A top adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris met Tuesday with the leader of a disruptive eco-activist group that has targeted Biden administration colleagues in the past, Politico reported.
Ike Irby, a senior adviser to the campaign and a longtime climate adviser to Harris, met with Michael Greenberg, the founder and leader of Climate Defiance, a group that has disrupted remarks by Harris, elected Democrats and cabinet officials, and also crashed the House office building in July 2023 and interrupted the 2024 Congressional baseball game, according to Politico. During the meeting, Greenberg and Irby discussed several of Climate Defiance’s “demands,” including a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel use in the U.S.
“We want her to oppose fossil-fuel subsidies,” Greenberg told Politico. “We need to rapidly phase out fossil-fuel infrastructure, fossil-fuel use, fossil-fuel exports.”
No you cannot “do both.”
That would be like sending 50,000 tons of lethal weapons to a brutal, murderous regime and then telling them you “want a ceasefire.” https://t.co/Z7yEVdbi7t
— Climate Defiance (@ClimateDefiance) September 2, 2024
Greenberg also “talked about how we just need climate to be a more central issue in this campaign,”according told Politico.
“It’s good policy, and it’s good politics,” he said. “Climate is an issue where the public trusts Democrats more than Republicans, and so it would really serve her well to get into climate rather than running away from it.”
Irby and Greenberg met virtually for approximately 30 minutes, Greenberg told Politico.
Democrats and the Harris campaign have notably not made climate change a top issue in their messaging since Harris replaced President Joe Biden atop the Democratic presidential ticket. Some political pundits recently told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Democrats are not leaning into the issue much this cycle because they have likely calculated that doing so could alienate crucial segments of the electorate in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
When she ran for president in the 2020 election cycle, Harris endorsed eliminating the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal — which she co-sponsored — and endorsed a ban on fracking, though she claimed in her recent interview with CNN that she no longer backs the ban. Several major eco-activist groups endorsed Harris’ campaign in its early days, even after an unnamed campaign staffer told The Hill that Harris’ views on fracking had changed.
Irby “understood this is important to us and that there’s a constituency of climate voters and youth voters who are eager to see more,” Greenberg told Politico. However, “with these types of meetings, you generally don’t get any hard and fast commitments on the spot,” he added.
Climate Defiance is one of numerous similarly-styled environmental protest groups that receives funding from the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF), a U.S.-based nonprofit that receives funds from many prominent and wealthy American liberals. CEF donors include Hollywood writer Adam McKay and actor Jeremy Strong, according to the organization’s 2023 annual report.
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