’s lavish climate spending primarily came through two pieces of legislation: $369 billion toward purportedly “green” energy sources such as wind and solar power in the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which added another $550 billion in new spending for “equitable, climate-smart infrastructure.”
To put these numbers in context, the budget the president submitted for 2025 included only $186 billion for the entire U.S. Army. America’s newest aircraft carrier cost taxpayers a “mere” $12.8 billion. Biden spent almost 72 aircraft carriers worth of money on global warming.
In addition, Biden created an array of special tax benefits, subsidies, and credits intended to lure private investment in green technologies. This type of more secretive spending isn’t counted in any budget, but is still effectively taxpayer spending.The amount of your money that Biden has already spent on green projects is extravagant, but it pales in comparison to what Harris would like to spend. “My plan sets out a bold target to exceed the Paris Agreement climate goals and achieve a clean economy by 2045, investing $10 trillion in public and private funding to meet the initial 10-year mobilization necessary to stave off the worst climate impacts,” Harris said in September 2019 while running for president.
As vice president, Harris earlier this year became the point person for a proposal to spend an additional $1 trillion. This includes a tax-equity package, a type of federal subsidy allowing green energy companies to sell special tax credits to investing institutions like banks for a guaranteed return in exchange for up-front cash. This kind of financing scheme helped fund an offshore wind turbine that recently shattered off the coast of New England, triggering an environmental disaster.
Harris’s big-spending record on all things green precedes her time as vice president as well as her presidential campaign. As a U.S. senator, Harris co-sponsored the Green New Deal, which inspired Biden’s own climate legislation. The Green New Deal would have banned coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear energy. That would have directly shuttered several industries with U.S. market capitalizations of almost $28 billion, above $716 billion, and $154 billion respectively, all to be replaced by unreliable wind and solar power. And those are just the direct costs.
Left-leaning economist Noah Smith estimated that enacting just a fraction of the Green New Deal would cost $6.6 trillion annually, or about 23 percent of every good and service in America. This means the Green New Deal would more than double current government spending.
Oddly, the Green New Deal includes making the entire U.S. health-care system run by the government via single-payer health-care. These provisions alone would light $32 trillion on fire in just the first ten years, according to economists at George Mason University. So Smith’s estimates of the price tag are likely low, as they do not include much of the additional spending listed in in the Green New Deals’ FAQ.
The FAQ page for the Green New Deal was originally released by the office of Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.) and includes additional things the legislation should spend money on. It’s essentially a bundle of very delusional progressive policies from “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work” to “fully get[ing] rid of farting cows and airplanes” while “replac[ing] every combustion-engine vehicle.”
But Harris’s history of environmental extremism isn’t limited to her support for and co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal (which she is now, conveniently, running away from). She certainly earned her plaudits as America’s “most liberal senator,” before evidence of this was scrubbed from the internet.
Harris also introduced the Climate Equity Act of 2020. This failed legislation would have created a new government bureaucracy of the “Climate and Environmental Equity Office” within the Congressional Budget Office. The new bureaucracy would have “prepare[d] an analysis for each bill or resolution with an environmental or climate change nexus that is reported by any congressional committee. The analysis would have had to include the bill’s impacts on frontline communities,” defined as “communities that have experienced environmental injustice or are vulnerable to climate injustice.”
Every one of the federal government’s 438 agencies or sub-agencies would have been mandated to “biannually publish a climate and environmental justice accountability agenda” and all spending by any federal agency would be audited to ensure equitable racial climate impact. This audit would be retrospective, “to review the application and administration of any investment of the agency with an environmental or climate change nexus to ensure that the investment is serving frontline communities.”
Harris also introduced the “Environmental Justice for All Act,” which would have added several additional layers of global-warming bureaucracy regarding ethnicity. The bill would have added “several environmental justice requirements, advisory bodies, and programs to address the disproportionate adverse human health or environmental effects of federal laws or programs on communities of color, low-income communities, or tribal and indigenous communities.”
It would also have required the federal government to create “an environmental justice strategy” featuring straight-up cash giveaways via a new series of “Environmental Justice Community Grant Programs” to “carry out culturally and linguistically appropriate projects and activities that are driven by the needs, opportunities, and priorities of the environmental justice community at which the eligible entity proposes to conduct the project or activity to address environmental justice concerns and improve the health or environment of the environmental justice community.” Essentially, this would have pumped even more taxpayer dollars into the left-wing environmental non-profit industrial complex of fake jobs for left-wing activists.
It’s the very kind of activism the Biden-Harris American Climate Corps is intended to encourage. The program, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and the FY 2024 budget, is another green boondoggle. “The American Climate Corps will focus on equity and environmental justice — prioritizing communities traditionally left behind, including energy communities that powered our nation for generations, leveraging the talents of all members of our society, and prioritizing projects that help meet the Administration’s Justice40 goal,” according to the White House. The Corps plans to send 20,000 young Americans door to door educating the public about global warming. It is a full-employment program for otherwise unemployable left-wingers, paid for by taxpayers.
But Harris’s history of environmental extremism isn’t just about her time in the Senate, either. While she was California’s attorney general, she made it her business to sue conventional energy sources out of business. She even stated that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” during a 2019 CNN town hall on global warming before recently reversing her position entirely after criticism — and after realizing that electorally important states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio have large fracking industries. Environmental groups aren’t worried about Harris’s position flip, however, and are openly saying she’ll be “immensely easier to pressure” than Trump would be.
Despite these environmental ambitions, as vice president, her highest-profile environmental responsibility was the federal government’s $5 billion dollar effort in 2022 to purchase electric school buses. The government intended to purchase 2,463 such buses, but has only managed to buy 60 so far, costing taxpayers a stunning $83 million per vehicle.
“Every school day, 25 million children ride our nation’s largest form of mass transit: the school bus. The vast majority of those buses run on diesel, exposing students, teachers, and bus drivers to toxic air pollution,” Harris said in 2022 while taking credit for the program. “As part of our work to tackle the climate crisis, the historic funding we are announcing today is an investment in our children, their health, and their education.”
If Harris is handed the presidency, America is liable to see far worse than spendthrift green school-bus schemes. If her record is any indication, her presidency would shackle America with unprecedented levels of “green” bureaucracy and fiscal irresponsibility.