Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed carbon taxes the last time she ran for president in the 2020 election cycle, but her campaign ignored multiple Daily Caller News Foundation requests to clarify whether she still supports them.
During a 2019 town hall hosted by CNN, Harris explicitly endorsed carbon taxes, adding that any additional costs being passed on to consumers “should never be the reason” to not impose them. The DCNF reached out to the Harris campaign several times over the course of four days to inquire about whether Harris still supports carbon taxes as she did in the 2020 cycle, but the campaign did not respond to any of those inquiries.
A carbon tax is a government-imposed fee on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions that is designed to incentivize emission reductions, according to the Tax Policy Center. Proponents of carbon taxes often characterize them as a market-friendly mechanism to help cut emissions across the American economy while generating tax revenue, but opponents say that carbon taxes will only drive up costs for businesses and consumers while doing little to actually reduce emissions.
“So you have said in your new plan which, you released today, you talked about a climate pollution fee. And just to try to understand what that is, that’s going to go on big companies, they’re going to pay this fee,” CNN’s Erin Burnett, who moderated the town hall event, said to Harris. “But how do you make sure that they don’t do what they will try to do, which is immediately pass that on to consumers?”
“Well, one, we’re going to do it in a way that is about what we’ve always done with industry, which is to say that there has to be some connection between the fee and bad behaviors, and there has to be — and that we have to monitor whether it’s going to be passed on to consumers,” Harris said in response. “But I’m going to tell you, that should never be the reason not to actually put a fee — in particular, a carbon fee.”
Ahead of the CNN event, Harris’ 2020 campaign released a comprehensive climate change plan that included a “progressively increasing fee” on carbon emissions, according to Politico, which also described Harris as one of two Democratic candidates in that cycle to have come out in favor of a “carbon tax” at the time.
The Harris campaign has already tried to distance the vice president from several left-wing positions she supported during the 2020 cycle, including banning fracking and abolishing private health insurance. As a candidate in 2020, Harris also said she would support eliminating plastic straws and altering dietary guidelines to nudge Americans to eat less red meat.
Featured Image Credit: Luke Harold
