What Trump's VP pick J.D. Vance could mean for climate policy

While around 2,400 GOP delegates will meet at an arena in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention this week, a small group of conservatives will be convening almost five kilometres away to talk about a topic not expected to gain much traction at the main event: climate change.

Eco-right organizations such as the Conservative Climate Foundation and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions were set to hold a reception on Tuesday at a horticultural conservancy where members of the Conservative Climate Caucus will speak. But their concerns about a warming planet will likely go largely unnoticed by the most powerful elements of today’s Republican Party. And anything they say is bound to be drowned out by former president Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he was picking Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate.

Vance, for his part, seems to be an embodiment of two important threads that have been pervasive in today’s GOP: limitless loyalty to Trump and an unwillingness to support policies to wean the United States off fossil fuels.

The Ohio senator’s name is more commonly associated with the former than the latter of these two concepts, but his connections to the fossil fuel industry run deep. Vance has been a supporter of expanding hydraulic fracking for gas in his state, which is the sixth largest in gas production. In the 2022 election, Vance’s campaign was among the top 20 recipients in the country of fossil fuel donations, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. And Vance’s personal investments are also heavily tied up in oil and gas. Financial disclosure forms he filed in 2022 show he owned between US$100,001 and $250,000 in a crude-oil-futures exchange-traded fund called K-1 Free Crude Oil Strategy ETF.

Vance’s political rhetoric and actions have matched the state of his personal and campaign finances. In 2022, he said he was “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man” and said the climate has been “changing for millennia.” He once said the climate crisis was “created” to “justify Democratic donors” and has criticized environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing as a “massive racket to enrich Wall Street.” Like his fellow Republicans, he has also opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, a law that has pumped more than US$12 billion into Ohio’s clean economy. And last year, he introduced a bill that, if passed, would repeal federal tax credits for electric vehicles and replace them with credits for gas-powered cars.

“Time and again, JD Vance has gone out of his way to minimize the very real climate crisis we face and cast doubts on the human behavior driving it,” Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement. “Now, Vance joins a ticket that has sought to sell out Appalachian communities by pushing for the expansion of dangerous fracking . . . as well as by seeking to defund vital Inflation Reduction Act investments that are targeted to support jobs in energy communities like the ones he claims to represent.”

J.D. Chameleon

Vance rose to prominence after Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir about his childhood in Ohio and his family’s Appalachian roots, became a popular bestseller and later a movie. In the book, he draws from his own experience to try to explain why some working-class parts of America are turning away from Democrats.

Once a vocal critic of Trump (having reportedly called him “America’s Hitler” in 2016), he ultimately apologized and fell in line when he started running for Senate in 2021 and needed the former president’s endorsement. Vance has undergone a similar evolution on climate policy. In 2020, he acknowledged the harms of climate change and said natural gas was not “the sort of thing that’s going to take us to a clean energy future.”

There was a time when Vance was considered a moderate voice, but the one-term senator has taken up the ultra-conservative mantra of Trump’s supporters, opposing measures that would enable access to abortion and provide greater rights to 2SLGBTQIA+ people.

Vance beat out two other fossil-fuel-friendly lawmakers on the shortlist: Florida Senator Marco Rubio and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

A second Trump administration would implement policies that roll back progress on climate with or without J.D. Vance as vice-president. But his selection will add yet another politician with ties to the fossil fuel industry to Trump’s inner circle.

“Donald Trump was the worst president ever for clean air, clean water, and protecting a livable future,” Jealous said. “With the selection of JD Vance as his VP pick, that climate-denying legacy would only worsen in a second term. Voters should reject this ticket and the reckless policies it would bring with it.”