Harris drops millions on private jet spending despite calling climate change an ‘existential threat’

FIRST ON FOX: Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign has spent millions on private jet flights since President Biden announced that he was no longer running for re-election and Harris locked up the Democratic nomination a couple of months ago.

Harris, who has jet set on the campaign trail delivering various speeches on combating climate change, said on multiple occasions that the issue is an “existential threat” to humans.

“There’s no question we have to be practical. But being practical also recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to us as human beings,” Harris told CNN in 2019. “Being practical recognizes that greenhouse gas emissions are threatening our air and threatening the planet and that it is well within our capacity as human beings to change our behaviors in a way that we can reduce its effects. That’s practical.”

Despite calling on people to make changes in their lives to prevent climate change, Harris’ campaign has spent at least $3.8 million on private planes in less than six weeks, according to a Fox News Digital review of disbursements on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website.

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Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) exits a private plane at Raleigh Durham International Airport on September 28, 2020, in Raleigh, North Carolina.   (Sara D. Davis)

Between July 24 and August 30, the Harris campaign made dozens of payments to multiple different private jet companies, including the Advanced Aviation Team, Private Jet Services Group, Principal Aviation and FlexJet. 

Most of the payments were to Advanced Aviation, which offers aircraft ranging from eight-seater turboprop jets for trips of up to three hours to 18-seater ultra long-range jets, which deliver a “comprehensive list of on-board amenities and sophisticated finishes” and include a flight attendant for travel times of up to 16 hours, according to its website.

FlexJet promotes itself as “First class meets world-class.” The private flights come after Harris spent years demanding that “we must treat the climate crisis as the existential threat that it truly is.”

“The urgency of this moment is clear. The clock is no longer just ticking, it is banging.  And we must make up for lost time. And we cannot afford to be incremental. We need transformative change and exponential impact. As nations, we must have the ambition that is necessary to meet this moment,” the vice president said at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2023. “We must lead with courage and conviction, and we must treat the climate crisis as the existential threat that it truly is. It is, dare I say, our duty and our obligation. Not a choice.”

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Harris also suggested that people are hesitant to have children due to climate change fears.

“I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a term they’ve coined called ‘climate anxiety,’ which is fear of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home,” Harris said during a discussion at the “Fight for Our Freedoms” event in September 2023, a clip that resurfaced since she became the 2024 Democratic nominee.

Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) exits a private plane at Fort Worth Meacham International Airport on October 30, 2020, in Fort Worth, Texas. (Montinique Monroe)

The Biden-Harris administration set climate goals for the aviation industry, releasing an aviation climate action plan that aims for aviation emissions to drop 20% by 2030. In August, the administration announced that $291 million from the Inflation Reduction Act would be allocated to projects in the effort to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from aviation by 2050.

Despite these efforts, the National Library of Medicine reports that private aviation is “the most energy-intense form of air travel.”

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The NLM estimates that fuel use per passenger on private flights varies, “but [is] estimated to be on the order of 10 to 20 times higher than the average fuel use per passenger hour for a commercial flight.”

The Harris campaign did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

Fox News’ Joe Schoffstall contributed to this report.