It was always going to be the case that the vice presidential debate would have the most substantive climate exchange of the 2024 election cycle. For one (big) thing: Neither candidate was Donald Trump. For another, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Ohio Senator JD Vance both have, at least at some point, professed concern about “the climate problem.” But a question from the moderators was all but guaranteed after one of the costliest hurricanes in recent U.S. history devastated communities far from the coast the weekend before the debate.
Rather than get just a few meager sentences about “immaculate clean water,” then, Americans who bothered to tune into the debate were treated to a lengthy back-and-forth about clean energy investment and the Inflation Reduction Act by the presidential candidates’ seconds. The exchange touched off when Vance was asked what responsibility the Trump administration would have “to try and reduce the impact of climate change,” especially given the scenes out of Western North Carolina.
“A lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” Vance said to start (though lest we forget, those “crazy weather patterns” just left 100 dead in six U.S. states and are expected to result in 250,000 excess deaths per year by 2050, according to the IPCC). He added that “Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water” but that “one of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions — this idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change.”
Who had on their Bingo card that Vance would be the first to mention carbon emissions during a debate in 2024? But he quickly turned the moment around to cast doubt on the human causes: “Let’s just say that’s true, for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science,” he added, though he proceeded to structure his remarks as if we live in a world where greenhouse gases are warming the atmosphere (what a thought!):
If you believe that, what would you want to do?
The answer is that you want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.
Kamala Harris’ policies actually led to more energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world — when I say that, I mean the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output.
So if we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people.
Of course, what Vance is describing sounds suspiciously like the rationale behind the Inflation Reduction Act, which explicitly aims to build a green economy at home in the U.S. Walz more or less pointed that out in his response: “We’ve seen massive investments — the biggest in global history,” he said. “We’ve seen that the Inflation Reduction Act has created jobs all across the country,” including in manufacturing electric cars and solar panels.
Walz also noted that Trump has called climate change a hoax, which earned Vance a chance to respond. “If the Democrats — in particular, Kamala Harris and her leadership — if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America,” he reemphasized, then added: “If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you’ve got to invest in more energy production. We’ve built a nuclear facility — I think one in the past 40 years. Natural gas, we’ve got to invest more in it.”
The ball then returned to Walz. “We’re producing more natural gas than we ever had,” he correctly pointed out (and, though he didn’t mention it, Biden recently signed a big bill advancing nuclear, too). But while Trump hosted oil executives at Mar-a-Lago when he was courting campaign donations, “we can be smarter about that and an all-above energy policy,” the governor went on. “That’s exactly what this administration has done. We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current.”
Was it a perfect climate exchange? Not really. It’s easy to see why the oil industry is sweet on Vance and Walz’s citation of an “all-above energy policy” will likely leave some in the more progressive wings of the climate movement feeling cold.
But it will be described as an amicable exchange, particularly for moments like Walz telling Vance, “Well, we got close to an agreement” on recognizing so-called crazy weather patterns. In truth, they also got close to an agreement on a little something called the IRA — yet another case of a Republican trying to have it both ways. It goes to show: Climate jobs and domestic manufacturing are popular ideas with the American public. Just don’t tell your boss, JD.
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