Exclusive — J.D. Vance: Biden’s War on Energy Is a Forced Transfer of Jobs to China

J.D. Vance, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat from Ohio and author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, noted Friday how the Biden administration’s “war on American energy” facilitates the loss of manufacturing jobs to China.

Democrat proposals to further subsidize electric vehicle technology amount to a subsidy for China given the one-party state’s dominance of the production of electric-vehicle batteries, Vance noted on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. The White House and broader Democrat Party regularly frame fossil fuel consumption as a driver of “global warming” while pushing for “green energy” and an end to oil and gas production.

Vance remarked, “What the Biden administration is doing on climate change — first of all, it’s a total farce, it’s not going to make the planet cleaner at all — what it will effectively do is force the transfer of manufacturing jobs and capacity to China, because when you subsidize, let’s say, electric vehicle technology, what you’re really subsidizing is the country that manufactures all that technology, which is China, so you’re subsidizing a country that hates us [and] that is building its middle class off the backs of ours.”

Such policies undermine the economic welfare of Ohio, Vance asserted. It makes their lives worse,” he said, “and it makes them poorer, and it makes our state poorer.”

Vance highlighted the national implications of the left’s opposition to fossil fuel production and consumption.

“The attack on our energy industry is in some ways much broader and much deeper,” he stated. “You see it in the Biden administration’s approach to the [Keystone XL] pipeline. You see it in the full way that they approach the regulatory state.”

Artificially inflating energy costs through “climate change” regulations drive up the cost of domestic manufacturing and make the U.S. less competitive a place to do business, Vance highlighted.

He added, “The energy piece is in some ways the most important part of the entire manufacturing conversation, because the thing you see when energy gets more expensive is we pay more at the pump, right? The cost of electricity in our homes goes up, but 40 percent of our power is used by American manufacturers.”

“If you don’t have cheap, cost-effective energy in your state, you don’t have the ability to make your own things,” he remarked, “and so the Biden administration’s war on American energy [is] bad for Ohio in a very direct sense, because we’ve got a lot of people working in the energy sector, but it’s even worse because the secondary … effects are that it makes [manufacturing] in this state much more expensive and much harder.”

He concluded, “It’s basically is a massive giveaway to the Chinese, which of course, are the biggest polluters in the world at the expense of Ohio workers and Ohio manufacturers.”