Vice President Kamala Harris boosted the Democratic presidential ticket’s climate credentials when she picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate, advocates said Tuesday, pointing to a record of expanding public transit, subsidizing electric bicycles and enacting one of the industrial Midwest’s strongest laws to phase down fossil fuel emissions.
The popular second-term governor, whose folksy accent and plain-spoken defenses of social democracy shone on national television in recent weeks, last year set the North Star State on a path to 100% carbon-free power by 2040, despite his party maintaining a narrow, single-vote majority in the state legislature.
While the 2023 Minnesota law dictates that renewables make up the majority of the state’s energy mix, the legislation broke with progressive orthodoxy on wind and solar and included nuclear power. Supporting atomic energy divided Democrats in Minnesota, which remains the only state with a complete ban on building nuclear plants. But Walz previously pushed to lift the moratorium and last year threw his support behind a $300,000 study to examine the potential for next-generation reactors.
“Minnesotans are not going to wait any longer,” Walz said before signing the bill into law. “They’ve made it clear — they make it clear with their voices, they make it clear with their advocacy, they make it clear with their votes — that they expect movement around climate change to happen and it is happening today.”
Already, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has sought to cast Walz’s record as radical. But criticism from some environmentalists for not taking a hardline stance against a controversial oil pipeline could help Walz burnish his image as a pragmatist who has overseen the biggest manufacturing revival in the Midwest.
In just the past two months, the Walz administration moved to clear bottlenecks to actually building new carbon-free power stations, rolling out nearly $200 million in state grants and signing legislation in June to ease permitting requirements on green-energy projects.
“We have good environmental laws in Minnesota, and that’s the way it should be, we’re protectors of 20% of the world’s freshwater,” Walz said in a recent radio interview . “But we also have permitting that takes too long and prohibits or makes it more expensive doing renewable energy projects, things that we want to get done.”
Walz signs a bill into law on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, that required Minnesota utilities to get 100% of their electricity from carbon-free sources by 2040. Walz has been called a climate champion by green groups and climate change experts.
Zeroing out emissions from the power sector is widely considered the key step to decarbonation, since eliminating fossil fuel pollution from automobiles and buildings requires switching from internal combustion engines, gas stoves and furnaces to electric alternatives.
It’s not just about swapping out fossil fuels, though. Modelers say shrinking the U.S. carbon footprint as the population grows and moves into larger cities means providing for more public transit or bicycles, popular ways of getting around in other rich countries that have so far proven difficult to popularize in a car-dependent nation that has struggled for decades to muster the political will to modernize its infrastructure.
In May, Minnesota started a new daily Amtrak service, connecting the state’s fast-growing Twin Cities to Chicago. Under Walz, the state capital of Saint Paul and its neighboring Minneapolis also undertook a massive expansion of a light-rail network. But as construction stalled earlier this year, local lawmakers — in what Walz’s supporters may read as a nod to the governor’s perceived competence — proposed legislation that would put the project in state hands rather than the municipal agency currently in charge.
Early in his tenure, Walz established a climate change subcabinet composed of leaders from more than a dozen state agencies tasked to “rally the resources of state government and emphasize the urgent need for climate action.”
The popularity of its policies hasn’t always matched the Walz administration’s capacity. Just weeks ago, Minnesota launched a new $1,500 rebate program to fund the purchase of e-bikes, only for the government website to shut down a mere 18 minutes later after reaching the limit of 10,000 applications in what the state’s newspaper of record called a “shaky initial rollout.”
Despite describing Walz’s “important climate victories” as “encouraging,” the anti-fossil fuel group Oil Change U.S. panned the governor for ” a troubling deference to fossil fuel interests” over his administration’s “lack of action” to halt construction of the proposed expansion of the Line 3 oil pipeline connecting Minnesota to Canada’s particularly dirty fields.
“ This campaign is an opportunity for Walz to put people before fossil fuel profits,” Collin Rees, the nonprofit’s political director, said in a statement.
The Trump campaign is taking the opposite tack, attacking Walz for his previously stated opposition to hydraulic fracturing, the drilling technique known as “fracking” that made the U.S. a top producer and exporter of oil and natural gas. Harris also said she opposed fracking during her unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 but has since reversed her position. The issue could prove most pertinent in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state where oil and gas production makes up as much as 10% of the economy.
“I am all in for Walz,” Gina McCarthy, who served as President Joe Biden’s domestic climate policy czar until 2022, said in a statement. “He can’t be bought by the fossil fuel industry. Walz is a climate champion moving Minnesota toward 100% clean energy. He gets that climate action isn’t about politics, it’s about protecting our small towns and cities. It’s about creating safer and healthier communities for our kids and grandkids to grow up in.”
Walz greets Harris as she arrives at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on March 14, 2024. Walz is now Harris' running mate.
Like most Americans , Minnesotan ratepayers saw energy bills increase over the past year, giving the Trump campaign potential fodder as the Republican presidential contender seeks to blame Democrats’ climate policies for price spikes. But state officials managed to negotiate smaller rate hikes than utilities initially proposed.
And legislation Walz signed in 2021 also created new state programs to identify renovations that would save energy, fund upgrades and train workers to carry out the home improvements. With the majority of emissions in fast-growing cities like Minneapolis coming from buildings, Walz passed legislation last year to increase the efficiency of new commercial construction projects, slashing energy use by as much as 80% compared to structures built to 2004 standards.
Federal research shows that stricter building codes tend to pay for themselves in smaller energy bills, even if the extra construction steps raise the baseline cost of new homes by a few thousand dollars. But as a nationwide housing shortage puts home purchases (and even rent) in large cities out of reach for many Americans whose income has grown far slower than the cost of shelter, such statewide programs could open another line of attack for Republicans trying to convince voters that Democratic policies inflamed the global inflation crisis that followed the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a statement issued shortly after Harris named Walz as her running mate, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, called Walz a “dangerously liberal extremist,” citing, among other examples, his record of “proposing his own carbon-free agenda” and supporting stricter emission standards for gasoline vehicles.
Yet in the veepstakes that followed Harris’ sudden ascent to the top of the ticket last month, Walz’s star rose on the back of his nimble defenses of his party’s record in TV clips that went viral.
In an interview last week , CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Walz if his progressive record — including legalizing recreational marijuana, expanding LGBTQ+ protections and enacting free school meals — would be “an asset to the ticket, or would it risk fueling Trump’s attacks as you being a big government liberal?”
“Yeah, my kids are going to eat here,” the governor replied. “And you’re going to have a chance to go to college. And you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we’re working on reducing carbon emissions.”
“If that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label,” he added.
While climate change ranks low when registered voters listed priorities to the Pew Research Center last year, over one-third told pollsters they want more action to curb planet-heating emissions, giving Walz a potential edge against Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, who has forged close ties with the oil industry and contests the widely accepted science behind rising global temperatures.
“The stakes in this election couldn’t be higher nor the choice more clear,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the National Resource Defense Council Action Fund, said in a statement. “Trump would bow to billionaire oil and gas donors, slam climate progress into reverse and leave our kids to pay the price. Harris is a proven climate and justice leader with two decades of public service on the front lines of needed progress and change.”
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