JD Vance Makes Pretty Good Argument For The Biden-Harris Climate Agenda
Pretty, pretty, pretty good!
We’ll readily admit that JD Vance surprised us last night in his debate with Tim Walz. We expected him to lie a lot about everything, and he certainly didn’t disappoint in that area. But weirdly, Vance also kept telling lies that, once you did a little fact-checking, undermined themselves and actually support Democratic positions.
To be sure, the fact-checks weren’t built into Vance’s lies; we still have to add those. When he was lying about healthcare, for instance, he claimed nobody should worry about Donald Trump’s concepts of a plan to reverse the Affordable Care Act, because there are already legal protections in place for people with preexisting conditions. The fact-check, of course, is that those protections are in the ACA, so yeah, eliminating it would unprotect them.
Something similar happened very early on in the debate, when Vance was asked, in the context of the climate-driven disaster of Hurricane Helene, what a potential Trump-Vance administration would do to “try and reduce the impact of climate change.”
Vance quickly trotted out the standard deflection that he and Trump both support “clean air and clean water,” which isn’t an answer at all. But Vance then pretended that he would go along — just for the sake of argument, you know — with what he framed as a potentially fringe theory, saying, “One of the things that I’ve noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions — this idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change.”
It was cute that he framed the scientific consensus for decades as if it were a nutty notion that “some” Democrats occasionally speculate about. Vance immediately cast doubt on it as “weird science” that he was only conceding to for the sake of argument, because he seems to have thought he had a real killer comeback: So in this hypothetical world where greenhouse gases might cause global warming, Vance said,
If you believe that, what would you want to do?
The answer is that you want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world. […]So if we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people.
Well, yes. That’s precisely the point of Biden and Harris’s industrial policy, which is all about building a domestic supply chain for clean energy and technology. And as a matter of fact, contrary to what Vance went on to claim, those policies have been followed by record growth in construction of new manufacturing plants in the USA.
Literally what Vance was demanding Biden and Harris do — or rather, THE HARRIS ADMINISTRATION, as he thundered over and over — they are already doing.
That’s just one of several points in the 74-page policy document the Harris campaign released last week (when the New York Times was falsely saying Harris’s policies lacked substance). Here, have a happy little chart from page 55, based on Federal Reserve data. Since the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science act, we’re building new manufacturing capacity like crazy:
As Walz replied, yes, that’s what we’re already doing:
We’ve seen massive investments — the biggest in global history. [… We’ve] seen that the Inflation Reduction Act has created jobs all across the country:
Two thousand in Jeffersonville, Ohio. Taking the EV technology that we invented and making it here. Two hundred thousand jobs across the country. The largest solar manufacturing plant in North America sits in Minnesota.
He also added that there’s no need to think there’s a “false choice” between economic growth and clean energy, because the energy transition is driving growth:
You can do that at the same time you're creating the jobs that we're seeing all across the country. That's exactly what this administration has done. We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current [moment].
Walz also pointed out that Vance, before going full MAGA, actually had considered climate change a threat, but now he’s on the ticket of a liar who calls climate change a “hoax” and who has promised to erase the progress we’ve made, in exchange for Big Oil donations. Vance knows damn well it’s not a hypothetical.
In another lie, Vance falsely claimed that the administration is “spending hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of American taxpayer money on solar panels that are made in China,” which simply is the reverse of the truth: Since 2022, American solar imports are just plain not coming from China, thanks in part to tariffs meant to exclude them. (Yes, those tariffs were initially imposed by Trump and continued under Biden.)
But tariffs are only part of the story; as Jigar Shah, head of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, pointed out during the debate, we’re already doing what Vance claimed we need to do. Thanks to the manufacturing credits in the IRA, Shah noted, “By 2026, 80% of solar deployment will come from modules made in the United States.”
Well hell, good for us, huh?
So thanks, Mr. Vance! Assuming that the scientific consensus on climate is true, which it is, we’re doing a pretty good job of moving in the right direction. Maybe if we can develop some technology that translates bullshit into reality, you could find a policy job in the Harris-Walz administration.
PREVIOUSLY!
[Heatmap / CBS News debate transcript / Image: Carol M. Highsmith. Library of Congress, public domain]
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Vance complained that we have only built one nuclear power plant in decades. That power plant is in Georgia, is billions of dollars over budget, and is years late going online. The Republican Public Utility Commission has already allowed the full cost of this boondoggle to be passed on to consumers rather than coming out of profits or investor returns. If the same money had been spent on placing wind turbines on farms in the Georgia coastal plain the work would have been done long ago, the energy produced by the sea breeze/land breeze reversals that occur daily there would be cheaper, and farmers would have a new source of revenue.
Bullshit can grow whiskers. Who knew?
Media: Vance lied, but he lied confidently.