A top adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris met Tuesday with the leader of a disruptive environmental activist group that has targeted colleagues in the Biden administration in the past, Politico reported.
Ike Irby, a senior adviser to the campaign and a longtime climate adviser to Harris, met with Michael Greenberg, founder and leader of Climate Defiance, the group that stormed into a House office building in July 2023 and disrupted the 2024 Congressional Baseball Game, interrupting Harris and other Democratic lawmakers and Cabinet members. According to During the meeting, Greenberg and Irby discussed some of Climate Defiance's “demands,” including a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel use in the United States.
“I want her to be against fossil fuel subsidies,” Greenberg told Politico. “We need to rapidly phase out fossil fuel infrastructure, fossil fuel use, and fossil fuel exports.” (Related: White House touts support for divisive environmental groups that have harassed administration officials, Democrats)
No, you can't “do both.”
That's like sending 50,000 tons of lethal weapons to a brutal, cruel regime and then saying, “We want a ceasefire.” https://t.co/Z7yEVdbi7t
— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) September 2, 2024
Greenberg also “said climate change needs to be made a more central issue in the campaign,” according to Politico.
“This is good policy and good politics,” he said. “It's a really good thing for her to tackle climate change instead of running away from it, because it's an issue where people trust Democrats more than Republicans.”
Greenberg told Politico that Irby and Greenberg met virtually for about 30 minutes.
It's notable that the Democratic Party and Harris' campaign have not made climate change a top messaging priority since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Some political commentators recently told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Democrats have not focused as much on the issue this election, perhaps because they calculate that doing so could alienate key voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
Harris, who ran for president in 2020, Filibuster She campaigned for passage of the Green New Deal and supported a ban on fracking, though in a recent interview with CNN she claimed she no longer supports the ban. Several major environmental groups supported Harris' campaign in its early days, even after anonymous campaign staff told her campaign. The Hill Harris' views on fracking have changed.
“Irby understood that this is important to us and that climate-conscious voters and young voters want more,” Greenberg told Politico. But he added that “these types of meetings typically don't produce firm commitments on the spot.”
Climate Defiance is one such group that follows a similar style of environmental protest. receive Funding from the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF), a non-profit funded by many prominent and wealthy liberals in the US. CEF donors include Hollywood writer Adam McKay and actor Jeremy Strong. According to The organization's 2023 annual report.
Neither Climate Defiance nor the Harris campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.
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