July 17, 2024 - Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who former President Trump named his vice presidential running mate Monday, is broadly aligned with the former president on climate and environmental issues, minimizing the threat of climate change and calling electric vehicles a “scam.”

The first-term senator has established himself as one of Trump’s most vocal allies in the chamber since before the VP selection process began.

Vance has not gone as far as the former president, who has falsely claimed climate change is a “hoax.” However, in a 2022 discussion with conservative radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, he dismissed the idea of a “climate crisis we need to destroy the economy to deal with.”

The same year, in a GOP candidate forum for the Senate primary, Vance went further, saying “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man.”

Data from Open Secrets indicates Vance is No. 19 on a list of recipients of contributions from the oil and gas industry, receiving $312,000 in 2022.

Although Vance has consistently opposed the Biden administration’s efforts to reduce emissions and incentivize renewable energy in the Senate, he reached across the aisle on another environmental issue following the 2023 derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio.

Vance and his Democratic colleague, Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) responded to the accident by cosponsoring legislation aimed at improving safety precautions on trains carrying toxic chemicals such as the vinyl chloride spilled in the derailment. The bill has yet to receive a full Senate vote, although Brown has expressed confidence it would secure 60 votes.

Vance, a venture capitalist best known for his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” before winning his Senate seat in 2022, struck a different note before entering politics.

In 2020, he called solar energy the source that would prompt the “biggest improvement in emissions” in a speech at Ohio State University and was broadly skeptical of the idea of natural gas a cleaner alternative to oil.