BY MARCUS BARAM
Excerpt: In 2020, Vance told a crowd at the Ohio State University that “we, of course, have a climate problem in our society.” He added that using gas as a source of energy “isn’t exactly the sort of thing that’s gonna take us to a clean energy future.”
As a venture capital investor, Vance put his money where his mouth was, investing in two microgrid developers and an electric vehicle charging technology startup and leading a fund that invested $10 million in a renewable energy tech company, Heliogen, which says on its website that it’s “unlocking the power of sunlight to replace fossil fuels.” He also sat on the board of AppHarvest, a sustainable agriculture company that was committed to “seeking to accelerate a zero-carbon energy future.”
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His recent positions directly contradict his previous assertions. Once a climate change believer, he now claims there isn’t a climate crisis. In 2022, he told the American Leadership Forum, “I’m skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man.” He added: “It’s been changing, as others pointed out, it’s been changing for millennia.”
He’s also fiercely criticized President Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate initiative in U.S. history, despite the fact that it’s expected to invest more than $12 billion in Ohio’s clean-energy economy and create thousands of jobs. And that some of the companies in Vance’s portfolio have benefited from incentives in the law.
He said the Inflation Reduction Act is “dumb” and has “made our economy less energy independent.” And in a recent op-ed, he called for expanding production in the Utica Shale oil and gas basin that lies under Ohio. In the piece, he denounced the Biden administration for its “harassment of fossil fuel companies” and its “war on traditional American energy.”
Neither Vance nor his aides responded to Capital & Main’s request for an explanation for his shift on climate change.
