US Election 2024: Democratic Climate Platform Is Okay For 2020, But It’s 2024

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As the US 2020 Presidential election cycle swings into speed, with Harris revving the Democrats into high gear and Trump melting down, the Democratic National Convention brought with it the release of the 2024 platform. With that document comes a greater opportunity to more finely determine how the Democratic party is considering climate action compared to other agenda items.

It’s worth noting that the Republicans are making up for the complete lack of any platform in 2020, having merely had a short document saying that what Trump says goes. This year, they have the 900-page Project 2025, a blueprint developed by conservative organizations which poses a significant threat to democratic institutions in the US. Originating from right-wing think tanks and a leadership and authoring team tightly linked to Donald Trump, it seeks to centralize executive power, diminish the independence of federal agencies, and erode civil liberties. The project’s transparent goal is to entrench authoritarian governance, undermining checks and balances vital to American democracy. From a climate perspective, it’s a complete reversal of all climate action.

The 92-page Democratic Platform is a breath of fresh air by comparison, not to mention a lot shorter. It prioritizes growing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out. It focuses on addressing the climate crisis and promoting clean energy. Health care expansion and protection of the Affordable Care Act are key components. The platform emphasizes social justice, including racial equity and reproductive rights. Safeguarding democracy and voting rights is a central concern. It also highlights the importance of strengthening global alliances and promoting democracy worldwide. The platform reflects a commitment to inclusive and sustainable progress.

To be clear, the document was obviously very close to its final shape prior to the recent change at the top, in which Biden said a statesmanlike and graceful adieu — something incredibly rare and to be praised — and Harris stepped into the role she wanted in 2020. However, the theme of the Democrats and Harris continuing the work of the past three and a half years, fixing the mess Trump and the Republicans left behind, taking aggressive action on climate change, recovering the economy from COVID-19, and dealing with the changing world order has been clear from all parties, so a radical rewrite was never in the books. It’s unclear what did change, if anything, but certainly the tone of the party has shifted substantially with the change at the top.

Also worth noting is that my assessment of the platform comes after a seven-part series on the last two Administrations’ climate actions as well as Trump’s climate pledges. That the Democratic Party is the only choice for positive climate action is incredibly clear, with the Republicans being the choice for making climate change a lot worse. This doesn’t mean that I found that the Biden-Harris Administration’s climate actions were stellar, but it’s possible they were the best that they could achieve given the ugly politics and power of the United States’ fossil fuel industry.

It’s also after an assessment of how a Harris-Walz ticket would likely impact actual climate action during a Harris Presidency. Net? A big upgrade for climate action from a possible Biden-Harris 2.0 Administration. Will that show up in the platform?

The “Producing Cleaner, More Affordable Energy” section is mostly about the Inflation Reduction Act and similar Biden Administration successes. It outlines the new manufacturing plants across the US, the offshore wind approvals, and the new jobs that will be created. It’s a stay-the-course platform plank, in other words. This is completely reasonable at one level, as the IRA is America’s first industrial policy since the late 1970s, and industrial policies take a while to have an effect. The IRA’s impacts are just starting to be felt.

However, it would have been good to see some harder commitments and a bit more precision that 99% of the clean energy will be electricity. However, a political document making it explicit that fossil fuels and the vast majority of burnable fuels have no place in the mix doesn’t win votes in large parts of the country. Shrewder readers will notice that it’s solar panels, wind turbines, transmission, and electricity storage — all electricity, all the time — but others will feel warm fuzzies as they read energy and imagine blue hydrogen in trucks and biomethane in home heating. Of course, too much money is going to hydrogen-for-energy out of the IRA and related policies, so it’s not so much warm fuzzies as roaring fires of greenbacks.

The section on “Lowering Energy Costs” is interesting. It includes this statement:

“… our policies are expected to slash overall electricity rates by 9 percent and gas prices by as much as 13 percent by 2030, saving Americans tens of billions of dollars.”

Lowering electricity costs to make the switch to increasingly low-carbon electricity is fine, but surely it’s a typo to say that they’ll be making it cheaper to fill gas guzzlers at the pumps in a climate change platform? No, it isn’t. After a reasonable section on the electric car rebates available to Americans and improved fuel economy standards with the clear indication that they’ll continue under a Harris Administration, it really does say that they are going to stand up to the price gouging of Big Oil to help the average American pump gallons of planet-warming gasoline into their oversized SUVs and pickup trucks.

And once again, this is a stay-the-course plank, not a bold-new-targets plank. So far, there’s no Harris-Walz stamp on this part of the platform.

Next up is “Creating Clean Energy Jobs.” Let’s just quote the first couple of sentences to give a clear representation of the entire section.

“President Biden has long said that when he thinks about climate change, he thinks about jobs. Good-paying union jobs that people can raise a family on. As President, he’s delivering.”

Isn’t this supposed to be the Harris Presidential campaign platform? Five references to Biden between name, title, and pronouns in two sentences? The entire section is like that.

In fact, Biden is named 287 times in the document, while Harris is named 32 times. And of the 32 times, 26 were as an adjunct to Biden. Only six times is Harris called out separately. The document was released four weeks exactly, 28 days, after Biden stepped down and endorsed Harris as the candidate. Harris secured the candidacy on August 2nd, 16 days before the platform was released.

Frankly, from a pure-platform perspective, attacks on Harris being simply Biden 2.0 have merit. It’s hard to understand the logic that the Democratic National Committee applied to this. Perhaps it’s just that they believe, probably accurately, that 99% of Americans won’t read the platform and won’t care, which is both cynical and sad.

As a reminder, the platform is a sausage made by a committee. The committee in this case is the DNC and it represents months or years of backroom deals, power plays, petty politics, grinding committee work, focus grouping, and the like. Significant surgery to the sausage in four weeks was always unlikely. But they really should have at least tried for cosmetic surgery.

Regardless, let’s press on. Good jobs for Americans is good policy. Clean energy industrial, manufacturing, construction, and operational jobs are much better jobs than slinging burgers at McDonalds. This is a segment where the inequity-increasing policies of both parties since 1980 have been in part addressed under the Biden Administration. The bottom half of the income distribution saw significant gains, with market incomes growing by 10.9% in 2021 alone. Despite challenges like inflation, the economic recovery following the pandemic has particularly benefited lower-income households. Additionally, the wealth of households in the lowest income quintile increased by 15.2% between the first quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, indicating a broader economic uplift.

When policies aren’t about Wall Street but about Main Street, everyone wins. Trickle up is a real economic policy, while trickle down only applies to things you’d rather not have dripping on your head. The Biden Administration brought in real policies that helped Main Street, and while imperfect, they are vastly better than more tax cuts for the absurdly affluent.

There’s a bit of nonsense in there about buying American steel and American cement. The US manufactures 71% of its steel demand from scrap steel, and exported 18 million tons of scrap in 2023 alone. So many steel-bearing manufactured goods, including cars, appliances, industrial equipment, and even furniture, are imported into the US every year that its scrap yards are overflowing. The country just doesn’t import that much steel. And cement is even more local. Quarrying limestone to manufacture cement is almost the definition of a local-to-demand industry. But it’s a shout-out to the Rust Belt, one assumes, as Biden was born there, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Harris wasn’t, but Walz is Rust Belt through and through, so perhaps there’s political sense where there isn’t industrial reality.

The Climate Corps gets a nod, although it’s Biden’s goal to triple it by 2030 that gets mentioned.

More usefully, both apprenticeships and STEM education get called out. America needs blue collar workers across the economic transition and apprenticeships are a vastly better path to those jobs than MBAs or video game degrees. The educational deficit in the US around STEM compared to global standards is clear. About 20% of PhDs in the States were in STEM fields, compared to 30% in Europe and 40% in China. And, of course, a significant number of those US STEM PhDs were granted to Chinese foreign students.

And so to “Reducing Pollution & Making Polluters Pay.” I really was hoping for a Harris callout in this section given her track record of prosecuting polluters in California, but it wasn’t to be. From here on, assume that the platform is Biden’s and Harris has to live with it. That said, I used to work in both sales and delivery for up to billion dollar technology programs globally. There was a saying during the sales cycle that we had to remind ourselves of constantly: “Don’t mistake sales and delivery.” I’m still of the opinion that a Harris-Walz Administration would be stronger on climate action than a Biden Administration, and they won’t be too hobbled by this platform.

“Transportation is America’s biggest emitter, responsible for a third of emissions. The Administration has put us on track to eliminate all carbon from the sector by 2050”

These are true statements, but that’s not a pledge, that’s an assertion, and it’s not particularly near at hand. Nor is it by segment, where significant differentiation is possible. The goal of 50% of passenger cars sold being electric in 2030 is nice, but other countries are asserting 100% by 2035 as a fixed commitment. Ground freight decarbonization is missing in action, and maritime shipping and aviation don’t warrant a mention. More for transit, which is nice, but America’s sprawl precludes the vast majority of Americans from using transit.

“We’ll keep pushing to reduce emissions from America’s buildings and heavy industry. We support local and state efforts to adopt energy-efficient building codes.”

This wording is so vague and lacking in teeth it’s painful, but it’s also the reality of the weird federation of sub-national geographies and the lack of national power in the country. Brussels has much more authority than Washington does in the states of the EU, and much more influence on the countries of the euro zone and other European hangers-on. Washington is reduced to education, encouragement, and funding whatever local governments decide to do.

“Going forward, we’ll also eliminate tens of billions of dollars in other unfair oil and gas subsidies.”

That’s nice. Per the IMF, the US subsidized oil, gas, and coal to the tune of $690 billion with negative externalities, a record-destroying amount in a year when the fossil fuel industry was seeing windfall profits. Under Biden, US extraction and export of oil, gas, and even coal shot up, along with US subsidies for the products. To be somewhat balanced, most subsidies are baked into the tax code and programs that automatically pay them out with increased production, but the significantly increased production has been on Biden’s watch.

The US under Obama and Biden committed to eliminating fossil fuel subsidies in 2009, along with the rest of the G7. Zero progress was made in the US. Pork kept rolling into the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. Understand that I take all US assertions about cutting back on the big drip of taxpayers’ money into the industry with a grain of salt sufficient to provide for the summertime needs of a large herd of overheated cows.

On to “Environmental Justice.” A good deal of this section is clean energy jobs and investments to communities that were hit hard by pollution. That sounds simply justice-oriented, but the reality of a lot of those communities is that they were industrial and coal communities that have no jobs, so it’s good policy to get good-paying, long-lasting economic development under way.

A lot more of it is paying for the Ponzi Scheme that is the fossil fuel industry in the US. The companies make the profits and get the subsidies, then leave behind Superfund sites for governmental agencies to clean up. Billions are being spent to cap wells and clean up the industry’s mess, which is to say, more subsidies for them.

What message exactly is this sending America’s kids? Here’s $100. Go make a total mess of your room and the rest of the house while you’re at it. Done? Cool. I’m just going to call a maid service to come in and clean this up for you. Frankly, the entire situation is perverse, and the antithesis of climate action or environmental justice.

Actual environmental justice would have the oil and gas firms receiving zero subsidies, paying a carbon price for all of their emissions, and paying out of current revenues and profits for all cleanup of all pollution. This business of paying them absurd subsidies on top of their profits to continue to pollute, then paying other people to clean up after them, is destructive on multiple levels. That it’s worse under Republican Administrations does not make this remotely good.

Next up, “Building Climate Resilient Communities.” Will managed retreat in the face of increased climate risks be mentioned? Will abandoning coastal areas and rewilding them be in the platform? Let’s find out.

Nope and nope. Americans can continue to build in flood plains and wildfire zones with impunity. The Democrats will increase FEMA payments, increase firefighting budgets, and fund cooling and disaster centers for municipalities that refused to limit sprawl into terrible land use choices. Houston will undoubtedly get tens or hundreds of millions more in the next four years, regardless of the election, as it basically turned its sea-level bayous into homes and businesses, against all rational sense. As I noted a while ago, its resilience plan also contains zero mention of moving people and businesses out of increasingly inundated flood zones, and FEMA keeps paying for people to rebuild their homes in places where homes shouldn’t exist.

There’s some good stuff in there, like burying power lines as sensible countries have done for decades, restoring wetlands that shouldn’t have been dried out, and trying to stabilize the Colorado River system. That last is a bit of a mug’s game, because innumerable communities, farmers, states, and tribes signed treaties guaranteeing their water rights during decades when the system was unusually full of water, and now it’s cycled back into its much more usual drought stage, one that’s exacerbated by climate change. Efforts of the Biden Administration are papering over the widening cracks, not fixing the problem, but that’s at least something.

“Conservation” gets a couple of paragraphs. Biden reversed a bunch of Trump’s giveaways of federal and park lands and protected more lands and waters. As a platform, it’s more of the same, including Arctic preservation.

As always with American conservation, there’s a lot of funding for private lands if the owners are nice to them. This would probably be preserved under Republicans, as their idea of a park is a privately owned one with a big gate keeping out the riff-raff who aren’t employed as minimum wage staff inside it.

And finally, “Global Climate Leadership.” In 2016 and 2017, America left the global climate stage. At that point, it was still considered a leader or at least an influencer by many countries, so global climate action suffered a bit.

China picked up the slack, and as I and others have been noting, is now at the tipping point for emissions. With its much higher percentage of industrial, commercial, residential, and transportation electrification, its much higher deployment of renewables, transmission, and storage, and having mostly finished its massive infrastructure and city building boom, China’s emissions are going to be plummeting in coming years. Their annual emissions might even drop below those of the US again by 2040 given the trajectories and policies of the two countries.

It’s nice that Biden returned the US to the climate stage, but other countries aren’t looking to the US for leadership because they are looking at November as a coin toss that is just as likely to return the worst President of all. This isn’t hyperbole from a foreigner, this is the aggregated opinion of 154 surveyed political scientists, mostly associated with the American Political Scientist Association, the leading professional organization for the study of political science that serves more than 11,000 members in more than 100 countries. Even Republican-affiliated political scientists ranked him 41st out of 45, while conservatives ranked him 43rd.

From the outside looking in, the same dynamics that enabled Trump, the worst possible candidate, to win over Clinton, one of the most prepared and rock solid candidates in American history, in 2016, and that allow him to be a likely candidate again in 2024, hobble the United States and its policies. It can’t be an effective climate leader when fossil fuel oligarchs have fomented divisive hate for decades as a mechanism to get more tax cuts for themselves via their captured political party, the Republicans.

The rest of the world is very happy that the US is at least at the table, but claiming leadership is pretty ripe these days. Europe is vastly ahead, having started down the course of real climate action in the early 1990s and stayed the course through the intervening years, cutting their emissions vastly while US emissions continued to soar. The world isn’t looking to the United States for answers on how to solve the climate change problem, it’s just hoping it won’t be a significant hindrance.

So how do I rate the climate action platform of the Democratic National Committee, the one with Biden’s name everywhere, Harris’ name barely present, and Walz’ (much more reasonably) missing in action? I gave the Biden Administration a B- on climate action. The platform comes down to continuing the same policies and approaches, and is remarkably light on commitments, plans, or details.

Climate change is four years further down our global road of inadequate action. The policies of four years ago in the face of significantly increasing global action and heightened climate crisis signifiers are not adequate. A grade of B- on the past is a grade of C on the future.

My hope for increased and wiser US climate action rests on the shoulders of Harris and Walz, both of whom have excellent records on file and excellent platforms before this one. They aren’t hobbled by this relatively weak sauce, backward looking, Biden-centric document, and so they have room to do much better.