Vice presidential hopeful JD Vance suggested during the debate Tuesday that decades of research backing up the relationship between climate change and fossil fuel emissions was “weird science.”
“This idea that carbon emissions drives all of the climate change, let’s just say that that’s true. Just for the sake of argument so we’re not arguing about weird science, let’s just say that’s true,” Vance said.
Moderators Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan had asked the pair of candidates how they would tackle the climate crisis, as climate change accelerates natural disasters like Hurricane Helene. Vance's response dodges the past insistence of his running mate, former President Donald Trump, that climate change is a hoax.
Trump's campaign has not released a slate of policies to address climate change. He has expressed skepticism over the phenomenon. Vance side-stepped the issue on Tuesday, instead promising more energy production.
“Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water. We support the environment to be cleaner and safer, but one of the things that I have noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions,” Vance said, noting that he wants to “re-shore as much American manufacturing as possible and you want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States” in response to climate concerns.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on the other hand, pounced on the former president’s denial of global warming.
“Trump called climate change a hoax and told oil company executives ‘I’ll let you do whatever you want,” Walz said. “My farmers know climate change is real. They have seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods back-to-back.”
