Climate advocates fear picking JD Vance for VP is ‘a dangerous step backward’

JD Vance’s close ties to the fossil fuels industry and eagerness to please Donald Trump pose a major threat to Americans and the planet, environmental advocates have warned.

The Republican nominee for vice-president, a wealthy venture capitalist who was elected to the US Senate in 2022, went from voicing concern about the climate crisis before running for political office to voting to roll back environmental protections and to repeal landmark climate legislation boosting renewables and electric vehicles.

“The selection of JD Vance as a potential vice-president is a dangerous step backward for climate action in the United States,” said Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for Fossil Free Media’s Make Polluters Pay campaign. “Senator Vance’s record shows a clear pattern of prioritizing fossil fuel interests over the urgent need to address the climate crisis.”

The Ohio senator – who once was a strident critic of Trump – has received $340,289 from the oil and gas industry in campaign contributions since 2019 and is among the top industry benefactors so far this election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a campaign finance watchdog site.

“JD Vance not only flip-flopped on supporting Trump, he flip-flopped on climate,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, communication director for the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led environmental justice group. “Vance will empower Donald Trump to enact even worse damage on our planet in a second Trump administration.”

The Ohio senator has questioned the role of humans and fossil fuels in global heating – despite the overwhelming scientific consensus. “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man,” Vance told the American Leadership Forum during the Senate race, as he sought Trump’s endorsement.

In his home state, Vance has become an outspoken champion of hydraulic fracking, a highly polluting process that involves injecting water, sand and toxic chemicals into the ground to extract hard-to-reach oil and gas.

Last year, he wrote an unabashedly pro-fossil fuel opinion article calling for an expansion of pipelines and drilling wells that would tie Ohio into oil and gas for decades to come. “I believe that right now is the time to double down on the Ohio energy industry,” Vance wrote in the Marietta Times . “We need less red tape and fewer restrictions from the federal government.”

Ohio is the sixth-largest fossil gas producer in the US and among the top 10 states for coal and oil consumption, according to the EIA.

“In a time of grinding inflation, increasing energy costs and continuing global instability, we Ohioans are lucky to live on top of the Utica Shale oil and gas basin,” Vance wrote.

In Washington, Vance has attacked the 2002 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Biden White House’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation. He has introduced bills to repeal the IRA’s federal tax credits for electric vehicles, which is regarded as crucial to convincing Americans to give up gasoline – while calling for a $7,500 tax credit specifically for gas- or diesel-powered vehicles made in the US.

He has also co-sponsored legislation to undo an Environmental Protection Agency rule setting strict emissions standards for cars and light trucks and repeal an IRA program designed to curb leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas spewed by the oil and gas sector which is responsible for about 25% of the heat trapped by all greenhouse gases .

As a senator, none of his attempts to gut environmental protections were successful – but campaigners fear what he could enable Trump to ruin.

The climate emergency is wreaking havoc across the US, with deadly extreme heat, wildfires, increasingly intense hurricanes, floods and sea level rise impacting communities from east to west. The Republican platform does not mention climate. Rather it states: “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again. The United States has more liquid gold under our feet than any other Nation, and it’s not even close. The Republican Party will harness that potential to power our future.”

“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,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club.

“Donald Trump was the worst president ever for clean air, clean water and protecting a livable future. With the selection of JD Vance as his VP pick, that climate-denying legacy would only worsen in a second term.”