Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said the Green New Deal—a $10 trillion progressive climate bill—should not be thrown out, during an interview with a local Pennsylvania news station.
In an interview with Pittsburgh's Action News, Walz was asked whether he believes the "Green New Deal should be scrapped," considering Pennsylvania's significant natural gas production.
"No," he responded. "I think all of us, this idea of energy, we want to make sure that we're producing the energy we need. We are. We're producing more natural gas, more oil and more renewables at any time in American history. I think the issue is, is making sure we have an all-of-the-above policy."
Walz’s remarks come as the Democratic ticket has been crisscrossing the must-win battleground state, trying to convince Pennsylvanians—whose economy relies on fossil fuels the Green New Deal looks to eliminate—that Kamala Harris will support their way of life. The Keystone State’s natural gas industry supports about 123,000 jobs and contributed more than $41 billion in economic activity in 2022, according to energy economists at FTI Consulting.
"We know climate change is real, but we're getting better and better at adjusting on some of the energy needs that we have to reduce carbon emissions," the governor continued.
As one of the original cosponsors of the Green New Deal in 2019, Harris pushed the progressive bill during her failed 2020 presidential campaign, saying she would remove the Senate filibuster to pass it. Harris has refused to say if she still supports the move.
Pennsylvania voters are skeptical of Harris’s recent promises not to ban fracking, a climate initiative she pushed in her 2020 presidential bid.
"I don’t believe anything Kamala Harris says," Scott Ivey, a self-proclaimed western Pennsylvania "roughneck" who relies on fracking for work, told the New York Post last month. "I don’t want to get too political, but I believe she’ll regulate it so hard that it’ll be impossible to frack once she gets in."
Sarah Phillips, a Pennsylvania petroleum engineer, added that Democrats "want net-zero [carbon] by 2050, which inherently is anti-fracking."
Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) declared that the Green New Deal "will be the vision under President Harris" in his remarks at the Democratic National Convention in August.