Why Environment America is endorsing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

Clean Air & Climate Protection

Joe Biden’s climate action plan is the real deal. No major party nominee for president has ever had a plan that comes close. He is committed to

• achieving a 100 percent clean energy grid by 2035,
• the full-scale adoption of zero-emission public transportation and personal vehicles,
• a doubling of our nation’s offshore wind energy capacity by 2030, and
• the weatherization of 4 million homes and workplaces.

Federal clean car standards were made possible by Joe Biden’s leadership in 2012. Those standards constitute the most effective policy we have on the books to reduce dangerous carbon pollution nationwide.

Kamala Harris was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal and has committed publicly to banning fracking. Since her time as a district attorney and then California’s Attorney General, she has repeatedly protected frontline communities and held polluting corporations in the fossil fuel industries to account.

Clean Water 

The Obama-Biden administration restored Clean Water Act protections to waterways that help provide drinking water to 1 in 3 Americans. Trump’s EPA gutted those protections in 2019. We trust Joe Biden will reinstate these critical protections for our lakes, rivers and streams. Joe Biden has also made clear commitments to protect our drinking water from toxic PFAS chemicals, which have already contaminated the drinking water of millions of Americans.

Biden’s support for clean water goes back to his early days in the Senate, when he cosponsored the Ocean Dumping Act of 1988, which prohibited dumping of sewage and sludge. As district attorney and as California’s Attorney General, Harris took on polluters and won, including an indictment against an oil pipeline company for a spill of heavy crude oil.

Open Spaces 

The Obama-Biden administration established more national monuments than any other administration and put more than 550 million acres under federal protection. As a U.S. senator, Joe Biden worked to protect The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling. He has made firm commitments to restore and reforest our public lands and ban new drilling permits. His work to protect land and open spaces goes back as far as 1975, when he was a co-sponsor of the successful effort to strengthen and increase funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This important legislation also established the National Historic Preservation Fund.