Climate change was the big loser in the vice presidential debate. Drill baby, drill | Opinion

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate in New York, when asked about the existential threat of climate change, one of the candidates bragged about how the United States is now producing more domestic natural gas and petroleum than ever before.

The candidate was Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The Democrat.

If this presidential election were to be decided by the popular national vote and not a relative handful of wafflers in Pennsylvania, Walz may have provided a more honest answer about how regardless of where the petroleum comes from, we need to use less. Perhaps he would have attacked the ridiculous answer of his counterpart, Ohio Senator JD Vance, who isn’t convinced that carbon dioxide emissions are behind our warming planet. But Walz did not.

The fight against climate change was the big loser in this debate, because neither side seemed to care, even with the horrific Hurricane Helene as a backdrop. Whether some Haitian immigrants in Ohio are legally there or not seemed more important.

Sometimes a debate is shaped by what was not said versus what was. This felt like such a debate.

Opinion

The 90-minute discussion moderated by CBS News did have some revealing moments for the viewers willing to sift through some bipartisan rhetoric. Vance, who mentioned President Joe Biden’s name sparingly, sought to blame the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris, for the nation’s problems over the last three-plus years. Illegal immigration and inflation are all her fault.

Walz sought to remind the country that it is Donald Trump who has caused the state-by-state chaos over reproduction rights in this country.

Stylistically, Vance was consistently calm. Walz, perhaps a little nervous at first, high energy, frantically scribbling notes on occasion.

When Vance was asked what a Trump administration would do to combat climate change, his answer was essentially a nothing burger, to produce more fossil fuels in the United States and to increase more domestic manufacturing jobs. He seemingly questioned “this idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change.”

Walz tried to mock how Trump has called climate change a “hoax.” But he had no ideas either and was essentially contradicting himself in consecutive sentences. “We’re producing more oil and more natural gas than we ever have,” he said. “Climate change is real.”

Arguably the most substantive and important exchange was over abortion. Vance began to take a provocative approach by saying how Republicans “have to do a much better job of earning the American people’s trust back on this issue.” But then he steadily imploded by what he continued to say. He essentially couldn’t explain why he has supported a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks, only to say that his voters in Ohio have disagreed with him at the ballot box. He seemed to accuse Walz of signing a law that allows doctors to kill viable babies when the mother is safe. Earning trust starts with talking straight. The Republican men running for both president and vice president continue to struggle on this fundamental issue of a woman’s right to choose.

Walz, by this point in the debate, had gotten his legs. “Donald Trump put all this in motion,” he said, by nominating the U.S. Supreme Court judges that have overturned the federal right to an abortion long codified in the Roe vs. Wade decision. Now in this country, said Walz, “the right to control your own body is determined by geography.”

Both candidates’ pasts came back to haunt them. Walz, a former school teacher, had previously said he was teaching in China at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. He wasn’t.

“I…misspoke on this,” Walz said.

Vance, meanwhile, was confronted with his previous opposition to his running mate. “I was wrong about Donald Trump,” the Ohio Senator said. “I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record.”

And now with the debates apparently over, we all head into the home stretch of a political race that only matters in the handful of states (not California) that will determine this election. This contributes to real issues taking a back seat to contrived ones. At least humans eating cats and dogs were not mentioned this Tuesday night.