Looking To The Future: Kamala Harris, Gen Z, & Climate Action

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It’s clear that former Vice President Kamala Harris missed an important opportunity to highlight climate change and use it as a starting point to target other policies in her campaign for US President in 2024. Such a position would’ve driven more Gen Z voters — those individuals  born between 1997 and 2012 — to the polls as endorsement of her candidacy. Unlike the current occupant in the West Wing and his MAHA fake science, Harris recognizes that the frequency of extreme weather “has accelerated in a relatively short period of time,” she said. “The science is clear. Extreme weather will only get worse, and the climate crisis will only accelerate.’’

In her book, 107 Days, Harris looks back on her very short campaign for US President and her need to reach out to Gen Z. “This generation is the destiny of our country and our world,” Harris offers. “At the heart of my vision for the future is Gen Z. The youngest member of that cohort is threatened now, the oldest is twenty-eight. In five years, the younger members will be about to vote, the oldest will be having kids.”

Nonetheless, she examines the positions on which she based her campaign policy vision, and climate change was not at the forefront. Harris acknowledges in 107 Days that young voters “fear that my generation’s failure to act was robbing them of a healthy planet, a healthy future. I knew I risked leaving those votes on the table by not talking more about this issue. In this short campaign, I just didn’t have time. I had to triage issues so that key information could sink in.”

The pressures of campaigning were not of interest to Gen Z, who were keenly aware of the existential crisis: 80% of Gen Z globally reports being personally affected by climate change. Harris posted on Instagram during the campaign, “Our young leaders have grown up only knowing the climate crisis. They know what is at stake for their future. As president, I will tackle the climate crisis with bold action to build a clean energy economy, advance environmental justice, and increase resilience to climate disasters.”

That focus on “young leaders” is important as we look ahead to 2026 and 2028 elections. In her book, Harris makes clear that this Gen Z will be a key demographic as US citizens decide what their nation and democracy will look like. Let’s take her musings another step and do a deep dive into how climate action can play a significant role of empowerment for Gen Z moving forward into the next round of elections.

Gen Z approached the 2024 election with malaise. As Eifert, Tarver, Lake, and Slade write in The American Prospect, Gen Z felt the two-party system ignored their concerns. A weak Democratic brand undermined their trust in government institutions. Candidates failed to recognize how progressive youth distanced themselves from Democratic leaders, whom Gen Z no longer saw as acting in their best interests. “Biden’s broken promises on climate issues that young people monitor,” the Prospect writers  continue, “like drilling for oil on public lands in Alaska, also helped tank Harris’s green agenda.”

Harris reflects on those and other issues in her book and sets a vision for how the Gen Z generation can shape the US in years to come.

Harris Looks To The Future: Gen Z

(Harris’ quotes from her recent book are in italics.)

Climate anxiety: “And they’re experiencing what they’ve coined ‘climate anxiety,’ which is their fear that because of changes in extreme weather, that the future of their lives is very much at stake. My goddaughter, who’s a junior in college right now, was crying to me just two days ago, worried about, what is the world going to be for me, Auntie? she said, when I want to have kids, should I even be thinking about having children?”

Climate anxiety is a reality for many Gen Z individuals globally — 38% of Gen Z say they feel stressed or anxious “all” or “most of the time.” And it’s not just young people who are manifesting symptoms of uncertainty and distress as a result of the changing climate. People of all ages are concerned, especially in light of what Rao and Powell at the Imperial College London note is “the extraordinary level of indifference and banality with which the climate crisis is treated by many others, including those in positions of influence.”

Government for the people: “We need to come up with our own blueprint that sets out our alternative vision for our country. A blueprint on how we will lead a government that truly works for the American people.”

An “alternative vision” could have included continuing the climate action that Biden started. Harris referred to climate change as an “existential threat” and stated that the US needed to act urgently to address it. As a presidential candidate in 2019, she released a $10 trillion climate plan that calls for investing in renewable energy, holding polluters accountable, helping communities affected by climate change, and protecting natural resources. As vice president, Harris announced more than $1 billion in grants in 2022 for states to address flooding and extreme heat exacerbated by climate change. In 2024 Harris said the US needed to take action to fight climate change in the face of increasing drought, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and sea level rise.

A vision for new governance: “There will have been much damage done. Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government. And that doesn’t mean nostalgically reproducing what has been before, but something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”

As California attorney general, she prosecuted oil companies for the “damage” of environmental violations. Rather than accepting that carbon emissions are inevitable, Gen Z folks seek tools to help mitigate the effects of a circular economy. They want to see business operations that can demonstrate direct and indirect emissions reductions and clarify real environmental progress. The Biden-Harris administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) represents the largest infusion of government cash into climate and clean-energy initiatives. As vice president, Harris was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the IRA, which provided about $370 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below their 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

A life marked by multiple crises: “They have lived through the pandemic, the resulting economic upheaval, the accelerating climate crisis, the increasingly toxic damage of social media. And now they are living through Donald Trump’s global tariff chaos, isolationism, and slashed safety net, including health coverage and food assistance.”

Sixty percent of Gen Z in the USA feel “extremely worried about current and future harm to the environment caused by human activity and climate change,” and they are much more likely to say global problems are “very serious” compared to Baby Boomers. In her DNC convention speech, Harris spoke to those concerns by emphasizing the word “freedom” as interrelated with climate change and other foundational rights. “The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”

Investing in the future for Gen Z. “Their generation is larger in number than the Boomers. We need to invest in them. I’m talking about something on the scale of the investment that we made in the Greatest Generation. Initiatives such as the GI Bill allowed people to harness their potential, to realize their greatness.. Since Ronald Reagan, we’ve systematically gutted Pell Grants, which once covered much of the cost of college for talented but low-income kids. These grants now cover less than a third, making them useless to the kinds most in need. The education we fund shouldn’t focus only on college degrees but should equally value and up life the trades and skills that build our home, modernize our electric grid, improve our infrastructure, realize the clean energy transition.”

Harris secured billions in funding for disadvantaged communities, clean school buses, lead pipe replacement, and drought mitigation, ensuring her legacy in environmental policy and justice. As a Senator, she was also an original co-sponsor of the non-binding resolution defining the Green New Deal, a blueprint for a large-scale mobilization aimed at transitioning the US to 100% clean energy within a decade while providing people with job guarantees and “high-quality health care.” As a 2025 Presidential candidate, Harris said she would offer tax credits to companies that increase “good union jobs” like the ones that the steel industry brought to Pennsylvania. Harris also said she would prioritize investments in strengthening factories and retooling existing ones.

Industries designed around climate action:“As they enter the workforce, Gen Z is feeling the greatest impact as AI and robotics revolutionize industries. We will need to govern with vision so that the opportunities of the new era fall equally. It is a challenge of massive complexity. Gen Z needs access to an education that is supple enought to adapt to rapid change and that helps them move nimbly through these innovations.”

As Vice President, has focused on the interconnected benefits of climate investments, stating, “When the President and I invest in climate, we intend to invest in jobs, invest in families, and invest in America.” Under Harris’s climate plan as a 2019 presidential candidate, she advocated for a blend of government action and market forces to combat global warming. She acknowledged that reducing emissions means holding polluters accountable. She also noted that “history shows us that reliance on market mechanisms alone can often leave communities behind.”

Final Thoughts About Gen Z & Climate Change

We know that Harris moved to the right during her 2024 campaign from her career-long positions on foreign policy, immigration, and climate change. Her advisors bemoaned how “the centrism is working” (not).

A Columbia journal in 2024 compared the visions of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as each sought the US executive office.

“Climate policy can mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on human health and the environment, while steering the US economy towards a sustainable future. Ineffective climate policy, on the other hand, risks stalling the transition to renewable energy—locking the nation into reliance on fossil fuels, and ultimately failing to safeguard future generations from the escalating dangers of a warming planet.”

Harris’ own presidency, the authors then concluded, would have been “an extension of the work already put in place by the Biden Administration over the last four years — including continuation and even expansion of the IRA.”

Ah, what a difference a year makes.