In a debate-night surprise, climate science got near-top billing during the vice presidential face-off between Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance in New York on Tuesday, as the sprawling impacts of Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people, were still being felt across the Southeast.
Just after an opening that addressed the escalating crisis in the Middle East, CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell noted that climate change is only making storms like Helene worse and asked Vance if he agreed with Donald Trump’s assertion that climate change is a “hoax.” Vance, in a pattern that repeated across the night, couldn’t bring himself to contradict the former president.
Instead, he pointed a finger at his opponents. If Democrats “really believe that climate change is serious,” he argued, “what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America.” That’s because, he said, America is the “cleanest economy in the entire world” in terms of “carbon emissions” per “unit of economic output.” He also pushed for investing in nuclear and natural gas.
It’s unclear what Vance meant by “unit of economic output.” But by most metrics, the US is not a clean economy. The US has among the highest carbon emissions per capita, one of the highest total annual emissions, a mediocre record on carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, and was most recently ranked 34th in the world in its Environmental Performance Index, a measure of a country’s environmental stewardship, including climate change mitigation.
Walz countered that the Biden-Harris administration has made “massive investments” in green technology—the “biggest in global history“—with the Inflation Reduction Act. The law, Walz said, has created 200,000 jobs across the country. (As CNN noted in its fact-check of the debate, some of those jobs may be promised, but not yet created; it’s difficult to come up with an exact figure of jobs sparked by the IRA.)
As for Hurricane Helene, both Vance and Walz shared their condolences with the victims of the flooding. As Vance said, “It’s an unbelievable, unspeakable human tragedy.”
