An unrelentingly bitter US presidential race, defined by name-calling, attack ads and stunted campaigning, has so far left little space for discussion about climate change, despite the world experiencing unprecedented heat and disasters.
But with Donald Trump now facing Kamala Harris rather than Joe Biden, the Republican has used recent rallies to echo misinformation and memes on X, including fictional bans on red meat and gas stoves.
The aim? To undermine Harris.
“Kamala called for slashing consumption of red meat to fight climate change,” Trump said during a July 27 rally in the state of Minnesota.
The Democratic nominee would “get rid of all cows … and I guess that at some point, they’ll go after the humans,” the former president added, echoing “depopulation” conspiracy theories that have plagued Harris in right-wing spaces since she waded into the topic of “climate anxiety” among younger generations at a White House press conference last year.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, amplified the claims in an August 3 speech in Atlanta, saying Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves, she even wants to take away your ability to eat red meat.”
Such climate myths took on a life of their own on X, encouraged by conservative commentators in swing states and MAGA accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers.
However, Harris made no such campaign promise.
She has cooked with a gas stove herself and noted in a 2019 environmental panel that she “love(s) cheeseburgers from time to time,” although she has supported the idea of updating dietary guidelines.
“A tried-and-true tactic in politics is to misrepresent your opponent’s positions to make them sound extreme and unacceptable. Trump and Vance are doing exactly that with Vice President Harris’s positions on climate action,” said Edward Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication.
The false narratives add onto Trump and Vance’s criticism of the vice president’s stance on issues such as fracking, a violently disruptive underground oil and gas extraction technique.
Harris initially advocated banning the practice in 2019 before becoming Biden’s running mate in 2020. She has more recently sought to avoid questions about it, particularly in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania where fracking is big business.
Still, climate activists have mostly saluted Harris, whose environmental stance has historically been to the left of the president — notably in going after oil companies as California attorney general.
The Biden administration also pushed a renewable energy shift in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in reducing carbon pollution in US history.