“Kamala Harris wants to ban your gas stoves and stop you from eating red meat”: Donald Trump’s strategy in the face of climate change in his race for the White House is simple: wave the scarecrow of his Democratic rival with a great deal of disinformation.
Heat waves and hurricanes are coming one after another in this summer of election campaigning, which nevertheless leaves little room for climate issues, preferring to name names through interposed rallies and aggressive advertising campaigns.
After President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, Donald Trump has had to find new angles of attack, and one of them is to repeat false information about Democrats’ climate policies, fueling online disinformation.
“Kamala has called for reducing red meat consumption to combat climate change,” the Republican candidate said on July 27 at a rally in Minnesota.
“She wants to get rid of cows… I imagine that at some point, they (the Democrats) will attack humans too,” he added, echoing the conspiracy theorists who accuse the Democrat of wanting to “reduce the population” since a slip of the tongue by the vice president last year, who then meant to say “reduce pollution.”
For his part, Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, followed suit in Atlanta in early August, accusing Kamala Harris of having a plan to ban gas stoves.
For Thanksgiving 2023, a photo of Kamala Harris and her husband, at home in front of a gas stove, gave ultraconservatives something to chew on on social media. The same thing happened when the vice president said in 2019 that she “loves to eat a cheeseburger every now and then.”
“Proven tactic”
The candidate has never said she wants to abolish gas stoves or reduce the consumption of red meat, although she is in favour of changing nutritional recommendations.
“A tried and true tactic in politics is to distort your opponent’s positions to make them extreme and unacceptable,” says Edward Maibach of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
The two Republicans also have a field day with the candidate’s position on hydraulic billing, a technique notably used for the extraction of shale gas by the oil and gas industry, supported by the Republicans.
After speaking out against the practice during the 2020 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris has recently avoided questions about it.
But in general, environmental activists are rather favorable to her positions, considered more to the left than those of Joe Biden, who supported the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a vast program promoting the energy transition. They also appreciate her record against the big oil companies when she was attorney general of California.
“Nuclear warming”
Asked by AFP, Lauren Hitt, spokesperson for Kamala Harris, did not respond to the Republican attacks, but said that the latter wants “a future in which all Americans breathe clean air, drink clean water and have access to a safe and affordable source of energy.”
The League of Conservation Voters, an environmental campaigner, called the Republican campaign of disinformation a “ridiculous scaremongering tactic” aimed at undermining “progress on climate.”
Donald Trump, a staunch opponent of the IRA, has promised, if re-elected, to extract oil “at all costs” and regularly questions the threats linked to climate change.
“The biggest threat is not global warming, with a rise in the oceans of just a few millimeters over the next 400 years,” he replied to Elon Musk during an exchange in which the boss of X, Tesla and SpaceX had just mentioned the possibility of a “more sustainable” future, notably thanks to solar energy, without “demonizing” the oil industry.
The tech billionaire didn’t contradict Donald Trump when he followed up with a theory about “nuclear warming,” brushing aside climate issues. Yet these will be dear to a third of registered voters when the time comes to vote, according to a recent poll.
“Trump and Vance’s attacks… could do more harm than good” to the small group of undecided voters for whom climate change is important, says Edward Maibach.
