Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential Candidate JD Vance Is a Critic of Renewable Energy and Climate Change

Days after the failed assassination attempt, Donald Trump chose Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate and running mate. The former venture capitalist is, however, a well-known critic of climate change and renewable energy. Interestingly, his home state of Ohio has embraced solar power and clean-tech manufacturing.

Critics now say that if elected vice president, Vance will push for more oil and gas production at the expense of carbon-free energy. Ohio ranks seventh among U.S. states in natural gas production. Vance has called for more production in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which are significant producing areas.

But Vance has done a U-turn on his views on climate change. In 2020, he acknowledged the reality of global warming, saying “we have a climate problem in our society,” blaming China’s emissions while lamenting the slow rollout of carbon-free energy in the U.S. While he said then that solar was driving big improvements, it could not meet all of the U.S.’s energy needs.

By 2022, his views had changed. In an interview this July on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show, he said there was no climate crisis, criticizing “ridiculous, ugly windmills on farms in Ohio that don’t produce enough energy to run a cellphone.”

“This whole EV thing is a scam,” Vance said in a July 2022 radio interview, days before the inflation-reduction bill was passed. “If you plug it into the wall, do these people think there are Keebler elves in the wall generating power? Of course, it comes from fossil fuels.”

He also posted criticism on Twitter (Now X), claiming that Democrats are pushing a “green energy fantasy” in the US while China is building coal-fired power plants.

“All this ‘bringing back American manufacturing’ from the Democrats is bogus unless we stop the green energy fantasy. Solar panels can’t power a modern manufacturing economy. That’s why the Chinese are building coal-fired power plants, which Tim Ryan’s donors won’t let America do,” he wrote at the time.

While Vance has morphed from a climate change believer to a critic, his home state of Ohio has outpaced 45 other states in the country in terms of solar capacity installed, according to the Solar Industries Association. The state will deploy 1.3 GW of solar in 2023, up 1,230% from 2022, and another 20 utility-scale projects are already underway.

The electric vehicle and battery plants are helping Ohio make up for job losses in conventional gasoline-powered car manufacturing. Workhorse Group Inc., along with battery maker Ultium Cells LLC, which supplies General Motors, employs about 1,700 workers at its Ohio plant.

But Vance’s U-turn is not surprising, given that the oil and gas industry has helped fund his political career. He has received more than $3.52 billion in contributions from the oil and gas industry since 2019, according to campaign finance data compiled by the nonprofit OpenSecrets. Private oil trader Vitol Inc., refiner Marathon Petroleum Corp. and oil producer Artex Oil Co. are among his top 20 donors.

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

(Based on information from the agency.)