What’s the Climate Record of Kamala Harris?

At the COP28 global summit last year in Dubai, Harris said that inaction on the climate crisis will affect billions of people for decades to come. In contrast, Trump, the Republican candidate, has said he would pull back from the Paris Agreement just as he did in his term in office. At the climate conference, Harris also touted the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which supports wind, solar, and electric vehicles with $370 billion over ten years. If elected, Trump would likely repeal the act.

Harris was one of the original co-sponsors of the Green New Deal resolution, which urged the U.S. to transition to 100 percent clean energy within a decade. Her record as a senator includes backing the electrification of school buses, reducing the exposure of children to diesel pollution, and replacing lead pipes. Harris also wanted to help agriculture become more resilient to drought.

As attorney general of California, Harris partnered with local prosecutors to criminally pursue an oil company whose pipeline spilled off Santa Barbara County. Harris successfully sued the Obama administration over its efforts to permit fracking off the California coast. However, she has recently shifted her position, according to The Hill, and no longer supports a ban on the controversial practice as she did in the past.

Scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries found that human extraction of water from the Great Salt Lake coupled with the drying from global warming expose large areas of the lake bed, releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gases. Conditions have been made worse by the mega drought in the West for the last 20 years.

When it dries, the lakebed cracks and releases CO2. As the Washington Post reports, a full lake removes CO2 from the atmosphere, but one that has dried up allows oxygen to penetrate deep into the soil and activate microorganisms that feed on organic matter that then release the gas. The research concluded that the lakebed emitted 4.1 million tons of greenhouse gases—about a seven percent increase in Utah’s human-caused emissions.

The team also determined that the original lake was likely not a significant source of emissions. Water levels at the Great Salt Lake have shrunk by nearly half recently, but even after some gains, there are still immense areas of dry lakebed, and besides releasing CO2, the drying can lead to toxic dust and loss of bird habitat.

The study was published in the journal One Earth.

As events got underway, the city was drenched with an inch of rain, delaying the swimming portion of the triathlon in the River Seine. Paris, like many older cities, has a combined sewer system in which stormwater and wastewater flow in the same pipe. Prolonged downpours can tax the capacity of the infrastructure and send water—and its bacteria—into the river.

In preparation for the games, the city built a giant basin to capture excess rainwater to keep untreated waste from flowing into the river. They also renovated the sewage system and upgraded water treatment plants. As Le Monde reports, the rains filled only around 20 percent of the basin, so officials said the contamination likely came from wastewater upstream.

Next, in an extreme swing that scientists associate with climate change, the rains gave way to temperatures as high as 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) from a heat dome parked across the Mediterranean. A new study from the World Weather Attribution group says the conditions would have been “impossible” without human-caused global warming.

“Yesterday, climate change crashed the Olympics,” tweeted Dr Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and part of the World Weather Attribution group. She wrote that if the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuels, Paris would have been about 3°C cooler and much safer for competition. She told the Guardian that while athletes were given ice packs and spectators sprayed with water, many people in the affected region don’t have air conditioning or cooling breaks at work, so the excessive heat can mean serious illness or even death.

Another study out last week presented solid evidence that intense downpours are occurring more frequently, while dry periods seem to last longer and become more severe because of human activity.

According to a new article published in the journal Environmental History, Pestina was a cartoon insect created to educate travelers about the dangers of transporting contaminants to the U.S. mainland.  In her article, “A Coquettish, Hitchhiking Bug”: The Rise and Fall of Pestina, Symbol of Invasive Pests and Agricultural Quarantine, author Erinn E. Campbell writes that Pestina was designed after World War II, as international trade and travel increased and the USDA was struggling to monitor unprecedented numbers of pests and diseases moving across the globe.

The first iteration of Pestina was created in 1958 by a federal inspector in Hawai’i to alert hotel guests about the risks of taking plants to the mainland and featured a voluptuous insect wearing a hula skirt. The character was then repurposed in Puerto Rico, wearing "Latin American" attire.

Campbell (University of Cambridge) notes that  …[U.S.] agricultural officials initially designed her as a phytosanitary femme fatale, leaning heavily into sexist, racist tropes to attract attention and combat a perceived crisis of public ignorance. Depictions of Pestina as a curvaceous, “exotic” hitchhiker drew on mingled anxieties about immigration and women’s sexuality, translating the threat of pest invasion into a moralized visual language that travelers already understood.

Eventually, in the 1960s, Pestina donned a strapless dress with pearls, (not dissimilar, we noticed, to an outfit with a zig zag hemline of the same time period worn by Wilma Flinstone). Pestina appeared in numerous pamphlets, posters, and television spots.

Alas, her exotic and curvaceous look was a bit too coquettish for the changing attitudes around women’s sexuality as well as social anxieties about immigration. So, in 1969, the USDA changed course and rebranded Pestina as a bland public servant, but after a federal report complained that her appearance undermined her message, they abandoned her altogether.