Harris is ‘perfect person’ to prosecute big oil, climate advocates say

Workers clean Huntington Beach after an oil spill in California on 5 October 2021. Photograph: Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

If elected president, Kamala Harris should take on the fossil fuel industry for its history of spreading climate disinformation, environmentalists say.

Forty US states and municipalities have sued big oil for allegedly spreading climate disinformation. For years, climate advocates and some lawmakers have said the Department of Justice should file a similar case.

It has so far failed to do so – even under Joe Biden, who ran on a climate-focused agenda.

“We get the sense that [the Biden attorney general] Merrick Garland has no interest in pursuing this issue,” said Richard Wiles, president of the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which supports climate litigation.

That could change under Kamala Harris’s leadership, said Jamie Henn, director of the climate accountability non-profit Fossil Free Media, who recently wrote that Harris is the “perfect person” to prosecute the case.

He is calling on Harris to make climate accountability a priority, including by empowering federal regulators to target alleged price gouging from oil companies, and appointing an attorney general who is willing to lead a new lawsuit on behalf of the Department of Justice (though the agency operates independently from the White House).

“It’s to be determined if she’s really willing to take all this up,” he said. “But I think that there’s a lot of signs that she could and she has the ability.”

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Before serving as a US senator and Biden’s vice-president, Harris was California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017. In that role, she launched an investigation into the oil giant ExxonMobil’s framing of climate risks in January 2016 (though she did not sue the company, as she once claimed).

That spring, she also won a major indictment in a criminal case against the Plains All-American Pipeline over an oil spill in Santa Barbara. Harris additionally played a key role in landing a $15bn settlement from Volkswagen after the Environmental Protection Agency found it was installing software in diesel vehicles to cheat on emissions tests. Months later, she secured a $14m settlement from BP subsidiaries over charges related to leaking underground fuel storage tanks.

During her time as attorney general, she also went after ConocoPhillips – the company behind the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska – for air quality violations at their gas stations, and filed other lawsuits against Chevron and the Southern California Gas Company. And she successfully sued the Obama administration over its plans to frack off California’s Pacific coast – demonstrating an “impressive” willingness to “even stand up to Democrats”, said Henn.

“She’s got a strong background on going after big polluters,” he said. “So when it comes to pressing this case, she’s the right person for the job.”

Harris voiced support for climate litigation during her 2019 presidential primary campaign, telling Mother Jones that the US Department of Justice should “absolutely” investigate fossil fuel companies for “creating incredible harm in our communities”.

“It’s about having the conviction to take these guys into court and to hold them accountable,” she said. “Let’s get them not only in the pocketbook, but lets make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behavior.”

In her first campaign speech in Milwaukee last week, Harris called out Donald Trump for his ties to the oil industry, citing reports that the former president – as she put it – “literally promised big oil companies and big oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for $1bn in campaign donations”

But other statements from the vice-president give environmentalists pause.

This week, for instance, Harris said she would not ban fracking if elected, walking back on statements she made in 2019. In 2015, she filed an opinion claiming a California-wide fracking ban would be illegal.

“We’ve seen two different sides of Kamala Harris: she’s a really inspiring candidate when she embraces progressive issues and picks big fights, and then she can fall flat when she becomes too cautious,” said Henn.

In an emailed statement, the American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil lobby group, said, “Any future administration should be focused on building on the progress the US has made in leading the world in both energy production and emissions reductions,” and called the demand for Harris to focus on climate accountability a “distraction”.

Wiles, of the CCI, is optimistic about the prospects of litigation from states and municipalities bringing forth climate accountability. But a suit from the justice department would be even more powerful, he said. If it filed a successful investigation and lawsuit, it could prevent the fossil fuel industry from circulating misleading claims about the climate crisis and prevent greenwashing.

“The DoJ is a completely different animal,” he said. “Its power is far greater than any attorney general’s office in a state … They have the FBI, they have a lot more investigative resources and they’ve got a lot more authority than a state attorney general is ever going to have.”

Henn said if Harris commits to going after the oil industry, she could drum up much-needed support from young voters. Such a move could even excite Republicans who are concerned about corporate overreach, he said.

A survey from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress earlier this year found that a majority of voters support climate accountability litigation.

Lawmakers including the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and Jamie Raskin, a Maryland representative, have called on the justice department to begin an investigation into the issue while elected officials including Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator, have called for the agency to launch a lawsuit.