JD Vance and Tim Walz on Tuesday both avoided talking about the main cause of global warming that is powering the kind of violent weather that struck the Southeast this week: the burning of fossil fuels.
Mr. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, used a rhetorical flourish during his debate with Mr. Walz to raise doubts about the established science of climate change. “This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change, well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument,” he said. His running mate, Donald J. Trump, has mocked global warming as “a hoax.”
But Mr. Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate who said “climate change is real” and spoke of the ravages of extreme weather, nevertheless shied away from any suggestion that the United States, the world’s biggest historic emitter of carbon dioxide, should stop burning oil, gas and coal.
He spoke instead of the economic benefits of investing in clean energy and the need for the country to adapt to climate change.
And he boasted that oil and gas production has reached record levels under the Biden administration, in addition to gains in solar, wind and other nonpolluting energy sources. “We are producing more natural gas and oil than any time we ever had,” Mr. Walz said. “We’re also producing more clean energy.”
Mr. Walz’s comments echoed a similar line that Vice President Kamala Harris used during her debate with Mr. Trump last month. “We have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” Ms. Harris said.
It’s a subtle shift in messaging among Democrats. Just a few months ago, the White House was seeking to avoid the fact that President Biden, who has called for a transition away from fossil fuels, has in fact overseen the biggest oil and gas boom in United States history.
That began to change on Aug. 31, when Mr. Biden posted on social media that “on my watch” the United States has “responsibly increased our oil production to meet our immediate needs — without delaying or deferring our transition to clean energy.”
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, energy production in America is now at an all-time high.
“Democrats have made the political judgment that they don’t get more votes by talking about reducing fossil fuel production,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. He said the decline of coal, oil and gas is implicit in the rhetoric from Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz, because the expansion in wind and solar power they seek would reduce demand for fossil fuels.
But, Mr. Gerrard said, Democrats feel no pressure from the environmental movement or young climate-minded voters to make that case explicitly.
“They believe they already have the environmental vote locked up and the people they’re worried about are the swing voters, many of whom are in Pennsylvania, which is a fracking state,” he said.
As a senator from California and a 2019 candidate for the presidency, Ms. Harris supported a ban on fracking, a technique for extracting oil and gas from deep underground that has been blamed for environmental and human health problems.
She has since reversed that position and promised during her debate last month with Mr. Trump that she would not implement a ban.
Still, Mr. Trump has insisted that a Harris administration would mean the end of fracking, and more broadly all oil and gas production. His energy policies are defined by his oft-repeated catchphrase, “drill, baby, drill.” On Wednesday Mr. Trump was expected to be in Midland, Texas, for a fund-raiser with oil executives, according to two people familiar with the event. At a similar event in April at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Mr. Trump suggested oil executives should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign because, if elected, he would roll back environmental rules that he said hampered their industry, according to people in attendance.
Mr. Vance also has shifted his position on energy. In 2020 he said “we have a climate problem in our society” and supported the development of clean energy.
At Tuesday’s debate, Mr. Vance called clean energy “a slogan” and said that “if you believe” in climate change, the solution is to bring manufacturing back to the United States and develop “as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we are the cleanest economy in the entire world.”
Mr. Walz responded that the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed in 2022 to provide more than $370 billion for wind, solar, batteries and other clean energy production, is doing just that. “All those things are happening,” he told Mr. Vance.
The law also includes billions of dollars for nuclear energy, hydrogen and carbon capture technology for fossil fuel plants. Recently, the Energy Department completed a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to help a company restart a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan. It also ensures new oil and gas drilling leases in waters off Alaska, as well as the Gulf of Mexico.
Democrats passed the bill, without a single Republican vote. Ms. Harris, in her role as vice president, cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate.
Amanda Eversole, the executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry, said her group was “encouraged that both candidates onstage last night were agreeing about the importance of America being an energy superpower.” But she said, “When it comes to the specifics about what that means, there are a lot of unanswered questions.”
Environmental groups were split on the Democratic ticket’s approach of touting oil and gas development.
Collin Rees, the campaign manager at Oil Change U.S., an environmental group that wants an end to fossil fuels, called Mr. Walz’s position “incompatible with the urgent climate action we know is necessary.”
Others said the support from Democrats for clean energy and their clear acknowledgment of the climate crisis was more important than any nod to oil and gas production.
“JD Vance spewed utter nonsense,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the spokeswoman for the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group. “He made it clear that a Trump-Vance administration would do nothing to stop the climate crisis and prevent more disasters like Helene because they don’t want to upset their fossil fuel billionaire donors.”
Paul Bledsoe, a lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy, said the refusal to discuss the root causes of climate change was “tone deaf” in the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Helene. “The focus on inflation and the economy seems to be driving a reluctance to talk about emissions reductions,” he said, adding “They’re missing the costs of climate impacts.”
A study published in Nature earlier this year estimated that climate change-fueled weather disasters will cost the global economy $38 trillion per year by 2049.
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