Vance dodged simple question about Trump calling climate change a ‘hoax’ – Mother Jones

Mother Jones; Matt Rourke/AP; Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty

During a surprise during a debate evening, Climate science was highlighted during the vice-presidential showdown between Governor Tim Walz and Senator JD Vance in New York on Tuesday, as the widespread impacts of Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people, were still felt everywhere. the South-East.

Just after an introduction discussing the escalating crisis in the Middle East, CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell pointed out that climate change was only making storms like Helene’s worse and asked Vance whether he agreed with Donald Trump’s claim that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance, in a pattern that repeated throughout the night, could not bring himself to contradict the former president.

Instead, he pointed the finger at his opponents. If Democrats “truly believe climate change is serious,” he argued, “they would bring more manufacturing and more energy production to the United States of America.” That’s because, he said, America is “the cleanest economy in the world” in terms of “carbon emissions” per “unit of economic output.” He also pushed for investment in nuclear power and natural gas.

It is not clear what Vance meant by “unit of economic production.” But by most measures, the United States is not a clean economy. The United States has one of the highest rates of carbon emissions per capita, one of the highest rates of total annual emissions, a poor record of carbon emissions per dollar of GDP and were recently ranked 34th in the world in their Environmental Performance Index, a measure of a country’s performance. environmental management, including climate change mitigation.

Walz countered that the Biden-Harris administration made “massive investments” in green technology – the “largest in world history” – with the Inflation Reduction Act. The law, Walz said, created 200,000 jobs across the country. (As CNN noted in its fact-check of the debate, some of these jobs may be promised, but not yet created; it is difficult to give an exact figure for jobs generated by the IRA.)

As for Hurricane Helene, Vance and Walz shared their condolences to flood victims. As Vance said: “This is an incredible and indescribable human tragedy. »