Nine years ago, an aging oil pipeline burst in the hills outside Santa Barbara, California, sending more than 140,000 gallons of crude flowing through a culvert under scenic U.S. Highway 101, across a beach and into the Pacific Ocean.
Kamala Harris, then in her second term as California’s attorney general, toured the muck 15 days later, pledging state resources for what would become both a civil and criminal case against the pipeline operator.
“Crimes against our environment must be met with swift action and accountability,” Harris said in 2016 as she announced the charges.
In the end, no one went to jail, but state and local officials collected millions of dollars on behalf of businesses and individuals who were harmed by the spill. The litigation and appeals stretched well into this year.
“She, I think, has a very strong commitment to protecting the environment and her office was genuinely aggressive in our efforts to require accountability by the oil company,” said Hannah-Beth Jackson, a retired Democratic state senator who represented Santa Barbara at the time.
As Harris seeks the Democratic nomination for president, her two terms as California attorney general offer a well-documented window into her approach to climate and energy issue.
Her time in that office, which predates her service as U.S. senator and vice president, also could provide a template for how a Harris Department of Justice would look at enforcing environmental regulations.
Beyond the oil spill, Harris as attorney general collected tens of millions of dollars from oil companies including BP over leaking underground storage tanks. She took part in the multibillion dollar settlement with Volkswagen over its emissions fraud.
In one of her last moves before leaving the legal office, Harris successfully sued the Obama administration over a plan to allow fracking off the Pacific Coast.
Some activists who had been fighting the plans in court for years, told POLITICO’s E&E News in 2020 that they wished Harris had involved the state sooner but praised her for bringing California’s resources — and political heft — to bear on the case.
As a result of the lawsuits, a federal district court barred new Pacific offshore fracking until the government resolved endangered species consultations and coastal management obligations.
The Supreme Court last June declined to hear a challenge to the court-ordered prohibition, rejecting a petition from the American Petroleum Institute and other fossil fuel groups.
The Trump campaign this week cited Harris’s opposition to fracking in an email that sought to cast her as “an extreme radical whose views are out of touch with voters.”
Harris said in 2019 that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Her campaign did not respond to an inquiry from E&E News to clarify whether she still holds that position.
But anti-fossil-fuel activists have cheered Harris’s ascension to presidential contender, arguing that her record as attorney general suggests she would push the Justice Department to aggressively take on the oil and gas industry.
“She’s the perfect person to prosecute the case against Big Oil,” Jamie Henn, a longtime climate organizer who is now the director of the nonprofit Fossil Free Media, wrote in a blog post.
The Sunrise Movement argued in a memo this week that if Harris campaigns on climate like Biden did in 2020, young people would turn out for her in November.
Among the group of young climate activists’ asks: that Harris hold fossil fuel companies accountable in part by appointing an attorney general “who will investigate oil and gas companies.”
Congressional Democrats have long asked the Department of Justice to open a federal investigation into allegations that the oil and gas industry knowingly misled the public about the danger of burning fossil fuels. The Biden administration has never endorsed the idea, but Harris did during the 2020 presidential campaign.
The government should “absolutely” look into the industry, she said in an interview with Mother Jones.
“Let’s get them not only in the pocket book, but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors,” she said as she promised that she would mobilize DOJ and EPA to ensure there is “pressure on the big companies to do what is required and what is responsible.”
Harris, however, has toned down her rhetoric on the oil industry since she moved into the Biden administration, and oil industry groups are watching to see if she’ll maintain that approach as a presidential candidate.
Her campaign did not respond to questions from E&E News that sought to better understand how aggressive of an approach she would take with the fossil fuel industry if elected.
Oil production in the U.S. reached all-time records in the last four years, despite Biden’s efforts to address climate change.
“There definitely appeared to be a sort of moderation from when she was in California and the Senate to when she was in the White House,” Kevin Slagle, vice president of communications for the Western States Petroleum Association.
Harris has showed a pragmatic streak before. When an environmental group petitioned Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to ban fracking statewide in 2015, Harris’ office issued an opinion saying the request was illegal and that Newsom should wait until a regulatory review was completed. Newsom decided this year to phase out oil production in the state, but on a relatively slow timeline — his administration stopped issuing new oil-well permits this year and projects the end of production in 2045.
Former attorneys with the Department of Justice cautioned that it’s difficult to make inferences about how a Harris White House — or Department of Justice — would operate by reviewing a handful of cases. But they said Harris’s decision in the Santa Barbara case shows a determined prosecutor.
“She was not averse to pursuing serious felony charges against a major stakeholder corporation in her state, and willing to do so based on a theory of recklessness as opposed to any intent to cause harm,” said Harold Krent, a former Department of Justice staffer and law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.
The fact Harris sought criminal charges is not unprecedented. Still, legal observers noted that criminal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations is less common than civil enforcement, even though some environmental crimes do not require proof of knowledge or intent.
At the same time, Harris wasn’t able to produce results on long-standing environmental issues, such as the cleanup of a former Navy yard in the Hunter’s Point neighborhood of San Francisco, said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. The nonprofit group recently sued the Navy and U.S. EPA over what it calls the failed cleanup of the World War II-era yard.
“There’s a mixed record,” Angel said. Harris, though, “inherited a system that was not conducive to AGs helping to resolve those types of complaints,” he said.
Santa Barbara looms large in California’s environmental history for a 1969 oil spill that is still the largest in the state’s history, said Albert Lin, a law professor at the University of California, Davis.
Lin noted the 2015 spill was problematic, too. It damaged miles of beaches, killed wildlife and forced fishery closures. The company also had a history of environmental infractions and was tardy in notifying regulators, Lin said.
Lin, a former trial attorney for the Justice Department’s environment division, said it was apparent that Harris viewed the spill seriously, dedicating state resources to investigating and prosecuting the case. The charges included felonies, as well as charges against an individual — although they were later dismissed. And Lin noted the felony charges against the company alleged that it had knowingly discharged pollutants, despite the company’s assertion that the spill was an accident.
“Under a potential President Harris, environmental criminal enforcement would likely remain the exception rather than the rule,” Lin said. “However, one can expect close attention to violations of pollution and other environmental statutes, including active civil and criminal enforcement efforts.”
Cindy Cho, a former DOJ trial attorney and assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, said Harris’s record suggests she’d choose an attorney general who would build on an aggressive framework for environmental prosecution, which she said Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder and Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland have embraced.
“Both AGs have boosted environmental justice efforts considerably, with a big focus on the way environmental degradation by big companies can victimize poorer communities,” said Cho, now a law professor at Indiana University.
Cho said that when it comes to identifiable federal environmental crimes, both Holder and Garland “responded pretty forcefully, and I imagine she would want even more of that.”
Cho has joined an effort to convince prosecutors to charge oil companies with criminal charges in relation to climate-related deaths such as heat waves. And she said Harris’s record suggests she may understand a need for “victim-focused prosecutions to stop corporate malfeasance.”
For a former prosecutor, Cho said, “it doesn’t take a big mental leap to think of such victims as warranting the protections the criminal law affords that go beyond civil and regulatory protections.”
Harris joined an alliance of fellow Democratic attorneys general in 2016 to investigate whether Exxon Mobil or any fossil fuel company broke the law by misleading the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. She left office in 2017 without filing suit against the industry.
Rhode Island in 2018 became the first state to do so. Harris at a 2019 CNN Town Hall said she had sued Exxon Mobil — her campaign at the time said she had been referring to her involvement with the investigation into the company.
“They have to be held accountable,” Harris said of the oil and gas companies at the town hall. “These are bad behaviors; they are causing harm and death in communities.”
Her immediate successor, Xavier Becerra, did not file a lawsuit either, but current state Attorney General Rob Bonta did in 2023, accusing five of the world’s largest oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute of waging a campaign to mislead the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels.
ClearView Energy Partners noted there are a few factors that could constrain both a Harris presidential campaign and a Harris presidency.
Though Harris ran to Biden’s left on environmental issues during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Pennsylvania — a major fossil energy producer — is one of the swing states she may need to win the White House.
“Thus, while the Trump campaign seems likely to revisit Harris’ anti-fracking past, we think she has strong incentives to project a more balanced stance,” ClearView analysts said in a note to clients.
And the firm noted that if Harris wins, the pressure to win re-election in 2028 “could potentially constrain the green ambitions of Harris’ first term the same way they did Biden’s.”
By contrast, ClearView analysts said, “a second-term Biden might have been more willing to pinch the oil patch in pursuit of an environmental legacy.”
Reporter Timothy Cama contributed.
This story also appears in Energywire.
