I will leave it to other, smarter people who were “paying attention” or “watching” to determine the winner of last night’s vice presidential debate between Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Instead I will turn briefly to the second question of the night, centering on the ongoing devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene and how to address climate change’s role in worsening such disasters. I have double- and triple-checked, and I can assure Senator Vance that this post is well within the rules.
This was about as quick a turn to climate, and as long an opportunity to discuss it, as maybe any presidential election debate in history. Moderator Norah O’Donnell of CBS News started with the specific disaster of Helene and then turned that to a broad, open question about climate plans:
Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60 percent of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change?
Vance began his answer by offering sympathy to those affected by the hurricane before turning to the larger question:
Look, a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns. I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water.
This is Vance being a good little soldier, largely repeating his boss’s rhetoric on the topic; in short, Donald Trump has long shown that he thinks “clean air and water” is somehow the basic issue involved with climate change, and Vance isn’t about to dance all over that particular misconception. He went on:
[O]ne 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 drives all the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science.
Indeed, arguing about “weird science” would surely be a mistake. Science that was first elucidated by Eunice Newton Foote in 1856, well understood by the time Arrhenius published in 1896, fully grasped by the time scientists warned Lyndon Johnson about it in 1965, and advanced to the point of eerily accurate prediction by Exxon in the 1970s or the EPA in 1983. Too weird, let’s move on.
Let’s just say that’s true. Well, if you believe that, what would you, what would you want to do? The answer is that you’d want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world. What have Kamala Harris’s policies actually led to? More energy production in China, more manufacturing overseas, more doing business in some of the dirtiest parts of the entire world. When I say that, I mean the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output.
Okay. So. A few quick things here: Kamala Harris is not, currently, the president, so it is a bit tough to call anything “her policies.” Next: the primary policy at play here is the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Biden a bit more than two years ago; it has resulted in an explosion in homegrown manufacturing of clean energy and related tech.
Finally, are the places the U.S. is “doing business” actually “dirtiest” with regard to CO2 emissions per unit of economic output? Another way to say this is emissions per dollar of gross domestic product — a measure that globally has been dropping relatively steadily for more than half a century. The U.S. fares a bit better than that global average, though it is really sort of middle-of-the-pack here, on par with Poland and Mexico, say, and definitely not “the cleanest economy in the entire world.” China is indeed worse, but it is not, in fact the dirtiest — among other relatively large countries, places like South Africa, Venezuela, and Russia are all dirtier.
Next up was Walz, who basically pointed out that the thing Vance was asking for — more American manufacturing — is already starting to happen. On the underlying question of managing climate change, though, the governor did not cover himself in glory either:
But my farmers know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500 year droughts, 500 year floods, back to back. But what they’re doing is adapting, and this has allowed them to tell me, “Look, I harvest corn, I harvest soybean, and I harvest wind.” We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have. We’re also producing more clean energy. So the solution for us is to continue to move forward, that climate change is real.
His point that previously rare events are now becoming commonplace is unequivocally correct. Why he then decided it was time to celebrate the absolutely thriving oil and gas industry, though, is a mystery. He is not wrong, of course — the country set records for both oil and gas production in 2023, and will break that record for crude oil again this year. The problem is that point A — disasters are increasing in frequency and severity — is directly connected to point B — we are producing more and oil and gas than ever — and no point C emerged about trying to fix that problem. “Climate change is real” is not, unfortunately, a policy prescription.
Unfortunately for all of us, this exchange continued. Vance said some more stuff about importing solar panels from China, Walz countered that they make some in Minnesota, Vance said Harris should actually agree with “Donald Trump’s energy policies” without elucidating what they are (drill more, drill everywhere, coal is good, wind power is bad, destroy NOAA and the National Hurricane Center, and so on), Walz pointed out that Trump has called warming a hoax, probably some other stuff. The point is, experts agree, VP debates don’t matter.