The Ocean and the Election — Voting for the Blue in the Red, White and Blue

By David Helvarg / Blue Frontier / Sept. 6, 2024

I feel we need to talk about the ocean as an election issue now.  Obviously and unfortunately our public seas did not get to be a part of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which most viewers saw as a victory for Harris even as things got more heated than Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean in August – when it hit 89 degrees.

More surprisingly, climate was not seriously addressed during the 90-minute debate even as Hurricane Francine was heading towards coastal Louisiana and New Orleans.  This followed the hottest summer in recorded history (yes, it really was 89 degrees on Alaska’s north slope). The climate issue was downplayed for reasons we’ll come to shortly.

The last question of the evening was on climate change and you’d have expected some substantial disagreement between a climate denier and a woman whose administration passed the largest climate action legislation in the history of the world, the $300 billion misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

Harris started strong noting “the former president (Trump) has said that climate change is a hoax and what we know is that it is very real.”  She then argued that while the Biden Harris administration “have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy…we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” taking on an “all of the above” energy aura that was popular with former President George W. Bush (who’s VP in charge Dick Cheney just endorsed her).

Trump ignored the climate part of the question going into attack mode claiming Harris would kill fracking in Pennsylvania (like the dogs and cats he earlier claimed Haitian immigrants killed for food in Ohio).  He also said that if she won the election, “the day after that election, they’ll go back to destroy our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.”

Trump’s energy policy, as he puts it, is ‘Drill Baby Drill’ and Harris’s, if you just listened to the debate, you’d believe was ‘Frack Pennsylvania.’  Natural Gas fracking is a major industry in this ‘battleground’ state that, under the electoral college system, prevents every American’s vote from counting equally in presidential elections and even allows candidates who lose the popular vote to still win the presidency like in 2016, but that’s a different issue for another time and place.

So, since the candidates failed to differentiate themselves on climate or on the blue in our red, white and blue here’s just a few direct quotes I dug up from the two of them.  See if you can recognize their differences.

From Kamala Harris talking to a NOAA group last year about coastal climate resilience:

“Natural infrastructure which reduces the impact of storm surges and hurricanes is really important and that natural infrastructure is often more effective than concrete barriers and retaining walls – In the Gulf of Mexico we will restore oyster reefs and that work will diminish the impact of tropical storms and hurricanes and clean our oceans by filtering out polluted runoff from our cities.  All of this makes sense and it works and is very doable.”

Two Donald Trump quotes from this year on energy and offshore wind –

“I make this pledge to the great people of America – We will drill baby drill –we will do it at levels no one has ever seen before – we’ll pay off debt and lower taxes.”

“I never understood wind – tremendous amounts of fumes and everything whether it’s in China, Germany, so they make them things and put them up.  If you have any windmills near your house congratulations your house just went down 75% in value …Windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before nobody does anything about that – Windmills are driving them crazy, they’re driving the whales I think a little batty.”

And here’s a bonus sample quote from Mark Spalding’s upcoming Ocean and Election conversation on our Rising Tide Ocean podcast:

“We know that Trump when he was president, withdrew us from the Paris (climate) Agreement.  We know his former administration members are behind Project 2025 which calls for further withdrawals from international agreements related to climate (the ocean) and the environment. Project 2025 dismantles NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) which is about how we monitor our weather including hurricane warnings, manages our fisheries and deals with all of our ocean and atmospheric research.  It calls for the dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency, it reduces funding for renewable energy.  It ends all kinds of programs that address climate change but perhaps as insidious as anything it calls for firing independent non-partisan civil servants and replacing them with loyalists to Trump.  This is a recipe for environmental and climate disaster.”

He and we then go on to discuss Harris and Walz’s record on ocean and climate issues and the different approaches that can be expected from a Harris – Walz versus a Trump – Vance administration starting in January 2025.

The challenge of course will be to get millions and tens of millions of America’s who enjoy the beach and ocean (like the folks pictured above in Ocean Beach San Diego) to understand that in order to protect ocean waters from being turned into a gas station and a garbage dump, a place where oil spills and Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) become more common, shutting down beaches, poisoning fish and mammals and destroying essential habitats needed to maintain and restore healthy seas, livelihoods and natural services (like generating 70% of the oxygen we breath) we need to take action. We need to Vote the Ocean!   And as Harris supporter Taylor Swift put it – you have to be registered before you can vote.  So, make your choices, register and vote because our Octopus teachers can amuse us with ten-tickles, but they cannot vote. Only you can vote.