States with poor climate policy ‘overlap’ with those seeking to limit rights, Kamala Harris says The senator called for more focus on the issue ahead of the 2020 election while criticizing her counterpart for “not doing enough” to address climate change.
Sen. Kamala Harris said the United States faces a climate “crisis” and the nation needs “much more from my political leaders in this particular moment than they are doing.”
“That’s the great challenge we face in this election because the urgency of this issue is not being reflected in this election,” Harris told “CBS This Morning” co-host Gayle King Friday in an exclusive interview. “In this election, climate change is too low on the priority list.”
WATCH: Sen. Kamala Harris says voters should not be “scaring” people about climate change, even though “the evidence is clear.”
“We have a choice on climate that we need to be working very hard and very long hours and years to get right,” Harris continued. “Now whether that election will be a tipping point for what it means to be a progressive voice and not just a progressive leader on climate.”
The senator criticized her colleague Sen. Chuck Schumer for not “doing enough” to address climate change despite their shared concerns.
“The urgency of this issue is not being reflected in this election, and I mean it is deeply offensive to me that in the wake of the most devastating storm in living memory, Senator Schumer is not taking climate change very seriously, and he is not showing up to work, in town halls, town meetings, in the Senate to talk about climate change, about the urgency we face, the need to address this problem in a very aggressive way, not just in a very bipartisan way,” Harris said.
Harris said she was not talking about herself in her remarks but “my fellow, my colleagues are also not taking climate change very seriously.”
“So I don’t think the way we talk about this issue will matter,” she said.
She added, “And that’s why I think that the urgency and the need for our leaders, especially my fellow Democrats, to make it part of our agenda, to be a progressive voice, is so important. And I’m not talking just about a Democrat here and there but a progressive voice in this environment is so important.”
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