J. D. Vance Loves to Hate on ESG

On Monday afternoon, following a flurry of leaks ruling out North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and Florida Senator Marco Rubio as Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, the former president announced Hillbilly Elegy author and Ohio junior senator J. D. Vance as his 2024 running mate.

A favorite of Trump’s son Don, Jr. who has molded himself into a populist on the intellectual vanguard of conservatism, Vance has taken on aggressive, culturally inflected views on climate change. While just four years ago he was saying that the United States has a “climate problem,” he has since tacked hard to the right and become a champion of the fossil fuel industry, especially in his home state of Ohio, where his 2022 Senate campaign received generous backing from the oil and gas industry.

While skepticism of anthropogenic climate change and support for oil and gas are nothing new for a Republican officeholder, where Vance has carved himself a particular niche is as a prominent critic of the use of environmental, governance, and social standards in investing, otherwise known as ESG. This is the idea that major investors would reward companies based on their adherence to a set of standards that often include climate-related targets and policies.

The supposed evils of ESG make a natural theme for Vance, one that melds traditional conservative support for business (and especially fossil fuels) and criticism of socially liberal — sorry, woke — elites into a more populist message than a typical Chamber of Commerce criticism of regulation. Or, as Vance himself put it to Breitbart in the days leading up to his election to the Senate in 2022, “ESG is basically a racket to destroy what we still have so that a few people on Wall Street can make some money.” (Somewhere along the line, his company also invested in erstwhile Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s anti-woke asset management firm, according to Bloomberg.)

By the time he took office in January 2023, Politico was already calling Vance “the Senate's new anti-ESG warrior.” That July, he sponsored a bill alongside Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis and Kansas’ Roger Marshall, Republican senators both, that would have appointed an inspector general inside the Treasury Department to “oversee allegations of regulatory abuse and misconduct by financial regulators and kneecap the ability of regulators to push left-wing policy goals through the federal regulatory system.”

Last year, Vance also wrote an op-ed for the Marietta Times arguing for greater exploitation of the Utica Shale, a geological formation that runs under Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York that contains an estimated 3 billion barrels of oil and natural gas.

Vance claimed in the op-ed that “in an effort to discourage investment in oil and gas companies, President Biden has weaponized the Securities and Exchange Commission to mandate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores on publicly traded companies.” (He also noted that “Utica Shale oil production increased by 65 percent in 2023” compared to the year prior, and that wells in Columbiana County in Southeast Ohio had “set new oil production records at the start of the year.”)

Admittedly, Trump’s decision to pick Vance as a running mate doesn’t seem likely to swing the general election needle too much in any one way or another (though it might mess a little with the cabinet position calculus). So far on Monday, the choice has been generally well-received by Republicans, including by the VP also-rans. But with a direct and easy line to Trump, Vance would become one of the most influential people in America in the case of a Republican win in November.

Even if ESG-bashing is kind of old news, it has the sort of culture-war zest to it that Rubio’s China hawkishness and Burgum’s carbon sequestration enthusiasm lack. It’s the sort of alignment that makes the ticket seem almost obvious in retrospect — the Trump-Vance anti-woke, anti-ESG perfect match.