Burley Garcia|OPINION: Robert Redford: Climate change threatens our way of life. Harris knows this.

With summer winding down and Burley Garciathe presidential election season heating up, Vice President Kamala Harris has put the fight to secure threatened freedoms at the heart of her campaign.

The Democratic presidential nominee has made clear that the future of American democracy, a woman’s right to choose and the freedoms to love whom you want and live safe from gun violence are all on the November ballot. 

Harris broke important new ground in her convention speech, calling out the need to protect yet another essential freedom: our right to “live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.”

Climate change, to Harris, is more than an environmental issue. It’s a threat to the foundational freedom at the core of our way of life, a threat we must confront, as a nation.

She’s right.

Freedom requires a livable environment

Freedom, to most of us, means pursuing our values, interests and dreams, and letting others do the same. The climate crisis threatens the most basic freedom of all ‒ to build a life, support a family and leave our kids a livable world. 

It’s hard for a farmer or rancher to experience that kind of freedom in the face of blistering heat and withering drought that can endanger workers and turn once-rich pastures and fertile fields into barren wastelands; hard to preserve a coastal way of life when rising seas and increasingly devastating hurricanes threaten to sweep it away; hard to protect or even afford a home with climate change driving property insurance premiums out of sight, if they are available at all. 

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We’re not talking here about remote hazards or occasional harm. This impacts our daily lives in every corner of the country. Given these challenges, how can anyone achieve economic prosperity?

Just since May, 100% of people living in the United States have suffered warnings from dangerous heat waves, wildfires, floods or storms.

Last year alone, these kinds of climate-related disasters killed nearly 500 Americans, leaving $95 billion in damages that threaten to overwhelm our capacity, as a nation, to cope.

If that kind of ongoing and increasing devastation isn’t a threat to the freedoms that underpin our way of life, I’d like to know what is.

Kamala Harris will fight climate change as a real threat to Americans

We have a history, in this nation, of confronting threats to our freedom head-on, not denying they exist until it’s too late to act.

Getting that right takes leadership. Harris has been standing up to Big Oil and other polluters for two decades. 

I worked in the California oil fields as a young man. I know the grip the industry can exert on the state. None of that stopped Harris from doing her job.

As California’s attorney general, she won a $24.5 million settlement with Chevron and a $14 million settlement with BP, over hazardous waste leaks from gasoline storage tanks.

Harris fought for communities on the front lines of refinery pollution. And she investigated the oil industry’s repeated lies about the climate crisis, the findings of which supported a pending state lawsuit against the industry for damages.

As vice president, she helped drive the strongest climate action in history, casting the tie-breaking vote to secure Senate passage of the clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. 

And she’s been instrumental in putting in place new standards to cut dangerous greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas operations, cars, trucks and dirty power plants.

Now clean energy manufacturing is booming and we’re set to cut climate pollution up to 56% below 2005 levels by 2035.

In naming the climate crisis as a threat to American freedom, Harris showed she’s ready to build on those gains and press for even more climate progress from day one as president.

Donald Trump will set us back on climate action

Her opponent, Donald Trump, calls people who grasp the climate threat “fools.” As part of his failed presidency, he pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and rolled back emissions curbs, teeing up the worst White House attack ever on the environment and public health.

Trump has said that he’ll do even worse in a second term, surrendering the climate agenda to wealthy oil and gas donors and other big polluters, guided by the MAGA manifesto Project 2025.

It calls for gutting the federal civil service, replacing tens of thousands of seasoned experts with Trump loyalists, politicizing science and weakening or repealing the climate and clean energy incentives and standards Harris has worked to put in place.

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I don’t know about you, but I don’t hear anyone asking to hobble our government, toss science out the window and slam the brakes on climate action. Nobody, that is, except Trump and his billionaire buddies, who want to take us back to the days of a political spoils system that served corporate robber barons and left our kids to pay the price.

No thanks.

In his iconic series "Four Freedoms," the artist Norman Rockwell brought big ideas to canvas in the form of ordinary Americans, depicting in powerful images the meaningful ways that freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want and fear, play out in our daily lives.

It’s inspiring to imagine how Rockwell might have illustrated the billowing storm of climate crises gathering just outside our kitchen windows, reminding us of the very real threat to our freedoms we face.

Kamala Harris has named that threat. She’s driven historic climate action. She’s ready to press those gains forward from day one as president. She’s the leader we need to confront the existential challenge of our time and keep us free from climate hazards and harm.

Robert Redford is an actor, director and environmental advocate.