When it comes to trade policy and climate change, there are few if any indications that an administration led by Vice President Kamala Harris will be much different from the one she has been a part of for four years.
The newly-minted Democratic presidential nominee has offered few specifics on what she’d do on the world stage or domestically, but the Democrats’ platform and her speeches show a willingness to stick with the agenda the Biden-Harris administration has been implementing, which continues to spend billions in Inflation Reduction Act funds for climate change projects.
On trade and the economy in general, Harris generally has stuck to generalities, speaking of creating an “opportunity economy” at the convention, and embracing Biden administration proposals to raise taxes for wealthier Americans and boost the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. It all adds up to nearly $5 trillion in tax hikes over 10 years.
Asked at the Democratic National Convention last week about criticism Harris has received for not having a comprehensive economic plan, veteran House lawmaker Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said he expects she will advance more of her positions “as the campaign goes on.
“She’s only been a candidate for less than a month,” said Nadler, who has promised a robust legislative agenda if Democrats take back the House. Nadler, who’s in line to chair the Judiciary Committee, said he would take up a bill, the PRO Act, protecting workers’ right to organize. He said he wants to give the executive branch more authority in the area of antitrust enforcement.
And in an answer consistent with the opinions of others asked whether Harris would “follow the path of the Biden-Harris administration,” he said, “I think she’ll build on it.”
Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., told Agri-Pulse at the convention that Harris “has climate change advocacy as part of her DNA. She's from California, she sued the oil companies, she worked to ensure that the climate bank got created inside of the IRA. So I know her personally. I know what she cares about, and I know she's going to make a big difference.”
Markey said he worries that if Donald Trump wins, he would claw back climate-related funding passed in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. “I'm afraid that if Trump wins, it's all just going to be washed away,” Markey said.
Trump has railed against the “Green New Scam,” an apparent reference to the IRA, saying he hoped to redirect clean energy funding to infrastructure projects. “We will not allow it to be spent on Green New Scam ideas,” he said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
The IRA included funding for farm bill conservation programs as well as an array of tax incentives for clean energy and low-carbon biofuels.
Claudia Polsky, a lawyer who directs the Environmental Law Clinic at the UC-Berkeley School of Law, said that when it comes to climate change and environmental matters in general, she found the Obama administration’s record instructive. Despite not having nearly as much experience on those issues when he was running, Obama ended up issuing the Clean Power Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. (The plan had to be replaced after the Supreme Court said it exceeded EPA’s authority.)
“With Harris, the Biden administration's climate policy progress and the IRA money gives her plenty to implement that will confer great results even if she were to do very little that was innovative,” Polsky said.
“But if she appoints a terrific EPA administrator, gives them a long leash, and listens —and uses her bully pulpit well to motivate citizens, local jurisdictions, and forward-thinking industries to contribute to the climate stabilization effort—there is an excellent foundation on which to build.”
It is on trade, however, where the differences between the two candidates are most apparent. Trump is talking about an across-the-board tariff on trading partners of at least 10% and perhaps as much as 20%.
Asked which candidate would be better for agricultural trade, former Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Agricultural Affairs Sharon Bomer Lauritsen of Ag Trade Strategies said the question really is, “Which one is worse for U.S. agriculture?”
Sharon Bomer Lauritsen Her answer: Trump, “because if they impose all the additional tariffs that they seem intent on doing, other countries will retaliate against our exports, as we experienced in the last Trump administration.”
A Harris administration, however, likely will continue the trade policies of the Biden administration, “which has focused on things other than tariffs and agriculture. They are continuing to work on [sanitary and phytosanitary] issues and try and resolve certain market barriers, but we certainly aren't seeing any free-trade agreements.”
Bomer Lauritsen, who served at USTR in both Republican and Democratic administrations, said Trump may be more willing to negotiate trade agreements and mentioned both the United Kingdom and Kenya as potential partners. Neither would represent a “huge win for U.S. agriculture," she said.
An unknown factor, she said, is whether a Trump administration’s willingness to impose tariffs might bring some countries to the bargaining table.
She said Trump's administration “was also very responsive to the U.S. agriculture community” by providing more than $20 billion from the Commodity Credit Corp. to compensate for exports lost in a trade war with China.
Joe Glauber, former chief economist at USDA and now senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, agreed that Trump would be worse than Harris for ag on trade policy because of tariffs.
However, he also expressed frustration with the current administration’s trade record, saying “they just haven't done much on the trade front.” The administration’s Indo-Pacific economic framework “doesn't deal at all with market access issues, and that’s important to agriculture.”
Nor has the administration engaged much with the World Trade Organization, whose work has been stymied by the lack of a full appellate body, said Glauber, who once was U.S. agricultural trade negotiator.
The Biden administration has “little to show for any efforts to kind of resolve the appellate body crisis at the WTO, which I think is a really significant problem that the Trump administration left, and it still hasn't been resolved.”
Joe GlauberThe administration also has not been active in international trade negotiations. “It’s frustrating to me to see the U.S. kind of on the sidelines, and they've been on the sidelines for some time,” Glauber said.
Gleaning information from the Democratic platform and other sources, Glauber says, “Everything that I see … would suggest” that on trade, a Harris administration “looks kind of like a continuation of Biden’s policies.”
However, “The one takeaway from Trump’s last term is, he did what he said he was going to do, and that's a concern,” he said, noting wide-ranging tariffs imposed on China in 2018 and 2019, which have largely been kept by Biden.
“Maybe he's hoping, or people are hoping, that Congress or the administration will come back and bail out the farm sector again,” Glauber said. But the tariffs were “devastating for the soybean trade and for agricultural trade more generally.”
Cathy Feingold, international director at the AFL-CIO, said Trump's across-the-board tariffs proposal does not constitute a real plan. "What is the economic strategy there? How is that leading to the creation of good union jobs?"
She says the union supports the Biden administration's use of "targeted" tariffs meant to grow U.S. industries, such as tariffs Biden said he was quadrupling earlier this year on Chinese electric vehicles. He also increased tariffs on steel and aluminum, semiconductors and EV batteries.
That action "sends a strong message" about the types of industries the U.S. wants to build up, such as the clean energy sector, she said.
Feingold applauded what she called a new, more "worker-centered" way of addressing trade, exemplified by the IPEF and another effort, the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity, which includes 12 Western Hemisphere nations such as the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Brazil and Chile. Its goal, says the State Department, is "to deepen economic integration, tackle economic inequality [and] restore faith in democracy by delivering for working people across the region."
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