Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick probably won’t make a huge difference to the fate of the planet. That said, Tim Walz is better than many alternatives: He hasn’t been actively boosting the oil and gas industry like his main competition, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. He’s worked to pass some impressive climate and environmental measures and presided over an extraordinarily productive Democratic majority in Minnesota. He also seems like a pretty normal guy with a wholesome energy that contrasts starkly with his Republican counterpart’s weird subcultural obsessions.
The importance of Harris choosing Walz doesn’t have much to do with his record. Vice presidents who aren’t Dick Cheney don’t tend to heavily influence what the White House does, including on climate and energy matters. While climate advocates have widely praised Walz’s selection, it’s not at all obvious that he would go out of his way to make those issues a defining feature of his vice presidency. The pick shows that Harris and her team don’t actively hate the leftists who’ve been encouraging her to pick Walz over Shapiro.
The optimistic reading of all this is that progressives’ enthusiastic embrace of these normie politicians shows their pragmatic willingness to rally behind the best available people for the job. Those officials and their staffers have taken note of that tongue-in-cheek goodwill as a sign that people to their left might be worth accommodating—or at least not actively scorning. The cynical take is that the audience eating up memes about how Kamala Is Brat and Tim Walz Is Dad is exceedingly small; that the far more important factors in Harris choosing Walz have been behind-the-scenes wrangling by the likes of Nancy Pelosi and John Fetterman.
It’s nice and mostly harmless to have some fun online and take a victory lap in the midst of an escalating planetary catastrophe. At the risk of being a buzzkill, though, the Shitposting Community shouldn’t get so caught up in all the hype around Harris and Walz as to forget who they actually are or how little power we have. After initially voicing his opposition, for instance, Walz greenlit an expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 oil pipeline, which was widely opposed by Indigenous tribes and environmentalists. His government has been criticized, as well, for allowing corporate polluters to have too cozy a relationship with Minnesota’s environmental regulators. Those aren’t reasons to oppose Walz’s place on the ticket! He’s probably the best person Harris could have picked, and a Trump presidency promises to grind any of the modest progress being made on climate at the federal level to a halt—and then reverse it in new, disturbing ways.
But we don’t have to look too far back into history to find an example of Extremely Online support for a folksy, little-known politician turning sour. Fetterman repeatedly courted progressives and ran a meme-driven campaign for his Senate seat, trolling his Republican opponent, Dr. Oz, as an out-of-touch, out-of-state ghoul. Then Fetterman turned out to be a bit of a ghoul himself, burning bridges with the progressives who helped elect him to become one of his party’s most enthusiastic supporters of Israel’s brutal war on Palestinians. He’s proceeded to be increasingly vocal about his right-wing positions on everything from lab-grown meat to energy policy.
The upshot here is that elected officials make for bad heroes, however ironic the worship of them might be. Walz isn’t Fetterman, of course. Yet his climate record is ultimately a pretty negligible factor in whether a prospective Harris administration makes meaningful progress toward reducing emissions; no accumulation of fancam edits will convince them to take on the fossil fuel industry. Maybe the best outcome here, climate-wise, is for the online fervor around Harris and Walz to be translated into real-world power that might force their administration to do better things instead of just making better content. If Harris picking Walz makes people more enthusiastic about that project, all the better.
