Ahead of Climate Town Hall, Kamala Harris Releases $10 Trillion Plan

WASHINGTON — Senator Kamala Harris of California released an ambitious new climate change plan early Wednesday, calling for $10 trillion in spending over a decade to combat human-driven global warming and a new tax or fee on companies that emit greenhouse pollution.

She unveiled her plan hours before a CNN town-hall-style event on global warming, which 10 Democratic candidates are scheduled to attend — the first time in a presidential campaign that the question of what to do about the heating planet has merited its own major forum on prime-time television.

Ms. Harris’s announcement came one day after three other candidates released climate plans, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a leading rival for the nomination. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., also put out a plan Wednesday morning.

The Democrats’ plans vary in costs and priorities but most have a similar aim: to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 — that is, reducing planet-warming carbon emissions so dramatically that the United States is eliminating as much as it emits.

To reach that goal, the candidates have proposed a range of spending — former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pledged $1.7 trillion, for example, while Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has called for a $16.3 trillion package. By and large, the money would go to similar priorities, like updating the country’s power grid and other energy infrastructure, installing electric vehicle charging stations and developing clean power like wind and solar.

While spending money is a solution that unites the candidates, they differ on where the money should come from. Ms. Warren calls for a 7 percent increase in the corporate tax rate. Mr. Sanders has said his plan would “pay for itself” by collecting tax revenue from high-paying new jobs and new fees and penalties from the fossil fuel industry. Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Harris have proposed putting a price on carbon emissions to pay for part of their plans.

Ms. Harris, a former California attorney general, also styled herself as a uniquely qualified prosecutor-in-chief who would maximize the power of the legal system to penalize corporate polluters and deliver “climate justice” to poor communities that suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate change, like flooding, heat waves and food and water shortages.

Political analysts cited the sudden rush of new plans before the CNN event as evidence that the issue has gained significant traction on the national stage. Over the past year, multiple scientific reports have concluded that climate change has already led to dangerous outcomes for humanity, and to severe costs to the American economy, including more powerful hurricanes, stronger droughts and spreading fires.

As the candidates headed to the forum in New York on Wednesday, Hurricane Dorian was lashing Florida after inflicting devastating damage to the Bahamas, where at least seven people have been killed in the storm.

Ms. Harris initially declined an invitation to the forum, citing a scheduling conflict, but her campaign later reversed that decision as criticism mounted from some environmental groups.

“Climate is obviously an important issue to Democratic primary voters, and the candidates are responding,” said Robert Shrum, a veteran Democratic consultant and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.

Many of the candidates’ plans, including Ms. Harris’s, bear similarities to proposals championed by Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who focused his presidential campaign on combating climate change but dropped out last month after it became clear he was unlikely to qualify for the next primary debate.

Mr. Inslee would not have been invited to the climate change forum, either, having failed to reach 2 percent support in enough polls. But analysts said that Mr. Inslee’s influence on the rest of the Democratic presidential field was clear.

“Jay Inslee wrote a super-set of climate policy options, and candidates are taking subsets of Inslee ideas,” said Kevin Book, an analyst with ClearView Energy Partners, a nonpartisan Washington research organization.

Mr. Inslee released six detailed climate plans, totaling over 200 pages. He said he hoped they would help “raise the ambition” of other candidates’ climate policies, and he has since had conversations with several candidates about how to incorporate his ideas into their plans, said his former campaign spokesman, Jared Leopold.

On Tuesday night, Ms. Warren released a broad new climate change plan — her third such plan of the campaign — in which she explicitly adopted some of Mr. Inslee’s policies. “While his presidential campaign may be over, his ideas should remain at the center of the agenda,” Ms. Warren wrote.

Four other Democratic presidential candidates — Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Julián Castro, the former housing secretary; and Mr. Buttigieg — have also released climate change plans since Sunday.

Ms. Harris’s plan includes many of the same basic policy elements as those of her rivals: a blueprint to end fossil fuel pollution from electricity generation by 2030, a halt on new fossil fuel leases on public lands and the imposition of aggressive new regulations on vehicle tailpipe pollution.

In her new proposal, Ms. Warren adopts Mr. Inslee’s plan to eliminate planet-warming emissions from power plants, vehicles and buildings over 10 years, and adds an additional $1 trillion in spending to subsidize that transition. The spending would be paid for, she said, by reversing the Trump administration’s tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations.

Mr. Castro’s plan also includes several ideas either directly adopted from or developed in consultation with Mr. Inslee, such as a plan to replace all coal-fired power generation with zero-emissions sources by 2030, and a proposal to marshal $10 trillion in federal, state, local and private spending on jobs associated with the transition from polluting to nonpolluting energy.

At least some echoes of Mr. Inslee’s proposals are also included in Mr. Booker’s plan, which calls for $3 trillion in spending to achieve a carbon-neutral economy by 2045, and in Ms. Klobuchar’s plan, which calls for reinstating Obama-era regulations on fossil fuel emissions to put the nation on track to a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

Mr. Sanders has not explicitly taken up Mr. Inslee’s ideas. Instead, analysts said, he is trying to win over the progressive wing of the Democratic Party with a climate plan that takes its name from the Green New Deal and has the biggest price tag of all the candidates’ proposals. He has called for banning fracking to extract natural gas, and for halting the import and export of coal, oil and natural gas.

“I think Sanders is looking for ways to prove that he’s the true progressive in the race,” said Paul Bledsoe, a lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy.

Mr. Buttigieg’s plan also makes no reference to Mr. Inslee. It calls for putting an unspecified price on carbon that will rise over time and quadrupling spending on clean energy research and development to $25 billion per year to achieve net-zero emissions by midcentury. Total federal spending would range from $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the Buttigieg campaign said.

Mr. Bledsoe said Wednesday night’s forum could be an opportunity for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to burnish his image. Mr. Biden’s climate plan, which calls for $1.7 trillion in spending over 10 years, initially won praise from environmental activists. But he came under attack from other candidates at the second Democratic debate for not being ambitious enough.

Polls reflect that climate change is a rising concern among voters.

In a survey published by Quinnipiac University last week, a majority of registered voters nationwide, 56 percent, say that climate change is an emergency. That majority included 84 percent of Democrats, but 81 percent of Republicans say that climate change is not an emergency.

Voters also think that the United States is not doing enough to address climate change, with 67 percent of voters saying more needs to be done.

Republican officials say the plans that Democrats have devised to address climate change will decimate the economy.

Mandy Gunasekara, a former policy adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency under the Trump administration, branded Democrats’ plans as socialist takeovers of the economy.

“Most Americans who talk about climate change, when you ask them, ‘O.K., how much are you willing to pay,’ it’s minimal to none. These trillion-dollar plans that each of them are putting up need some measure of honesty,” she said.

Mr. Bledsoe said there was some political danger for Democrats in attempting to outdo one another.

“In all honesty, every one of the climate plans proposed is more ambitious than anything that’s ever been remotely contemplated before,” he said. “But the danger is that they ignore the nuts and bolts of energy politics of swing states and risk handing Trump the election.”