“This is the kind of phenomena that you see around the country, where in low-income communities and communities of color, you see bad actors treating these communities like dumping grounds,” Harris said in an interview with the podcast “A Matter of Degrees” in 2022. “And so I went after them.”
The unit consisted of two staff attorneys and an investigator tasked with prosecuting law-breaking industries and individuals.
“That was really important,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice based in San Francisco, who led the organization back then, too. “Now, were there as many results as we would have liked to see? No, there wasn’t.”
In fact, as district attorney, Harris failed to take on some of the biggest polluters in the city, he said. That includes the U.S. Navy, which is responsible for contaminating the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. The Superfund site is still contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive waste, even after the Navy ceased operations in 1994.
“We would have liked to see more aggressive prosecution of those who contaminated the shipyard and more action to ensure that there be a proper cleanup,” he said.
According to a recent investigation by independent reporter Lee Fang, Harris’ environmental justice unit ultimately only filed a handful of lawsuits against relatively small entities.
“I think it would be fair to say we feel she could have done more in her role here in San Francisco,” Angel said.
However, as California attorney general, Harris stepped up her efforts to hold polluters accountable. In 2011, she reached a settlement with the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to reduce diesel engine emissions and to properly warn nearby residents about the high levels of diesel exhaust. In 2016, she helped bring criminal charges against a pipeline operator responsible for a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara the year prior. She also took on PG&E for its role in the San Bruno pipeline explosion.
“She has a very long record on climate change and environmental justice and has really put protecting communities at the center of a lot of her work,” said Leah Stokes, associate professor at UC Santa Barbara.
Since Harris joined the Biden administration, environmental issues have become an even higher priority for her, Stokes said.
In addition to supporting the Inflation Reduction Act and the Green New Deal, she sponsored “green bank” legislation to provide funding for low-income communities to reduce their carbon footprints. She also worked on legislation to transition to electric school buses.
“It’s not just that she cast that deciding vote for those climate laws,” Stokes said. “It’s also that her ideas were really at the heart of the entire package.”
If former President Donald Trump is elected to the White House in November, Stokes said, all that progress will be for naught.
“This is a man who does not believe in climate science. Who appointed people who do not believe in climate science to run the Department of Energy and our Environmental Protection Agency,” she said.
Angel, the Greenaction executive director, agreed that a second Trump term would be catastrophic for the environment. But, he said, if Harris is elected, he hopes she does more for the country than she did for the city where she got her start.
“The lesser of two evils is not good enough,” he said.
