The Veep Comes to Town

The U.S. Senate was deadlocked at 50-50 last year on the Inflation Reduction Act, a key part of the Biden Administration agenda and, at $369 billion over 10 years, the first big meaningful U.S. investment in clean energy technologies . Republicans in both chambers of Congress stood unanimous in their opposition.

Vice President Kamala Harris was cast in a frequent role, ushered into the president’s chair and casting the tie-breaking vote. A year later, visiting the McKinstry Co. in Seattle, the Veep was extolling what she described as “the largest climate investment in American.”

The investment has come none too soon. “Every day around the world,” said Harris, “the impact of the climate crisis is stark and it is vivid.” The country has been “choked by drought, washed out by flood, and decimated by hurricanes . . . Here is Washington state, you have endured deadly heat waves and devastating wildfires.”

Harris has rarely ventured far from Pennsylvania Avenue during her first 30 months as the first woman to serve as Vice President. She cast a record number of tie-breaking votes in an evenly divided Senate, a factor keeping her close to the Potomac. And she needed to work into a tight-knit Joe Biden political operations whose key players date back to the 1980s. She has become a target of the acid tongues of right-wing media.

With the 2024 election approaching, Harris has been set loose. “Vice President Harris remains uniquely popular with the key constituencies that make up the Biden-Harris coalition,” the president’s campaign managers Julie Chavez Rodriguez and Becca Siegel said in a memo last month.

“Over the past few weeks alone, Americans have watched her be a powerful and effective messenger, calling out the extremist MAGA agenda and lifting up the issues that Americans care about: Reproductive freedom, voting rights, economic opportunity, gun safety reform, and climate change with clean energy.”

Washington is a good place to display the message and messenger.  Climate is a big deal here, and the Inflation Reduction Act commits real resources and tax credits, underwriting clean energy technologies and allowing generous tax deductions to people who purchase electric cars. After Harris’, visit, State Rep. Alex Ramel, D-Bellingham, tweeted: “I’m feeling energized after hearing from Vice President Harris and so many great leaders about the investment in Climate Justice. We can turn the tide . . .”

Harris is also skilled at big-time fundraising, having run statewide for Senate and state attorney in California. After her McKinstry speech, Harris was driven across Lake Washington – creating big traffic jams – to a luncheon at the Medina home of Beth McCaw and Yahn Bernier, with Microsoft’s Brad Smith as host. The tab to attend started at $5,000.

“She is formidable,” said one Medina attendee.  Harris had her start as a prosecutor in San Francisco, went on to win election (narrowly) as California’s attorney general, and was sent to the U.S. Senate in 2016. She delighted in roughing up Trump cabinet appointees from her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Harris was unable to offer a coherent health care program and flamed out early as a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. 

The Inflation Reduction Act broke a decades-long impasse in committing the U.S. to reduce its carbon footprint, and fully engage a 21^st Century economy that moves away from the burning of fossil fuels. It is the marquee achievement of the Biden-Harris administration, notable because the Republicans, 50 in the Senate and 207 in the House of Representatives, stood unanimously in opposition.

The investment is coming none too soon. “It is clear the clock is not just ticking, it is banging,” Harris told a crowd at McKinstry, a Seattle-based firm that has been a national leader in energy-efficient building construction.

The arrival of visiting Democratic presidents and vice presidents has become an opportunity for local politicians to market their wares, and sometimes to show an attachment to sound bites over substance. The Veep’s visit brought Harris together with an equally no-nonsense former Senate colleague, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

Cantwell has promoted a clean-energy economy as a boon to jobs as well as the planet. She was early to point out, after trips to Beijing early in this century, that China was forging ahead on such fronts as solar panels and wind energy and semi-conductor manufacturing. Cantwell argued that the United States needed to catch up in a way good for the planet and the economy.  She found an Exhibit A: Turbines for wind energy farms in Eastern Washington were built in Denmark and Germany.

The Inflation Reduction Act has changed all that. “The IRA is 10 years of predictable investment so that companies like McKinstry and others can do the innovation that is going to give consumers a choice,” Cantwell said on her Tuesday visit.

Harris was just off a trip to Dalton, Georgia, and a solar panel manufacturer that will be employing 2,500 people.  All told, she added, “175,000 new clean energy jobs” have flowed from that tie-breaking Senate vote last year.  Touching on another long-time Cantwell cause, the Veep said “thousands of miles of new high voltage transmission lines” are under construction to carry green energy from source to market.

“We are rebuilding America’s manufacturing, we are rebuilding American innovation,” Harris declared. Of Cantwell, her former Senate colleague, Harris allowed: “She is truly one of our nation’s great climate leaders.”

Gov. Jay Inslee, whose brief 2020 presidential bid helped supply President Biden with a climate platform, spoke excitedly of clean energy projects in Eastern Washington. He was recently at the ground-breaking for a sustainable jet fuel production plant in Moses Lake. Inslee has described the Eastern Washington city as “the new Kitty Hawk.”

Both Harris and U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm gave a nod to clean energy development in the Inland Empire. And not by accident.  Republican U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers led House floor opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act. McMorris Rodgers has championed continued subsidies for the petroleum industry, coal mining on public lands, and expedited permitting for new power plants – despite summers of drought and wildfires in her Eastern Washington district.

Hearing Inslee, introduced yesterday as “America’s greenest governor,” a question inevitably comes to mind: Is he a policy architect or cheerleader? He speaks in sound bites — “This is not your grandmother’s climate change anymore” — and turns global warming into locker room speak. An example: “There is no acceptable tie with climate change. It must be defeated.” Of the Biden administration, added Inslee: “They are turning the rust belt of the Midwest into a clean energy belt.”

Jennifer Granholm also assumed the role of cheerleader, noting that companies have announced $110 billion in clean energy projects during the year since Harris’ vote broke a tie in the Senate. “The American energy sector has never been more electrifying,” Granholm joked.

She predicted 80 percent of the nation’s electricity will come from clean energy sources by 2030. Biden has set a goal of 100 percent clean electricity by the year 2035.  “We are back in the game, baby,” Granholm joked.

At McKinstry, Harris was on political hallowed ground. Then-Sen. Barack Obama visited the SoDo plant in 2008 for a morning immersion in the potential of clean energy building technology. Obama found his bearings quickly. He then went on to greet a crowd of 17,000 at Key Arena, and a sweep of Washington’s presidential precinct caucuses.  A few months later, he was elected the 44^th President of the United States.

Obama was new and fresh at the time, a candidacy defined by the memorable “Hope” poster. Joe Biden, 80, has been around since being elected to the Senate in 1972. Indeed, Harris has some constituency-building to do.