Vance's criticism of clean energy, climate change grew as Ohio embraced it

Critics say Vance would be a relentless booster of oil and gas at the expense of emission-free energy if he's elected vice president

Donald Trump’s newly picked running mate, Senator JD Vance, has grown more critical of renewable electricity and climate change even as his home state of Ohio embraced solar power and clean-tech manufacturing.
 

It’s a contrast that intensified as Vance was campaigning for the Senate — and Trump’s endorsement — in 2022. Now, the former venture capitalist’s approach is drawing fresh scrutiny from critics who say Vance would be a relentless booster of oil and gas at the expense of emission-free energy if he’s elected vice president.

“Donald Trump has chosen an avowed climate denier as his running mate who has used his time in Congress to vote against the environment and shill for fossil fuel corporations at every opportunity,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Evergreen Action.

Conservatives see in Vance someone who will fight for fossil fuel workers. Ohio ranks seventh among states for natural gas production — which took off as energy companies tapped the prolific Marcellus and Utica shale formations — and Vance has called for expanding production there.

“Millions of energy workers have been sacrificed at the altar of the green movement, and to have one of their own — someone who knows the struggles of small towns targeted by powerful DC green groups — breathes hope into these struggling communities,” said Daniel Turner, founder of Power the Future, a group that advocates for rural energy communities.

Vance’s pivot on climate and energy issues has been swift. In 2020, he was unequivocal in acknowledging global warming. We “of course have a climate problem in our society,” he told a January 2020 conference in Ohio. At the time, Vance blamed “unrestrained emissions in China” for driving the phenomenon, though he also lamented the slow adoption of carbon-free power in the US. Solar energy is driving big improvements, he said, but it can’t meet all US energy needs.

By 2022, Vance had shifted his approach, questioning whether humans were solely responsible for driving climate change and casting scorn on activists focused on fighting it. In a July 2022 interview on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, he agreed there wasn’t a climate crisis. In a candidate forum, he derided “ridiculous ugly windmills all over Ohio farms that don’t produce enough electricity to run a cell phone.” And on X, he said Democrats were pushing a “green energy fantasy” in America while China was building coal-fired power plants.

While Vance was emphasising the limits of renewable energy, his home state was racing to deploy it.  In 2023, Ohio bested 45 other states in its installation of solar generating capacity, according to a March tally from the Solar Energy Industries Association. The state’s deployment of 1.3 gigawatts of solar power last year represented a 1,230% increase over 2022, and there’s more to come with 20 utility-scale projects planned. 

Ohio, a Rust Belt state with a deep manufacturing history, also has embraced an industrial future increasingly tied to the energy transition. First Solar Inc. is expanding its solar panel manufacturing capacity in the state, with facilities in Perrysburg and Lake Township. And in February, panel production began at Illuminate USA, a factory in central Ohio that’s a joint venture of Chicago-based renewable developer Invenergy LLC and China’s LONGi Green Energy Technology Co.

New electric vehicle and battery manufacturing plants are helping offset jobs Ohio lost in its production of conventional gas-burning cars. Among them: factories run by electric truck maker Workhorse Group Inc. and battery manufacturer Ultium Cells LLC, which supplies General Motors Co. and employs about 1,700 workers at its facility in Warren, Ohio.

Even so, Vance has been an unabashed supporter of another home-state industry — oil and gas — which in turn helped fund his political career. He received more than $352,000 in contributions from the oil and gas industry since 2019, according to campaign finance data compiled by the nonprofit group OpenSecrets. Among his top 20 contributors were donors associated with privately held oil trading firm Vitol Inc., refiner Marathon Petroleum Corp., and oil producer Artex Oil Co.

“This choice signals that a potential Trump-Vance administration would likely double down on fossil fuel expansion at a time when we desperately need to transition to clean energy,” said Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign at the advocacy group Fossil Free Media.

During his year and a half in the Senate, Vance has been a consistent vote against President Joe Biden’s environmental policies, including pollution standards that increasingly will compel automakers to sell hybrid and electric vehicles.

Vance introduced legislation last year to repeal a $7,500 consumer tax credit tied to the purchase of electric vehicles and instead replace it with one tethered to conventional US-made gasoline- and diesel-powered models.

“The whole EV thing is a scam,” Vance said in the July 2022 radio interview, days before passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. “If you plug it into your wall, do these people think there are Keebler elves back there making energy in the wall? It comes, of course, from fossil fuels.”