In just two days after surviving an attempt on his life, former president and Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump made his first public appearance with a grand entrance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis., on July 15.
The same day, Trump introduced his running mate; first-term Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH).
Shortly after Trump announced his VP pick, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk praised the former president in a post on his social media network X (formerly known as X), calling Vance’s appointment an “excellent decision.”
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The 39-year-old Republican is best known for his New York Times bestselling book “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was adapted into a movie by Netflix. However, he is also known for his takes on various hot-button issues.
While his outspoken conservative views on immigration and border security, DEI, and LGBTQ+ rights have garnered a lot of attention, the Senator is known to be a flip-flopper on one critical cluster: climate change and electric vehicles, which may work against Musk and Tesla’s interests.
U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) at the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The “Never-Trumper”
Before running for his current Senate seat, Vance was not the same kind of Republican he is today.
The Ohio senator was considered a “never-Trump” Republican before 2022. According to Reuters, in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, he called Trump an “idiot” and said he was reprehensible, and behind closed doors, he compared him to Adolf Hitler.
He also held views about climate change that other Republicans wouldn’t dare to say out loud. At a January 2020 conference hosted by the Center for Ethics and Human Values at Ohio State University, he recognized that there was a “climate problem,” praised cleaner alternatives like solar power, and recognized natural gas as a fuel that isn’t “the sort of thing that’s gonna take us to a clean energy future.”
While this sounds like the makings of a politician embracing carbon-neutral solutions, Vance’s tone and rhetoric changed once he started running for the Senate.
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A Paradigm shift
According to Open Secrets, a public website that tracks individual politician’s campaign contributions, Vance has received $340,289 from the oil and gas industry since 2019.
In an October 2022 event for the American Leadership Forum, he told the audience that he is “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man.”
At the same event, he questioned environmental activists by asking if “they think climate change is caused by carbon emissions, then why is their solution to scream about it at the top of their lungs, send a ton of our jobs to China, and then manufacture these ridiculous ugly windmills all over Ohio farms that don’t produce enough electricity to run a cellphone on?”
Vance is a massive proponent of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technology used in his state to extract oil and natural gas from shale reserves.
Fracking is a dirty process involving high-pressure injection of water, sand, and other chemicals into underground shale formations. Environmental activists argue that it can pollute Ohioans’ groundwater.
In an August 2023 opinion piece for the Marietta Times, Vance lambasted the Biden administration for “doing everything it can to subsidize alternative energy sources and demonize our nation’s most reliable sources of power,” noting that its “wanton harassment” of oil companies are hurting fellow Americans.
A Tesla Supercharger
The gas pump over the electric plug
Before he stepped into office, Vance was a vigorous opponent of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The centerpiece of President Biden’s green initiatives was passed in 2022 without a single Republican vote. It is intended to allocate at least $370 billion to the growth of renewable energy.
“It’s dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer,” Vance wrote on Twitter (now known as X).
Critics in the EV and Tesla communities have pointed out that the Senator was behind the Drive American Act, a bill that would take away the $7,500 EV tax credit funded by the I.R.A. and replace it with a subsidy of the same amount for American-made gas-guzzlers.
“Right now, the official policy of the Biden administration is to spend billions of dollars on subsidies for electric vehicles made overseas,” Senator Vance wrote. “If we’re subsidizing anything, it ought to be Ohio workers – not the green energy daydreams that are offshoring their jobs to China. We can secure a bright future for American autoworkers by passing this legislation and reversing the misguided policies of the Biden administration.”
According to the rules laid out by the government on fueleconomy.gov, eligible vehicles “must undergo final assembly in North America.”
A week before the Drive American Act was introduced to Congress, Vance wrote an opinion piece in the Toledo Blade encouraging the then-striking United Auto Workers union to “force the President to stop subsidizing an industry that benefits Communist China.”
“These are the facts: China dominates the global supply chain for electric vehicles — especially for critical minerals and batteries,” Vance wrote.
“While an electric vehicle may bear the logo of Ford, Chevy, or Chrysler, its core components were probably made in China with Chinese labor and Chinese materials. Two of the Big Three automakers are losing massive amounts of money on electric vehicles. Ford, for example, loses $32,000 on every EV they sell. These losses lead to lower wages for workers, fewer auto jobs being available, and higher prices for consumers.”
Donald Trump said that a bloodbath would happen to the American auto industry if Biden kept on promoting Chinese made EVs.
He of course is 100 percent correct.
All other reporting about his “bloodbath” comment is complete propaganda. The media should be ashamed.
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) March 17, 2024
In a March post on X, Vance said that Trump’s claim of an economic “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry was correct and noted that the “media should be ashamed” for focusing too heavily on the wording.
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