The debate highlighted the differences between the candidates on energy and climate – Mother Jones

This story was originally published by Ground material and is reproduced here as part of the Climatedesk Cooperation.

A month ago It seemed unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris would ever achieve the goal she had set for herself as the 2019 presidential candidate. But on Tuesday night at 9 p.m. – more than five years after she dropped out of her first presidential campaign – Harris finally faced off against Donald Trump in what will likely be the only debate between the two candidates before Election Day.

Harris and Trump are diametrically opposed on issues ranging from national security to the economy to foreign policy. But nowhere are the two candidates as far apart as on the issue of climate change: one sees rising temperatures as an existential threat, the other thinks climate science is nonsense.

This gap between views became clearly visible in the last minutes of the hour and a half long debate, when ABC News Live Prime Host and co-moderator of the debate, Linsey Davis, asked the two what they would do about climate change.

Harris, who answered the question first, was quick to point out that Trump has suggested on many occasions that climate change is a lie spread by China. “We know it's very real,” she said. “Ask anyone who lives in a state that has experienced these extreme weather events, who is now being denied homeowners insurance or who is being scammed for it.” In recent years, private insurance companies have begun canceling policies in fire- and flood-prone states like California and Florida.

While Harris acknowledged the existence of these worsening problems, she did not say what she plans to do about them. Instead, she pointed to the current president's investments in climate change. “I'm proud that as vice president, we invested a trillion dollars in the last four years in a clean energy economy while increasing domestic gas production to historic levels.” She arrived at that trillion-dollar figure by adding up all of the administration's major investments over the last four years, some of which are only loosely related to climate change.

Trump did not answer the question at all, but instead made a confused remark about domestic vehicle production. He then falsely claimed that President Biden was getting millions of dollars from China and Ukraine. “They are selling our country out,” he said.

Trump cut numerous environmental and climate regulations during his four years in office and appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who have since made it harder for the federal government to crack down on pollution. He also withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a global pact to slow global warming, but President Biden later rejoined it.

Before Tuesday's debate, it seemed likely that Harris would cite her accomplishments as district attorney for the city of San Francisco, where she created the nation's first environmental justice unit to punish companies for polluting the environment, or her tenure as California's attorney general, when she investigated oil companies and secured a multibillion-dollar settlement with Volkswagen over the company's attempts to evade emissions standards. But she didn't bring those receipts to the podium.

Instead, Harris stepped up her recent efforts to get swing state voters in gas-rich states like Pennsylvania to forget her anti-fracking position from the 2019 presidential campaign. At the time, Harris said she was “for banning fracking,” but she recently walked back that position. “I'm not going to ban fracking,” Harris said at the start of the debate. “In fact, I was the deciding vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened up new leases for fracking.” The Inflation Reduction Act also happens to be the largest single investment to combat climate change in American history, something Harris failed to mention.

Rather, she argued for an energy strategy that has been proposed by many Republican lawmakers over the years: something akin to an “anything goes” approach to strengthening American energy independence. “My position is that we need to invest in diverse energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” she said.

“Harris has spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate action group, said in a statement. “We want to see a real plan that meets the scale and urgency of this crisis.”

Harris wasn't the only one who spoke eagerly about oil and gas at the debate. On stage, Trump frequently returned to a number of familiar energy-related talking points. He criticized President Biden – and by extension Harris – over high gas prices, which have skyrocketed again this year. He claimed that the day after the election, should Harris win, “oil will be dead, fossil fuels will be dead.” Neither Harris nor Biden have ever said they intend to end the country's huge dependence on fossil fuels any time soon.

Trump also attacked renewable energy sources, saying that while he is a “huge fan of solar energy,” Democrats have “commanded an entire desert to generate energy from.” Trump may have been referring to parts of the American West where the Bureau of Land Management has opened up 33,500 acres of land, some of it desert, for solar installations since 2021.

As the debate ended, it was not clear whether Harris had achieved her goal of convincing Pennsylvania voters that she is not the anti-fossil fuel campaigner Trump wanted to portray her as. But she left Philadelphia with at least one coveted endorsement: that of pop icon and Pennsylvania native Taylor Swift.

“I've done my research and made my choice,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended. “In the 2024 presidential election, I will be voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”

Jake Bittle contributed to this article.