Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

GAVIN WAX: JD Vance Just Proved That Republicans Can Talk About The Environment

(Screen Capture/CSPAN)

Former President Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance, spoke in stark contrast to the traditional Republican candidate in his recent comments on the topic of environmentalism.

Vance said in Detroit on Tuesday that he is “worried about the environment” and then attacked the faulty premises upon which Democrats frame the issue. He brilliantly connected protecting the environment with MAGA economic populism, starting with global warming.

“If your No. 1 issue is carbon emissions, look at the two countries that have emitted the most carbon in the last 20, 30 years. It’s China, and it’s India. Make more stuff in the United States of America. That’s how you make sure we have clean air and clean water,” Vance said.

Vance is right. Globalist corporations are happy to offshore their operations to countries without adequate safety regulations where they can maximize profits by abusing the environment and paying low wages. These policies are what drive increased degradation to the environment on a global scale and are rarely, if ever, talked about by Democrats.

Hostile foreign powers like China and Russia heavily subsidize their industries, which, of course, are far from green, and collude to make us dependent on their energy. The answers are to increase domestic energy production and levy tariffs on energy from countries like China and Russia.

Punishing countries that do not uphold our environmental regulatory standards in energy production with pollution tariffs is an obvious way to protect the environment.

This is where we need to apply the Trump trade agenda. Trump’s tariffs got at the heart of the issue: countries like China engage in unfair trade practices and must pay for it. That was obviously correct and fundamentally changed political orthodoxy to the point where even Biden kept them in place.

We must hit them precisely where they are cheating us: the environment. By putting a tariff on their pollution we hit them where it hurts while forcing Democrats to deal with policies that expose their green hypocrisy.

The Democrats are happy to gloss over these uncomfortable truths because they get in the way of their narrative. Their one-size-fits-all answer to global warming is to give more power to mega corporations through rent-seeking “buy green” mandates and the regulation of industry. The mega-corporations will be able to pay the fines and fees, passing them off to the consumer, for the Democrats’ global warming regime. Their smaller competitors will be crushed.

“We have to do a better job at real environmental protection, not the fake Kamala Harris environmental protection, which apparently the only thing it means is ship all of our jobs to China,” Vance said.

Vance also talked about the food supply and the alarming spike of childhood and chronic diseases that has occurred over the previous generation.

“But here’s what I really worry about. I worry about our food supply. Like, what has gone wrong with our food supply that we have got an obesity epidemic in this country unlike we’ve ever seen in the history of the world?” he said.

One of the most pressing health issues rarely talked about on a national level is microplastics. This is often because of who is talking about it, which is grassroots conservatives. For the elite media, this signals that an idea is below them. Yet, it is still true that Americans are ingesting these toxins at an alarming rate, with new studies showing microplastics in human testicles, brains, and the placenta of babies.

Democrats care only about using the environment as a cudgel to increase their power. What America needs is a government that looks out for both people’s health and their economic well-being, protecting the natural beauty of their surroundings.

This is what MAGA Republicanism, as championed by Trump’s visionary vice-presidential choice, has to offer.

Gavin M. Wax is the Executive Director of the National Constitutional Law Union. He also serves as the 76th President of the New York Young Republican Club and as an Ambassador for Turning Point USA & Live Action.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.