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JD Vance skirted around whether or not he believes climate change is real on Tuesday night – as he dismissed the crisis as “weird science.”
During the vice presidential debate against Tim Walz in New York City, the Republican candidate appeared skeptical about the factual statement that human-made carbon emissions drive climate change.
“Some of the things I’ve noticed our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions,” he said.
“This idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change – let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument so we’re not arguing about weird science…”
Human activity is responsible for around 100 percent of the Earth’s warming climate since 1950, scientists agree.
Vance’s comments come as the US is grappling with one of the deadliest storms in modern history, after Hurricane Helene slammed into the southeast states, killing more than 100 people. On Sunday, one day before meeting communities ravaged by the hurricane in Georgia, Donald Trump sparked controversy by asserting climate change is “one of the greatest scams of all time.”
“Look, a lot of people are very justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” Vance said of the hurricane.
“I think it’s important for us first of all to say – Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water, we want the environment to be safer.”
Vance, who also falsely claimed America has the cleanest economy in the world, argued the solution to tackling carbon emissions is to bring more manufacturing to America.
“The answer is you’d want to restore as much American manufacturing as possible and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world,” the Ohio senator said.
However, carbon emissions still contribute to a warming planet regardless of whether they are manufactured in the US or abroad. And the US, along with China, is among the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters in 2023, according to a 2024 World Economic Forum report.
Vance has long flip-flopped on his climate change messaging.
Not so long ago, the Republican vice presidential nominee accepted it as a reality.
“We have a climate problem in our society,” he said while giving a speech at Ohio State University on the climate crisis and the path to clean energy in 2020.
Two years later, his stance changed and his messaging became more in line with his running mate, Trump.
“I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man,” Vance said at the American Leadership Forum in 2022.
Vance’s skepticism comes despite scientists having long warned about climate change’s impact on extreme weather events.
After Helene made landfall last week, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Deanne Criswell, told CBS News’s Face The Nation that the severe flooding and subsequent devastation was directly linked to the climate emergency.
The former vice president, Al Gore, also said this week that Helene is “a staggering and horrific reminder of the ways that the climate crisis can turbocharge extreme weather.”
Despite 87 percent of Americans saying they have experienced at least one extreme weather event in the past five years, climate change trails inflation, healthcare, immigration and jobs in the list of voter priorities in this year’s election.
