Trump’s VP Pick Is A Climate Skeptic And The Knives Are Out
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tilakdoshi/2024/07/18/trumps-vp-pick-is-a-climate-sceptic-and-the-knives-are-out/
By Tilak Doshi
Within a day of Donald Trump’s announcement of “climate denier” Mr. J. D. Vance as the Republican vice presidential nominee, the climate industrial complex and supportive mainstream media had the knives out. A few headlines of the past 24 hours are an indication.
The New York Times: “J.D. Vance Is an Oil Booster and Doubter of Human-Caused Climate Change”
The Independent: JD Vance: “Climate activists alarmed by Trump’s ‘dangerous’ pick for vice president”
The Guardian: “Climate advocates fear picking JD Vance for VP is ‘a dangerous step backward’”
Climate advocacy group Fossil Free Media spokesperson Cassidy DiPaola asserted that “This [VP] 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.” Communications director Stevie O’Hanlon of Sunrise Movement, a climate activist organization, said that “Like Donald Trump, J.D. Vance has proven that he will make it a top priority to roll back climate protections while answering to the demands of oil and gas CEOs.”
Does Mr. Vance have a principled stand and is his stance on climate and energy policy worthy of consideration?
Climate Denialism
Mr. Vance’s climate skepticism goes beyond encouraging US oil and gas dominance in global markets once again – a strong theme of Mr. Trump’s first term – if the Republicans get elected to office. He has come out fiercely against the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) movement. In an interview with Breitbart in 2022, he said “ESG is basically a massive racket to enrich Wall Street and enrich the financial sector of the country, at the expense of the industries that actually employ a lot of Ohio’s workers for middle-class jobs.” The push against ESG occurring through the red states in the U.S. and the increasingly evident lack of success of ESG-focused firms and investment advisors suggests that Mr. Vance has probably got a better finger on the pulse than his critics would care to admit.
Who’s More Credible?
As a climate change skeptic, Mr. Vance stands in good company. For instance, the 2022 Nobel Laureate in physics John Clauser exposed in a recent lecture how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models and analyses do not meet basic standards of scientific enquiry. IPCC models have been used as “proof” of scientific consensus by politicians and activists to support claims of a “climate crisis.” Another example would be Richard Lindzen, an American atmospheric physicist and Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who published an assessment of the global warming narrative in 2022. Prof. Lindzen finds climate alarmism “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system.” Whatever one’s views on climate science, it is apparent that Mr. Vance is not a wild-eyed outlier in his skepticism of the claims of climate policy advocates as asserted by his many critics.