Chameleons change colors to fit landscapes. The fabled scorpion swore he’d changed and rode on the frog’s back halfway across the stream, but then stung the frog – because that’s his nature.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz seem intent on changing their environmental policy positions, from dark green to lighter shades of lime, in order to fit audience and election expediencies. They promise what they think voters want to hear, then revert to their true, far-left colors ... because that’s who they are. They’ve repeatedly shown they are dedicated members of the radical left, avowed supporters of hard-green and woke causes.

Space prevents addressing every example. But their records on energy and climate change policy clearly demonstrate why Americans should be alarmed about what a Harris-Walz Administration would likely do to the country.

VP Harris today claims she helped the United States set oil and gas production records. In reality, the record output came despite Biden-Harris policies and actions – not because of them.

It came because the White House and federal bureaucrats couldn’t directly thwart leasing, drilling and fracking on private and state lands. However, they did exactly that on federal lands and did everything possible to block pipelines and stymie activity in the state and private domain. Production would have been far higher – and prices far lower – had they not stood in the way.

Senator Harris co-sponsored the radical 2019 Green New Deal to “fundamentally transform,” not just America’s energy sector but its entire economy, in the name of fighting “dangerous manmade climate change.” During her 2020 presidential campaign, she advocated a total transition to electric vehicles by 2035. She’s fully behind mandating electric stoves and home and water heating.

Her wind and solar energy plans, which mimic Biden’s, fall disastrously short of generating enough reliable, affordable electricity to meet current US needs, much less those of the all-electric economy she envisions.

In 2020, presidential candidate Harris said there was “no question” that she would ban fracking (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing). Her campaign staff now says that’s no longer her position – probably because she wants Pennsylvania votes. Whether that rumored change of heart would survive its first encounter with raging “Ban Fracking” fanatics in her party is doubtful.

Ms. Harris has long been enthralled by “climate equity” and “environmental justices” – by which she intends to resolve the disparate impacts the “climate crisis” is allegedly having on women and people of color. Her Senate proposals would have spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on new federal agencies, advisory councils and bureaucrats to implement her ideas.

She would ban plastic straws and single-use plastic bags – but is also oddly committed to wind and solar technologies that create thousands of times more single-use plastic trash that cannot be recycled and ends up in enormous landfills.

Her highly touted scheme to spend $5-billion on electric school buses embarrassingly resulted in only 60 buses being purchased in three years.

During her 2019 “climate town hall” on CNN, she said she was committed to taxing “carbon” (fossil fuel) use and would use the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute America’s energy producers.

Finally, Ms. Harris has shown herself to be in lockstep with a Biden Administration that adamantly opposed mining in the United States – even for metals and minerals essential for wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, transformers, transmission lines, and our national defense. With America already dangerously dependent on China, Russia and other foreign adversaries for those materials, that is foolhardy indeed.

It’s no wonder Senate Harris was ranked to the left of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in 2020.

She now claims to have changed or moderated her policies. That’s what candidate Joe Biden said in 2020, when he promised to govern from the middle as a sensible, moderate, unifying President that would restore America’s economic wellbeing and global status.

Gov. Walz matches Ms. Harris’s left-wing bona fides. He opposes fracking, supports bans on gasoline vehicles, and signed a law requiring that Minnesota generate only “carbon-free” electricity by 2040 (with or without nuclear or hydroelectric power). Even without considering the exorbitant price of backup batteries for windless-sunless periods, that law will likely cost the state nearly $350 billion.

His policies have made electricity prices rise so high that factories and foundries have closed, and Minnesota has trailed US averages on economic and employment growth.

A Harris-Walz administration would likely outdo anything the Biden-Harris Administration did to send prices soaring for everything we manufacture and consume. There’s little doubt a Harris-Walz Administration would also likely be completely detached from the realities which underpin the U.S. economy and marketplace. 

It will be interesting to see if American voters play the role of the naïve frog which hitches a ride with a Harris/Walz ticket that’s big on promises, but likely to sting them.
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Craig Rucker is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)