Announced Tuesday, Harris's selection of Walz was hailed by advocates, who have pointed to eye-catching moves like his 2023 signing of a law that requires Minnesota to get all of its electricity from carbon-free sources by the end of the next decade. Walz and allies in the state legislature worked to pass more than 40 climate-related bills that session.
While Walz had a largely progressive voting record in the House, he was known to diverge from the party line on energy and environment issues and buck President Obama, the only Democratic president whose tenure coincided with his.
Walz, who flipped a rural, historically Republican district in 2006, has a 75 percent lifetime score on environmental legislation from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), falling below Harris's score of 90 percent while in the Senate.
He received his single worst annual score, 14 percent, in 2018, the year he was elected governor, after receiving a 97 percent the previous year.
LCV's scorecard indicates he cast an "anti-environment" vote 30 times that session versus five votes the group scored as "pro-environment," while in 2017 the ratio was 34 pro-environment votes to 1 anti-environment vote. The one 2017 vote was in favor of a Republican-backed measure that would weaken Clean Water Act safeguards against pesticide discharge.
Kathryn Hoffman, CEO of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, told The Hill she believes Walz has made a sincere shift over the course of his career.
"I do think he has grown into that role over time as a climate champion and is stronger on it now than when he first came into office," she told The Hill in an interview. "[He] definitely has evolved, and that may just be that as a state-level politician it's easier to talk about."
Read more in a forthcoming story at TheHill.com.
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